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.

Agh! For some reason my AppleTV keeps syncing content that I specifically told it not to sync. And is has stuff synced that should have been deleted some time ago. I add a new podcast, it shows up in iTunes.

Yes, I have it set to only sync “Selected podcasts” yet it continues to sync ones that I don’t have checked. Even If I play them on the AppleTV they won’t auto delete.

The two recessed lighting fixtures are installed. The fixture over the toilet is a Broan 744 Recessed fixture with exhaust Fan. It’s supposed to have a noise rating of 1.5 sones, which isn’t the quietest but not the loudest. It’s the quietest recessed fixture I could find. I’m done with all the attic work in this location so I put the ceiling back up hopefully I won’t change my mind about something and have to take it out again.

I still want to put in two electrical outlets, one for a heated towel rack and one to put in a cabinet (so I can put all my rechargeable stuff and hide it). I have to decide where I want to tie into the existing GFCI protected circuit.

I special ordered some bathroom fixtures from Lowes on Wednesday. I can’t believe how much I spent on them, but I just didn’t like the cheap in-stock stuff. Bathroom fixtures just simply are not cheap. They were supposed to call me on Thursday and let me know how long before they arrive and it’s Saturday and I haven’t heard anything back.

I’ve put together the base cabinets I bought from IKEA to figure out how to lay them out. I’ve drawn out several ideas but it’s hard to tell without actually seeing it.

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.

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.

Last week I tried to log into my FileVault protected user account and got an message at the login window, “Unable to log in to the user account (name) at this time”. I logged into the root account and tried to mount the sparseimage manually and got a “input/output” error upon mount. Basically, I was screwed.

I tried to copy the 18GB disk image to a external drive, but I kept getting a error -36 after several hundred megabytes were copied. After messing around with it for a while I got the idea to change it from a .sparseimage to a .dmg by just changing the extension. Sure enough, I was able to mount the disk image. I thought I would then have access to my files, but the finder was extremely slow just building the list of files, sometimes takes minutes per file.

With 18GB of files, it would take forever to even build the list of files. Assuming it would even be successful at building the file list after spending all that time trying. I started messing with disk recovery software. Disk Utility was able to repair some of the damage, but it seemed to cause more damage. Disk Utility left me with “Missing thread record (id = 11025)” messages that it couldn’t fix and it left me with a unmountable disk image. I then used Disk Warrior and it’s scavenge function to build a new catalog file.

Disk Warrior worked mostly. It did create a new catalog file but many files were unrecoverable. I did have backups of most of the important stuff, it would have been easier to just copy everything whole from the disk image. Seeing as how that wasn’t going to happen I concentrated on the stuff I didn’t have. Mostly stuff from my Library folder, application specific settings. Things like my Mail.app messages (Apple really should store these in the users Document folder).

When the finder tried to copy a file that was corrupt, instead of just skipping the file, it errors. I couldn’t just select all files and copy them at once, I had to copy one by one for the most part. Which means I missed a lot of stuff. Like the scripts I use to publish this blog.

After I got everything set up in a new user account, it was 2.3GB. What happened to the 16GB I had in my original account? Don’t know and so far I haven’t missed anything. Hopefully I don’t miss them later.

Channel 7 in Southern California has a news report (from October 4th) with Ken Fairbanks of SmartLabs, who makes all the Insteon gear I write about. Along with the article is a video showing some of the stuff Home Automation can do. Its a short clip but shows some interesting things, like the control of blinds (which I haven’t figure out how to do yet).

You don’t need Insteon to do the stuff in the video.

I’ve finally got around to getting the right side links working again. Rather than manully manage my list of links. I’m using a javascript to get links that I’ve added via del.icio.us. This means it’s easy for me to add new links to my sidebar without having to do anything to my site.

To post stuff to del.icio.us I’m using the Lazy Sheep bookmarklet which auto tags links based on what others have tagged it. Plus it works right in my browser.