X111.com

We finally rearranged things so we can now both use a computer at the same time instead of having to take turns. The main idea was that we’d be able to work on themes and coding and graphics together, but somehow the new setup was abused to us both playing a World of Warcraft trial. Ahem.

After thinking long and hard about what to do with this site I think I’m going back to day 0; everything including the kitchen sink. I was thinking about switching to a single topic but let’s face it, that’s just not my style. I ‘might’ disable comments for future posts as they rarely have anything meaningful to add, but maybe switching things around might pull a different crowd. Or not, let’s wait and see.
But yeah, X111.com for my random postings, stripping out the community aspect as that’s all dead and buried.
X111.org as my personal newsreader and heuts.org for the portfolio of my wife and I.
Time to get back in the game and get a little more active, 3 years of negligence have taken its toll on the traffic. ;)

Now I just need a new look for the site.
And import my old wallpapers here somehow.
And whip up a few new scripts.
And modify the theme to alter the look depending on the type of content.

We’ll see how it goes. As Bruce said, be like water!

Finally took the jump and upgraded both Macs from Leopard to Snow Leopard.
On the iMac, which is used as our every day computer, it couldn’t be more simple. Plop in the disk and go and at the end everything was upgraded and everything worked, we didn’t have a single app that was borked. Beautiful. And indeed, Snow Leopard is noticeably faster, which by itself is worth the upgrade.

The Mac Mini however… not so nice. Not really Apple’s fault but that one is used as my webserver/mailserver/database server/ftp server and after the upgrade…. well nothing worked. At all. It took me a good day to figure out every single little thing as some problems just didn’t make any sense whatsoever.
First and foremost, it’s a stupidly simple thing to fix once you’ve figured it out, but before you do it can take a while; if you see parts of your site failing without any proper error, with apache processes crashing left right and center (with messages in your Apache error log like “[notice] child pid 7362 exit signal Bus error (10)”), look for mysql_close() in your php scripts and remove it. Simple huh? Apparently it’s no longer supported in PHP 5.3 which is default in Snow Leopard and using mysql_close() makes your page halt wherever its called and the Apache process fall over and die a horrible death. This was during my upgrade the last glitch to fix, but it also took by far the most time to track down as I thought it was simply crapping out due to misconfiguration.
The rest was pretty simple, just make sure you make a backup of your Apache config files prior to upgrade as these get replaced, so you can easily get things like your vhost settings back. You may also have to recreate the symbolic link to mysql depending on which package you were using. As for my mail, that was simply a matter of buying the new MailServe Snow to replace the old Leopard Pro version.

So overall, yay for Snow Leopard. Just make sure you have a good backup if you’re using yours as a server as well.

Best wishes and all that good stuff.
Here’s to a better year.
Now come on lottery, make us rich!

This topic made me think about social networks, how I use the internet and how things have changed over the years.
I used to seriously dislike the whole social networking fad because I think it pretty much killed ye olde fashioned forums. Now however I’m more getting the hang of it and actually prefer it because it fits better into my current schedule and workflow.
Continue reading →

It’s Thursday evening and I hereby declare weekend. Life is good. Maybe I’ll finally get round to that Snow Leopard upgrade. Or crash with the flu. Either way, first 3 day weekend since August.