The MacDeskBlog

I tried to follow these instructions loosely in order to upgrade the new dedicated server to MySQL 4, and PHP 5. I say “loosely” because the new server is running Fedora Core 2 not Fedora Core 3. Anyway, I proved once again that a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. The MySQL upgrade went okay. I should have been content and left it there. But no, I wanted to upgrade to the latest and greatest version of PHP while I was at it. Now, I can’t even get back to a working version of PHP4. It seems that Apache no longer recognizes the MySQL extension.

cannot load mysql extension,
please check PHP Configuration
Documentation

So, if there are any rpm wizards out there who can give me a bit of advice, please let me know.

First off, here’s a picture from last weekend of the house back down, sitting on the new walls. Notice the lovely lack of steel protruding from the front of the house. The shear wall on the south (left) wall is complete, while the north wall has partial shear wall in the picture. I’m pretty sure that the north wall has full shear wall now, as should the rear wall where it has studs. We’re leaving a gap in the rear wall until we can get a Bobcat through to the backyard to remove a whole lot of dirt, which will be after the slab gets poured downstairs.

PG&E finally came by to hook up the temporary power this morning. I spoke with Michael Woods again yesterday. He tried to play the blame game by pointing the finger at the City of Berkeley. I didn’t let him off the hook. I don’t think he took it to heart at all. Very unfortunate that PG&E has no accountability nor responsibility in their service planning group. Giving credit where it is due, Mr. Woods was the only person in the entire office who actually called me back at any point in time. While his service sucked, he stands head and shoulders above the rest of the office, as far as I can tell. Very unfortunate.

I’m heading over to the house tonight to try to fix the phone line, which got soaked in a rain shower last week, and to work on the water line. I doubt I’ll have time to work on the electrical too, but I certainly will if the phone and water go well. I’ll also get a chance to look at my new full wall closet and the footing for the stairs. I’m not sure if any of the stairs will have been framed by tonight. I just spoke with Steve, and it seems that current building codes make my preferred stair design illegal. So, we’re switching to a more generic picket style design. It should still look nice and keep pretty well with the character of the house. We just won’t be able to put planters on the stairs, which could have just led to water damage anyway. Probably for the best. The picket style was the runner up, and I almost picked it from the start.

On 10 April 1998, the Macintosh Desktop Pictures Archive was born. I didn’t have a domain name yet, and didn’t really have much of a plan. I had recently upgraded to a gargantuan 1280×1024 display and had way too much trouble finding desktop pictures for it. So, I generated 16 desktop pictures and posted them onto the web space included with my ISP at the time. I was pleasantly surprised that a few thousand people found the site. After about two and a half months, when visits started declining, I decided to start adding more pictures. After a month or so of that, I started to receive submissions, and decided to post four new pictures each week. By the end of 1998, the Macintosh News Network recruited me to join their collection of sites. I changed the name of the site to MacDesktops when I transitioned over to their servers. I bumped up from four to eight new pictures each week, doing manual updates. Then to daily updates when I moved the site into PHP and MySQL with help from John Engler (PHP/MySQL orientation) and Misha Sakellaropoulo (new site graphical design).

My relationship with MacNN was good for a couple of years. Then it started to sour. When they had a hard drive failure, lost my data in December of 2001, and ruined the backups, I decided to leave the network and go it alone. MacDesktops essentially went down from December 2001 until March 2002, when I re-launched on the new server. Robb Kinnin at NetStep gave me a great deal on co-location and agreed to sponsor the site as well.

It’s been a bit over three years now, and I’m in the middle of transitioning to a new server running Linux (ick) because it’s much less expensive than co-location (when evaluating my own time at $0/hour). At least it will be when the transition is complete.

It’s hard to believe that I’ve been doing this for seven years already, and at the same time, it’s hard to believe that I’ve only been doing this for seven years. I’m looking forward to completing the transition to the new server. I’m looking forward to rewriting the site, adding features, optimizing code, finally using CSS and providing RSS. And, I’m looking forward to at least a few more years of producing (in the Hollywood sense) great desktop pictures from wonderful artists around the world for your continued enjoyment.

I’m 35 today. My house isn’t ready for me. We passed rebar inspection for the footing for the front stairs this morning, but the rain all day prevented us from pouring the concrete. I’m giving the crew the weekend off. They busted their tails for the last three weeks to try to make the goal of today which I set. There was just too much work to do. Time to step back and re-evaluate a bit. Time to remake the schedule based upon the work remaining instead of driving it off of my birthday. I’m a little disappointed, but I’ll get over it.

PG&E still has not connected my temporary power pole, which was approved by the City on March 25th! I raise hell today. I spoke with several people at PG&E and lodged complaints which each of them. I even called the California Public Utilities Commission (after filing a complaint electronically) and the service representative I spoke with was very helpful, connecting me to PG&E’s headquarters. I also spoke with the City of Berkeley twice. The first time they resent the service authorization to PG&E. The second time I had them send me a copy and follow up with a phone call to PG&E. Of course, I still have not received a call back from PG&E’s Service Planning group, so I don’t know whether raising hell has gotten me anywhere. If not, I’ll just have to continue next week. I hate having to complain in order to get service.

I noticed that I had turned off one of the two methods I was using to monitor Apache on the server. I had left on the ineffective method and disabled the less ineffective method (I almost said ‘more effective’ but it’s still just restarting Apache after it has hung, so that’s not very effective in my book). So, I switched them, turning off the worse of the two and re-enabling the other. Apache has already restarted five times since then, so it’s an improvement. I’m also going to re-evaluate prioritization of the MacDesktops server configuration. I’ll probably but it up a few slots.

I really wanted to meet the target for the house. Now that we didn’t, I don’t see a big difference in missing it by two days or two weeks. That philosophy might shift, but that’s where I am today.

My father sent to me from Seattle chocolate made in Berkeley, where I live. Scharffen Berger is good stuff. And a book, Chocolate : A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light. Should be a fun read. Well, I’m off to the Giants game with Michelle, mom and John. I hope the Giants do better for my birthday than they did for Brett Tomko’s yesterday.

I received the new dedicated server yesterday afternoon, and have apache and mysql set up on it for the main site. Stayed up past 3am working on it. Surprisingly, I’m not dragging that much today. I’ve been running httperf on it since about 2am. It looks like it can handle about 7-9 page requests (of the front page of the site, http://MacDesktops.com/) per second right now, while simultaneously running httperf. I expect this to go down somewhat when I get the rest of my sites on it, and get the rest of the services running. In comparison, the old G3 server can barely handle 2.5-3 page requests per second while httperf is running on a separate machine.

I’m cautiously hopeful about the new server.

I need to help Michelle move this week, so I’m not sure when I’ll be able to finish setting up the new machine. I doubt I’ll finish this week. We’ll see.