hating computers

So, advogato is back up-ish. Raph has moved it to the new machine we bought to replace the ghostscript.com host, which expired some time ago and only survives now only as an artificial creature, dependent on life support.

There may be a few more glitches as we transition the machine's primary responsibilities, but hopefully things will stay up a little better now.

Sometimes I hate computers. I feel like I've spent more than half of the last 3 months fighting with broken servers. The hosts for both ghostscript.com and xiph.org imploded about the same time, and getting replacements online was in both cases something of a nightmare. The lesson, at least for me, is that when you're trying to do things on the cheap, build the machine locally and ship; the kind of on-site support you need if it doesn't work costs more than the hardware, and you won't save anything by having someone build something locally.

For Xiph.org we also ended up switching hosting providers. Our primary server is now with the very cool folks at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab. We were also inspired by the pain of the downtime and data loss to set up some redundancy, and in particular mirrors for the websites. If you'd like to help us out, email the xiph.org webmaster; we need both mid-bandwidth web hosts for the sites, and high-bandwidth mirrors for media content and release files.

Still, an end is hopefully in site. At least if my home machine would also stop trashing its disk.

Ex Londonium

I finally received my Canadian immigration papers this past November, and officially became a resident on December 21st last year. After spending xmas was my partner's family in Kingston, we found a nice apartment in downtown Vancouver, then went back to London to pack up there. We came back ourselves at the end of February and the things we shipped finally arrived in June, so we're officially here. It's really nice to be back.

The reverse culture shock was interesting. When I first moved to Vancouver 10 years ago it was the biggest city I had ever lived in. After a while I got used to the scale and enjoyed taking advantage of all the things on offer. Then we went to London, one of the largest cities in the world. So when we came back, we were struck by how pleasant and friendly everyone was, how clean the streets were, but also how small it all was. Now Vancouver is just a place with only two cheese shops.

These things wear off though, and we're still happy with our decision to return. It was a great experience to be able to live in Europe for a few years, but London wasn't our first choice as a place to stay.