And, as fast as rabbits are migrating to Cape Town, 6000 miles… has migrated all the way from to its new home here in SA.
Of course, you probably won’t notice a difference; the standard of writing certainly won’t improve, so don’t go getting your hopes up.
At this point, I must once again thank The Guru who has made this whole thing almost effortless (for me, anyway). The transition has been seemingly seamless.
Now, let’s see if Afrihost can match Site5’s incredible uptime record.
I’ve been playing with my new Samsung Galaxy P7500 tablet and I noticed that I was already critically short (my words) on RAM, despite having nothing of huge significance running. It seemed that the device was using about 80% of its available RAM just to run.
I was naturally concerned.
At times of natural concern, we all have someone to whom we turn. Lois Lane had Superman, Commissioner Gordon had Batman, I have The Guru. My initial attempts to raise him by projecting a giant Android symbol onto the moon failed due to intermittent cloud cover over the Southern Suburbs, so I sent him an email instead, asking whether I should perhaps employ some sort of task manager to manage my tasks.
His reply was enlightening:
No – it’s a bad idea, which in almost all cases slows your phone.
Windows people use them, but there are extensive treatises, including by Google engineers, explaining how Linux/Android uses memory, and how task managers screw up the OS’s attempts to do so efficiently.The “not much RAM to spare” is exactly the Windows-thinking I am talking about. Unused RAM is wasted RAM for Android.
If you want to read more:http://www.androidcentral.com/
ram-what-it-how-its-used-and- why-you-shouldnt-care
I was enlightened. Literally.
If you have an Android device, the article above makes very interesting reading and it is at a suitable level for you and I (ie. basic). The comments, less so on both counts, as geeks take each other on in who can use the most confusing terminology, much of which includes parentheses.
Suffice to say that The Guru has allayed my fears that I have purchased a dud device (which, I have to point out, never faltered in its service to me). I can now enjoy my tablet with a relaxed and untroubled mind.
Viva, The Guru. Viva!
“Blog Stuff”
That was the subject of the email awaiting when I returned from a weekend “getting away from it all” – including cellphone signal – in the Southern Cape. After the trials and tribulations of the last week – only 1% of which concerned the blog crashing and burning and the other 99% of which was carefully tucked away, hidden from the prying eyes of the readers of this esteemed site – it was manna from heaven.
The email was from the character who I have, in the past, labelled The Guru. As most of you who can read will already know, that man is Jacques Rousseau. While I was still blogging at ballacorkish.net by writing html by hand in notepad, he introduced me to the joys of WordPress. I can still remember what he said:
…you should give it a try, I think you’ll like it.
But that was then and this is now. While I have been throwing words at your screens, Guru Jacques has been honing the interface for your viewing pleasure. And once I had torn out the spine of 6000 miles… and begun crying on Friday, he set to work rehoning what was left. Basically from scratch.
Thanks be to Jacques, because what he has created is the “Slimmer6000” theme:
Basically, it’s all good. Aside, it seems, from my sidebar text:
I reckon your sidebar text is too small (always has been) – if you want to play with that, go to lines 82 and 83 of style.css
Later, in another email, Jacques described himself as “a genius”, which I was about to agree with until I realised that he had given me free rein to play around with his work.
Pfft.
He obviously enjoys repairing things.
I thought that once I* had repaired the file that I had damaged (which just so happens to be the file that underpins the entire blog on www.6000.co.za), that things would be ok. Not so.
It seems that the file in question went out of its way to take other files down with it. Or… something. I’m really not sure how, but it seems that is what has happened. Stuff that once existed, no longer exists and cannot be found. Stuff that was working fine is no longer working fine. Plugins are gone.
I’m not even sure if I can post this. That’s actually why I’m writing it.
Let’s try a quota photo from my dad’s flickr stream, shall we?
Here’s the Sidecar 2 race from this year’s Isle of Man TT races. And that’ll be a sidecar going around Ballacraine.
Probably rather quickly.
As you can see, the traffic lights are out. If he was in South Africa, he’d have to treat the junction as a four-way stop, which would almost certainly damage his lap time.
I digress. Watch twitter or our facebook page for further updates as to the recovery from the #6kCrash.
And once we are back up and running, I’ve still got to do the thing I was trying to do when I caused all this trouble in the first place.
Please have extra Milk Stout on standby. This could get messy again.
* I say “I”, but I was assisted in no small part by The (presumably jetlagged) Guru.
It seems likely that I will require much further assistance from him in the coming days.
This will inevitably cost me some (or more) bottle of red wine, but it’s more than worth it.
Incoming from The Guru:
FYI, the server we’re on will be migrated to a new datacenter, starting 27/12 at around 2am our time. It’s unlikely that anything will break. The process could take as long as a couple of days, but might well be done by mid-morning on the same day. Regardless of duration, sites will be fully accessible while it’s going on, and I’ll let you know when it’s complete. But I’d recommend not posting anything on the 27th itself, and certainly not doing any site changes, as what could happen is that you do something during the transition, and it gets lodged in the old database locations, and then the new database locations don’t contain that data. So it’s entirely possible that a comment or somesuch could get lost between the 2 datacenters.
Thanks, The Guru.
This doesn’t sound anywhere as spectacular as swallows flying non-stop across Europe and Africa or magnificent herds of wildebeest galloping across the Kenyan savannah, but it obviously has implications for me posting anything on the 27th – unless, of course I get it in before the 2am CAT deadline. Which is obviously what I have done if you are reading this.
Please feel free to leave comments during the 27th. I like to live dangerously like that. If your comment does get lost because of the migration, then I will personally head off into the old datacenter (there’s a portal at the back of my wardrobe) and risk my life, Indiana Jones-like, to try and rescue your thoughts.
Otherwise – back tomorrow.