Greg In The Desert

In case you haven’t noticed, there’s been a few changes and other screwey things happening on this site. On 9 March 2009 I received a email from my then hosting provider MacHighway.

Unfortunately, we’ve needed to suspend your blog, greginthedesert.net. Your site is regularly using between 30 – 99% of the CPU on that server. It appears that your site is getting around 161k hits per month. The good news is that Technorati estimates that a blog getting 100k his a month is worth $75k/year. The bad news is that it’s far exceeds the fair use policy of our shared hosting environment. Your sites’ needs have outgrown what a shared hosting provider can offer.

Additionally, your site calls on a tremendous amount of resources with all of the dynamic information that the site needs to load in order just to display the front page. This is exacerbating the problem and should definitely be trimmed down.

I totally understand how this was a problem and I can see how I made it worse with some of the stuff I was using to generate my blog since I have been experimenting with plug-in’s and templates. I replied to the support ticket and said I had a number of ideas on how to reduce the CPU usage of my blog and that I wasn’t coming close to my bandwidth or disk usage quotas. They were having none of it and said move my blog elsewhere.

It also would have been nice if they could have given me some heads up about the excessive CPU usage. I guess they didn’t want me as their customer. It’s too bad since the few other issues I had with MacHighway were well taken care of.

I started to look for a non-shared hosting provider. Dedicated hosting is expensive, the cheapest I found was nearly $100 a month. Even though the MacHighway support guy suggested my blog should be worth $75,000, I make tens of dollars a year on advertising, not hundreds. There is no way I can afford dedicated hosting. Also, the 161,000 hits a month I get are only translating to about 9,000 real people a month. I also can only see where 58K hits a month are coming from including robots, image leachers, etc.

After a searching around for a few days including local services providers I ended up going with another shared hosting provider: Dream Host. In fact, there’s a number of things I like about them but that’s a blog post for another day.

MacHighway temporarily enabled my blog so I could export my data. I copied all the Wordpress directories to my hard drive, exported the database and exported a WXR file. Just in case the database dump failed to import.

After getting my domain redirected to the new servers at DreamHost and Wordpress installed, I attempted to import the database. The raw sql file is 230MB and compressed it’s 22MB, far more than the 7MB limit that the phpmyadmin allows. I had to become familiar with the command line to do the import. After contacting DreamHost support because a few things weren’t properly configured on my account I attempted to try the command line import sequence. The import failed on line two, where the sql file’s phpmyadmin version was 2.11.9.4 and DreamHost’s version is 2.11.9.3. I commented that line out and tried the import again, next fail was at line 7.

I contacted DreamHost support to see what they would say about the situation. They tried importing and found several lines which failed. The support person suggested that I continue to comment out lines which fail. I thought that was a bad idea since many of those line look like important parts of the database creation process and I didn’t know how long this editing-upload-fail-repeat process would continue.

Database import wasn’t going to work. I started working on importing the WXR file. My import file was 10.6 MB, bigger than than the 7MB limit imposed by wordpress for import files. I compressed it, which I read elsewhere could overcome the import size limitation. Even though it brought the file under 7MB, it could not get it to sucessfully import. I had two results with the importing of the WXR file, sometime the site would just hang sometime it would give me a 408 page.

I went through and removed the 14,000 plus but that didn’t change the results. I broke the WXR file into several small files and was able to have successful imports. I went through a process of having one half of the cut up file succeeded importing and the other half fail. It has become clear that there is some part at the beginning of the WXR that is corrupt or some other problem that is confusing the import process.

There are still abut 400 posts left to import, but the majority of the important ones are there and I will continue to go through the process of breaking up the remainder of the WXR file until I find the problem entry. Although I learned a lot about Wordpress and phpmyadmin and SQL databases, I’m looking forward to getting this whole ordeal behind me and return to blogging.

Mountain Lions are pretty common in New Mexico and most occur near the uh… mountains. Last week a Mountain Lions apparently killed an ate a man in Pinos Altos, NM. Pinos Altos is located way south of Albuquerque. They caught a cat that may have been the cat that did it, so they killed it anyways. The American way i guess.

In May

Officers from the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish investigators said they are now 90 percent sure that a Mountain Lion’ pounced on Jose Salazar Jr., 5, and was trying to drag him away as the boy’s father gave chase.

Mostly Mountain Lion’s try to avoid humans and are probably pretty desperate if they attack a human. If you live near their habitat, I would keep your small dogs and cats inside.

Updated 7/1/08: A second lion has been killed near Pions Altos. This one may have also been responsible. Lets just kill them all to be sure.

I can’t help be be amused that the Mayor of Albuquerque has suspended the red light camera program over money. According to him, the purpose of the program was not to make money, but was to increase safety at risky intersections. Its questionable if the data supports this, but the program did make money, like $10 million. Oops, that extra $10 million wasn’t supposed to happen. Or was it?

Now the state wants a cut of it, or I guess all of it, so goodbye cash cow. I’m sure all interested parties will find a way so everyone can profit. except the citizens.

I guess this is a “letters to the editors” section in the Rio Rancho Observer. I call it whining. The last one is my favorite.

A man on Lisbon has something for sale every day, whether it’s stuff that goes to the junk, he’s always got something there for sale. I don’t know what his problem is and why he thinks he can do that out here on Lisbon.

I guess this sucks if you have a helicopter and live in Scottsdale. The advantage of owning a helicopter is you can live pretty far away.

Only a handful of residents have commuted via helicopter since then, but planners said that they feared more helicopters would start hovering since street traffic is so congested. About three years ago, some homeowners began complaining about noise from heli-commuting neighbors.

Another sale from Smarthome. 10% off stuff they have marked as “Hot Deals” . Use coupon code ESPRING07 on check out, good till 2 March. Also free shipping till on $150 or more till 1 March. Not all of the Insteon stuff is included. I’m buying a few things in this sale.

• Keypad Dimmer INSTEON Starter Kit. A KeypadLinc, two SwitchLincs and two SignalLincs. Price for this stuff separate would be $239.99, they have it listed for $159.99 before discounts.
• Icon Appliance On/Off Module. Listed at $24.99, normally $34.99.

I wish they had some Icon On/Off Switches included, guess I will have to wait for anther sale. They have some other Insteon stuff like the Plug-In Dimmer INSTEON Starter Kit, Kitchen Lighting Starter Kit and the Icon Lamp Dimmer.

Oh my little iPhone, in some Chinese factory out there. Your probably nothing more than little bits of plastic and toxic chemicals right now. Come June, you will be in my hand and I will make sweet, sweet love to you…. What? Why are you looking at me like that?

Your thinking the same thing, I know it.

I’m going to be throwing away my Palm TX. Palm had their chance, but they blew it. I’m glad I never bought their stocks.

My Motorola RAZR, It too is going in the garbage. It’s so sexy on the out side, but much like many a sexy model, it’s a asshole inside. I hate it more and more every day.

I’m going to have to switch from T-Mobil to Cingular. All I can think is, why can’t AT&T just die already. They wont and I get almost no signal from T-Mobil, so I guess it’s time to switch.

Going from a 60GB iPod to a 8GB iPhone, that could be an issue.

The Rio Rancho City Council has voted to extend Northern Blvd into Corrales. I don’t get how this works exactly, how does Rio Rancho decided if a road is built in another city (town, whatever Corrales is).

I also don’t get how the road will be extended. Check out the end of Northern Blvd as it butts up against Corrales now, I guess there’s some room there somewhere. I do like the concept of having a major road go all the way through, instead of the weird set up we have now. It shouldn’t increase traffic to Corrales, that’s going to happen whether the road is extended or not. Extending the road should improve the traffic flow for when the traffic does increase.

Finally, I think Councilor Mike Williams is on the right track for voting against it. Why doesn’t the city worry about the other road projects that they haven’t completed yet, before doing this one.

“I’d be in support of D-93 if at any point in time I had something in writing from, first of all from the state of New Mexico highway department stating that 528 was going to be done before Northern Boulevard was going to be opened up, also that the City of Rio Rancho commits that Northern Boulevard is four to five lanes all the way to Unser just so it can handle the traffic,” Williams said. “I have no problem opening this leg, but this is not the time, and until we have that etched in stone with 528 and Northern Boulevard, I have no choice but to vote against it.”

I guess I don’t have a infestation. After my last post I went to the nearest Home Depot and found some Glue Traps. They are a platform with a ultra sticky substance that’s suppose to attract scorpions, spiders and other bugs. I’d prefer to stay away from the nuclear option of spraying the place if possible. Besides, scorpion’s are difficult to kill with standard pesticides anyhow.

Since putting them down I haven’t seen as single scorpion, which surprised me. Until a few days ago, I found a small one in the glue trap. I’m not sure where they are coming from but It’s pretty clear they are coming from the north end of the house. They could be coming up from around the heater ducts in the floor or possibly from the master bathroom where the roots were coming up, i haven’t finished demolishing that yet.

In either case I’ve learned to live with the fact that they are there. In fact, they are a excellent predator and will eat centipedes, another nasty insect that people find in their homes in New Mexico. So what would I rather have, scorpion’s or centipedes? Scorpion’s turn out to be the lesser of two evils.

I guess you could say that AMREP owned most of Rio Rancho at some point. They basically started Rio Rancho, the first house I bought here was made by AMREP. Thankfully they are out of the house building market.

Their latest financial report is a good indicator that the real estate marked hasn’t slowed down that much here.

Revenues of the Company’s AMREP Southwest real estate subsidiary were $37,092,000 in the first quarter of 2007 compared to $7,689,000 in the same quarter last year. This substantial revenue increase was primarily due to increased sales of both developed and undeveloped lots in AMREP Southwest’s principal market of Rio Rancho, New Mexico, where interest in the Company’s landholdings did not appear to be impacted by the slowdown in housing that has been reported in many parts of the country.