Day 996: Travel, Sick Relatives, Computers. Gah.
May 20, 2008 - Filed Under computing & internet, family & friends, health, travel, wordpress
Things have been rather hectic here at VatulBlog HQ lately. So busy that I have neither the time nor the inclination to blog. I’ve seen more of the insides of airports and geophysical data than any human should and the best part is that it isn’t over. More travel and data schlepping ahead.
This past weekend, I flew up to Ohio to spend some time with my parents and grandmother, the latter of whom I haven’t seen since my wedding around sixteen months ago. This is Patti’s (Tamil for grandmother) second battle with that awful beast known as cancer and she has just come out of another demeaning round of chemotherapy and radiation. Yet, she got out of bed and walked into the living room to spend time with one of her favorite grandchildren and, through coughs and sniffles, lovingly related to me all the things I used to do as a precocious young kid visiting my grandfather and her in India. I want to take this opportunity to say the following to my grandmother: Should this fate befall me, Goddess help me be half as strong as you are and look half as beautiful as you do after swallowing harsh, cancer-killing chemicals and being zapped by gamma rays, neutrons and protons that make you sicker than your illness provides. You, my dear lady, kick ass. I love you. (I also admire the hell out of you for tuning out the inevitable, heated discussion on American politics that went on among your children and grandchildren.)
Should this fate befall me. Let’s see - paternal great-grandmother and maternal aunt dead of breast cancer, paternal uncle dead of lung cancer, grandmother fighting non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and I live on Cancer Alley. Nice. When I mentioned this to him, Herr Doktor Brother assured me that nanotechnology will cure all within the span of a decade and that I’ve got to have faith in the coming and unstoppable advancements in medical science. I’m similarly optimistic about the oil industry and alternative sources of energy, but, like any passive consumer of products I don’t know much about, I’ll believe the cure for cancer when I see it.
Speaking of frustrating illnesses, Dangerblond’s blog is on the fritz. More specifically, we are battling File ‘./blog/wp_comments.MYD’ not found (Errcode: 13), which probably means a corrupt Comments file/table which in turn means a Wordpress upgrade. I may not be able to fix cancer, but I will make her blog cry Uncle, by gum. Tonight, I go in with a Ka-Bar between my teeth. Wish me luck.
Day 946: Wordpress 2.5
March 31, 2008 - Filed Under computing & internet, wordpress
VatulBlog now comes to you via Wordpress 2.5.
Thus far, I am underwhelmed by the new dashboard because it is powered by widgets. So what if I can customize some aspects of the Wordpress interface to my feng-shui liking if something as simple as the Insert/Edit Link window doesn’t work? (Update: The form works in Mozilla Firefox, but populates with absolutely nothing in IE6.) Incidentally, during the upgrade, it took three FTP uploads of the edit-form-advanced.php file before extended post options would show up on the Write Post form.
A few nice additions: Full-screen WYSIWYG editing is cool; it allows you to concentrate on writing. Posting also allows the creation of a post which contains a thumbnail gallery. Clicking on each thumbnail takes you to a sub-post.
Some more tinkering is in order. If I am not used to this “wordy” interface in a week’s time, I’m going back to 2.3.3. Thank goodness there are no security patches associated with 2.5.
Day 940: The Troubled Fortnight Of VatulBlog
March 24, 2008 - Filed Under WTF, computing & internet, wordpress
Some of you may have noticed that between March 14th and this past weekend, there were no new posts up at this blog. This is all due to iPowerWeb, which deserves an award for Worst Web Host Ever. Here is my official warning to the denizens of InternetLand: Steer clear of iPowerWeb! Also, be prepared to deal with the rearing of their ugly heads in the future. Follow.
Back when I lived in Illinois and Wisconsin, I had space on university departmental servers. You know, the kind where you could walk up to or email the sysadmin and say, “Dude, can you reboot this machine?” or “Please install the latest version of _____ software for me” and the nice person would kindly oblige in a matter of minutes. Now that I work for The Man and a personal home web server is out of the question thanks to the unreliability of Cox at my house, I am forced to pay some company $120 a year for hosting my site and its blog. Oh, the ignominy.
The site and blog have had problems with iPowerWeb in the past and, each time I’ve called/emailed and complained, the problem has been fixed. This time around, iPowerWeb began to flake out at the beginning of March. Having just returned from Jamaica and not particularly interested in fighting evil computer djinns, I let the slow load time slide, thinking that a server/MySQL upgrade on iPowerWeb’s end couldn’t possibly take very long. Besides, I was still able to reach the Wordpress Dashboard and create posts, which was plenty at the time. A week went by and even that capability was lost. Sensing that something deeper was wrong, I emailed iPower support on March 12th, 14th and 16th. These are the responses I received:
- March 12th: “I checked the blog and it is loading fine without any delay from our end. The normal Web site loading time is 2-3 minutes (including gallery application). “
- March 14th: “We are currently experiencing issue with our MySQL database server. Hence, you are experiencing slowness while accessing blog. Our senior engineers are working on the issue.”
- March 16th: “We have lots of customers in the queue and the additional MySQL servers are added on a random basis. We do not know the exact time frame when your account will be upgraded to the additional MySQL severs.”
So on and so forth. Four days, three emails and two phonecalls later, I had been given three different reasons why my blog wasn’t up and what was being done to resolve it:
1. Everything is fine on our end. It’s all your fault. Optimize your database to speeden up page loading.
2. It’s all our fault, what with the additional MySQL servers, but we cannot give you a time when things will function smoothly again.
3. The problem is really with the vDeck Control Panel transition we’re making. We’ve tried twice to upgrade your account to the new Control Panel and have failed.
Why should any of these reasons be my responsibility? March 18th was the day I made the immutable decision to migrate my site to Dreamhost RIGHT F*ING NOW, thanks to this response, spelling and grammatical errors notwithstanding, from yet another customer service specialist when I asked for an approximate time frame during which the server upgrade would be finished: “As you mentioned in your E-mail, I have check your Account and notice that in the previous e-mail you have not mentioned the exact time frame when your account will be upgraded to the additional MySQL severs.”
Wha wha WHAAAT? How am I supposed to know? That’s their job. They are supposed to tell me when my account will be upgraded. Apparently, I’m not the only one with this problem. From the North Country Gazette - January 17, 2008 (emphasis mine):
Is IPowerWeb engaging in new tactics in order to force customers to comply with their mandated “transition” to their new platform, subjecting their customers to ongoing outages in an attempt to strong arm them to “migrate”? Are the outages going to intensify and become more frequent until and if the customer agrees to their “transition”, kind of like a technological “We’re going to make you an offer you can’t refuse”? Is that legal? Shouldn’t the FCC and FTC be opening an investigation into this Ipower/Endurance scam?
On Monday, The North Country Gazette website experienced another outage due to IPowerWeb’s server being down. Attempts to reach customer support were futile telephonically and after waiting for more than an hour for a “Live Chat” technician, when the “live” person finally responded, it was only to say he’d “be back in three or four minutes” and away he went.Over the past week, NCG has learned that there have been multiple outages in IPower service which once advertised 99.9% “up time”. That “guarantee” has since disappeared from their website.
It was increasingly clear that, at any given time, I was dealing with no more than Level 1 Customer Support staff whose sole responsibility was to stall me with any handy excuse, while engineers scrambled behind the scenes. The problem with that is they’ve got to keep giving the customer the same excuse and stick with it, and never let slip that they have no idea what they’re doing. Whoops. Word to the wise: Never tell these morons that you can’t access your Wordpress blog’s administration panel to optimize/export anything because it will result in five emails that either change your iPower Control Panel’s password or ask you for your blog login and password. Don’t bring up anything other than slow loads, no loads and what they are doing about it.
The moment I sent iPower a request to transfer my domain to Dreamhost, my blog loaded in less than a second and everything was back to normal. Surprise, surprise! Following this, I was inundated with emails that read, “Is there a specific reason why you are transferring your account away? Perhaps, if I knew why you were transferring, we could work something out so that IPOWER could better suit your needs.” TOO LATE NOW, iPower, I am moving my business elsewhere while you figure out how many customers you’re losing with your horrible service. Loyalty is offered only to those providers who have a clue what they’re doing.
It took until March 21st for iPower to acknowledge that I’d dumped them like a drunk boyfriend on prom night and for the domain transfer to go through. Between March 21st and 23rd, three different attempts to import my Wordpress export file into the new install over at Dreamhost failed because:
1. Unless you create a PHP.ini file over at the Dreamhost server and specify a limit, the upload limit is a mere 7MB. Follow these instructions on how to create a PHP.ini file and update your .htaccess to increase the upload limit. Better yet, do a clean install of Wordpress using the Detailed Instructions and then import the database at the command prompt. I don’t believe in One-Click or 5-Minute installs; do the extra work up front to ensure fewer future headaches.
2. The WXR (Wordpress Extended RSS) blog export file does not necessarily attach the right posts with the right Post ID, etc. For instance, post 1690 in the database was showing up as post 1140 on the new blog and with the wrong Permalink structure. So, make sure that when you back up your blog, generate a SQL database backup and not just a RSS XML one.
This is when Alan Gutierrez stepped in to help. He ported the SQL database containing VatulBlog to its new location and inserted a RewriteRule into the .htaccess file to mimic the Permalink structure of the old blog. An hour of tinkering with the template and deleting old files yesterday, and the blog was back in business.
Why did I say at the beginning of this post that my saga with iPower may not be over? Some Googling reveals that iPower has a habit of rebilling folks for services not offered. I was assured by someone at iPower that my account which ends on May 20th will be cancelled on April 3rd. If I am rebilled on May 20th for another year, it’s Credit Card Dispute City. These folks are not getting another dime out of me.
Why did I do business with iPower in the first place? Five years ago, they had wonderful ratings and offered reliable hosting solutions with a good pricing structure. This only goes to show that a decline in service is possible with any host, which is why my goal is still to set up a personal home web server and manage it myself. All said and done, however, in my fifteen years of dealing with technology service providers, I have never come across such lousy support. If you’re currently an iPower customer, my only advice is to perform regular backups and to get away while you still have access to your Control Panel and files. Now, to end on a positive note, many kudos to Dreamhost and Alan Gutierrez! Thanks!
Day 938: The Blog Has Risen!
March 22, 2008 - Filed Under computing & internet, wordpress
Now if we died with VatulBlog, we believe that we will also live with it. For we know that since VatulBlog was raised from the dead, it cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over it. The death it died, it died to sin once for all; but the life it lives, it lives to Internet. In the same way, count your blogs dead to sin but alive to Internet in Maitri’s VatulBlog. - WebHosts 6:8-11
From the fiery depths of iPowerWeb to delivery by a DreamHost of angels (and timely intervention by Alan Gutierrez), VatulBlog is alive. Don’t call it a comeback.
Now, Happy Easter, my peeps! Business resumes as usual come the morrow.
Day 677: My Happy Tech Life, July Edition
July 7, 2007 - Filed Under computing & internet, gizmos & hacks, new orleans, recovery, wisconsin, wordpress
The Road Home Unconference is less than a month away. The “unconference is a new format that is shaking up [the] conference industry, because it is easy to convene, flexible and inexpensive. It is perfect for industries where the expertise lies in the audience … the premise is that ‘there is more expertise in the audience than there possibly could be on stage.’” The aim of the New Orleans Road Home Unconference on July 28th is to discuss problems with the Road Home Program and come up with solutions that will be fed back to those in charge. Make ICF do its job. Are you registered?
* Meeting Capture - I’m working with Alan Gutierrez and KC King on how to record and archive the discussion at the unconference. The object is unobtrusive and thorough meeting capture — we don’t want people engrossed in conversation and idea generation made self-conscious by a tape-recorder or video camera shoved in their faces. Ideas?
* New Orleans Podcamp - Christopher Johnston is organizing a New Orleans Podcamp scheduled for April 2008. Two applications that come to mind for New Orleans are a) podcast newsletters from neighborhood organizations and other groups, and b) adding the vocal and sound touch when archiving various aspects of New Orleans. Since serious podcasting is my next geek project, I’m excited to begin working with him in the context of several New Orleans meetings, projects and communities that can benefit from this technology. Read this article to learn more on podcasting.
* New Laptop - It’s time for a laptop upgrade. PC or Mac? Why do I bother asking when I always end up buying a PC? For the record, Vista 64 will come nowhere near my new baby.
* WP Me ASAP - Wordpress 2.2.1 is out, with major security fixes.
* Cleophatra Does Milwaukee - Christy has a blog and I didn’t know. Apparently, she and I have been doing similar things lately like looking up old classmates online, attending The Police concert and making Simpsons avatars. Christy and Greg are visiting Milwaukee, one of D’s favorite cities, soon, so I left her some what-to-do-there suggestions. The Miller Brewery Tour, baby!
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