grahambinns.com

RAID5 is quite reliable as disk arrays go. So I can understand why having two disks in a five-disk array fail on Thursday morning took my hosts, Servelocity, somewhat by surprise. Which is the quick way of saying exactly what happened to the site over the last four-and-a-bit days.

There, that was painless, wasn't it?

Elsewhere, I appear to be stuffing my hours full of more minutes than they can feasibly cope with, or at least that's how it feels. For one thing, work-wise, we're mid-release cycle, and though there's a bit of a lull for me at the moment for logistical reasons I know it'll pick up to insanely busy levels towards the end of the week (perversely, I'm rather looking forward to it).

Writing-wise... Well, let's gloss over that by simply saying that I haven't done any of it for about three weeks. In fact the last time I did any writing that wasn't an email or a blog post or a hastily scribbled plot note for novel-the-second was in the Starbucks on Horseferry Road. I wrote a few paragraphs of a short story called, tentatively, Branches and rather enjoyed it and then I got tied up with work and haven't really had time to go back to it. And once again I find myself thinking that I should get back to writing but more specifically that I should get on with writing novel-the-second before it turns into the novel-I-meant-to-write that all wannabe writers have tucked away at the back of their minds. That thought terrifies me, frankly; it's too good a story to waste (though I'm not yet sure that I can do it justice). Trouble is, Branches is pretty good so far, too, especially since it's my first foray into hard(er) core Science Fiction.

Massive server outage over the weekend, will explain later. At the moment I'm just glad to see that nothing important is borked.

This tickles me a bit. The headline, especially.

Germany imposes ban on Tom Cruise (BBC)

Germany has banned the makers of Tom Cruise's new movie from filming at military sites in the country because the actor is a Scientologist.

In other news, my remote feed (Twitter, Flickr, etc.) aggregator thingumy appears to be buggered. Ho hum; I'll fix it later.

[Edit]

Well, the remote feeds thing is fixed, though it still needs a coat of looking at. Alas, the BBC have now amended their headline in the RSS feed, which is a shame, although they've left it as-is in the story itself, which just seems... slack, really.

Thanks all to those people (two, count them) who let me know about the odd site slowdown. My bad; turns out there was a huge-assed query running on every pageload that really didn't need to be there. Excising that and doing a bit of judicious caching has sped things up considerably.

And now, back to our normal programming. 

[Edit]

And yes, I really did post this at that time. 

Looks like we're up-and-running. Bon. The DNS propogation took longer than I expected, partly because the update didn't go out until 9:30 GMT, which I'd managed to not notice. Anyway, seems like everything works (for the time being at least), so I'll call it a win.

There are still a couple of tweaks that I need to make, but they're mostly on the back end, so you won't see them. For the most part though, Django handles things admirably, which makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. Doing the development work for this site - and in turn learning how to use Django - has been a lot of fun, so I'm going to keep playing with it; you might find you see a lot more tech-oriented posts on here now as a result.

That's not to say, however, that I'm not still making things up; on the contrary, I'm steeling myself to start on Novel-the-second in the very near future (probably next week or the week after). It's just a case of getting all if my creative ducks in a row (it's the shooting them part that worries me). I've got plenty of ideas and plenty more to come but I can't help feeling that if I don't start now one of two things is going to happen:

1. I'll spend all my time world-building and writing down ideas and not actually write any prose or
2. Someone else will write the story before I do.

And now I need to fiddle with my Python.

[Edit]

Before I forget, props must go to Simon Willison , whose blog introduced me to Django (he co-created it) and whose django_openidconsumer library I used as a replacement my own, less comprehensive OpenID consumer implementation. Many thanks Simon.