The main 40 GB hard drive that powers this server has apparently given up the ghost. Yesterday, I woke up to check the server as normal and it had decided to remount the filesystem read-only, which is never a good sign. After rebooting (and losing my >25 days of uptime ) into my recovery environment, I was able to repair the filesystem, reboot and it worked fine.

Until about 2am this morning, when the same thing apparently happened again.

Unfortunately, that probably means the main drive is dead. There are actually two drives in this server, that 40 GB one and a 160 GB drive which important web server data is mirrored to each night (although which has question marks about stability for running a boot drive).

For now, I’ve copied everything over to the 160 GB drive until I can get a replacement main drive. Thanks to the flexibility of Linux, I simply copied the data over, rebooted off a GRUB CD-ROM, entered the boot commands for the second drive and it booted as if nothing had happened.

Now, I don’t know whether to just get another drive and continue with the current setup or get two SATA drives and try doing some form of RAID. Or do that later. I don’t know.

First of all, sorry for my lack of posting. I’ve been really busy trying to work on Vaveo (which is coming along very nicely), trying to keep up a post a day on FOSSwire (and pretty much managing it too) and of course trying to keep up with life too.

That means my personal blog here has had to suffer over the last few weeks, so if you were expecting lots of awesome content here, try here instead.

Over the past month and a bit, we have literally gone from nothing on Vaveo to where we are now, where we have a significant number of features done. There are still features left to do, and lots of testing to do and bugs to squash, but I’m really happy that we are getting there and making very good progress considering I’m not even able to do this full time at the moment. By this time next weekend, it should be full time, though.

It is the weekend now, so I get a little more time (I don’t stop working on Vaveo, however, but I don’t do full days either or I’d go mad!) and hopefully get to catch up with stuff. Like this blog.

An IM conversation a little earlier today:

Chris Van Patten: drupal 6 is going to be preinstalled with openid support
Peter Upfold: awesome
Peter Upfold: when is it out?
Chris Van Patten: soon, i hope… i have to digg up the email
Peter Upfold: digg lol
Peter Upfold: ;D
Chris Van Patten: hahahaha
Chris Van Patten: wow i can’t believe i did that
Peter Upfold: that’s what the web does to you

Also posted on Chris’s Tumblr but I wanted to repost it here too.

I recently won the PHP Classes Innovation Award for SleekTabs.

You do get a prize for winning, selectable from several generous corporate sponsors. I chose an O’Reilly book of choice, which happened to be MySQL Cookbook.

It arrived today, shipped all the way from California.

Massive thanks to O’Reilly and all the other sponsors and of course to the PHP Classes site for the recognition I have been given by this award. SleekTabs will hopefully get some well-needed dev attention pretty soon.

Thanks again, everyone!

Left - MacBook with Firefox open, with the project I’m developing open and tabs with any other resources I need to hand.

Middle - IM and other random windows so I can stay in contact and stash stuff I want close. Only 1024×768, but ah well.

Right - code open in (one of) the world’s greatest web development IDE(s) - Quanta.

For those of you who don’t already know, I’m extremely pleased to announce that I won the PHP Classes Innovation Award of April 2007 for my latest free software release, SleekTabs.

I’d like to thank everyone who voted for me and everyone in the PHP Classes community. I am very proud to be recognised.

I may well get some time this weekend to work on the next version, which should improve some of the annoying quirks in the first release, add some new features and stabilise the code a bit.

Once again, thanks to everyone who supported me. I hope that in time SleekTabs can help out a lot of people and I of course welcome all suggestions and comments regarding it.

Super-secret project development is coming along nicely. Due to unforeseen circumstances (that I may well explain a little later), I didn’t get quite as much time as intended today, but nevertheless things are chugging along very well.

No I can’t tell you anything more yet, but I’m sure everyone who reads my blog will end up with a beta invite anyway.

If you tried to get on the site yesterday at all, depending on what time you tried to visit, you probably didn’t get here.

Unfortuantely my ISP Tiscali experienced some heavy downtime yesterday, so I had no connectivity (and neither did the server). From looking at logs, I can estimate the downtime period was between around 2pm BST yesterday and 1am this morning.

Very frustrating for me, as it has been the first major downtime on the self-hosting setup (almost a month now) and there was nothing I could really do about it.

It also meant that last night I was unable to get any development done on The Project.

Ah well, never mind.

In town on a lunch break recently and as me and my friends walked past a travel agent, I noticed this:

It’s on a little LCD screen which is supposed to display the latest great deals on travel and entice people walking by to come in, but apparently someone didn’t notice that a slight bug crept in.

Time is very precious. I’m currently working on a semi-super-secret (if there can be such a thing) coding project with my good friend Chris Van Patten. Hmmm… I can tell you this much:

“we’re an events aggregator geared toward artists”

I absolutely love coding. It’s absolutely great fun, but the problem is that precious resource known as time is so scarce. I have to keep blogging, doing all the stuff I have to get done and of course the very important task of staying sane.

If anyone’s bored and has a spare, oh, even just two hours in their day, please if you could lend me the time so you have a shorter day and I have a longer one I’d be very grateful.

The bottom line is - my personal coding projects here might seem to be inactive for a while. Rest assured that I have not forgotten about them, they should get some attention as soon as I have the time to spare!