Server is settled down

Had a server OS upgrade (well more like an upheaval, when the auto re-image at the hosting provider continually failed ). Things are running on a more solid and more recent OS Centos 5 (2.6.18 kernel), Apache is now version 2.2.3 My SQL at version 5.0.77 and PHP at 5.1.6. It's certainly not on the bleeding edge, but it certainly is not five years behind the times. Also for now, it has an extra 20 GB from the conversion (the techs had to swap out a hard drive). This machine still has plenty of legs left. I'm definitely looking forward to having setting up my workstation for development of my site. Managed to get a decent domain name roamigo.com "Roam I Go" ... that matches the intent of the site. Started looking into how to best represent geographic data in a database, and also started wondering about database designs as well as database implementations. One intriguing possibility is to use a column store architecture (yes on an online database with continuous submissions !!). MonetDB is a good candidate. One reason for this would be speed of queries and especially joins. Another possible advantage would be the natural data partitioning that a column store database supposedly has. That would come in handy when parallel servers are needed. That of course would only be necessary if/when the site has a lot of growth. Of course ease of maintainability and ease of scaling should be considered when choosing an implementation. Cant wait to really get into all of it.

Finally

The conversion of the live site for my friend is finally done. Right now the site is working with the latest stable release of the software for it, and it includes all of the earlier custom software as well as the styling changes. What a pain that was to finally get it going. The final conversion took only a bit under an hour. The reason it took that long is in the middle of it I got a bit distracted and forgot a step along the way. I had overlooked the consequences of one of the conversion steps and for ten minutes or so the state of the server puzzled me. It was not acting as I had expected it should and the cause of that baffled me. Remembering a custom configuration parameter that I had set manually earlier in the week, I checked if the normal administration interface had overwritten it when I temporarily disabled the domain to do the conversion. Sure enough, that's exactly what it was. Plesk does not like it when you modify the Apache configuration files yourself.

All in all this process has taught me a few things about problem solving and how to mitigate risk. Unfortunately it also taught me that conversions are very very lengthy if there are only a couple of hours everyday to work on them.

What is left before I can begin development of my hobby site ? Well there is that whole upgrading of the base operating system on the server. The procedure is well documented by the hosting company but it is still fraught with danger. I have to think this one through, and perform it carefully. Of course I'll have to have a viable backup strategy, so that I dont loose any data.

Overall I'm happy with the results, I only wish I had managed to get them done a month earlier. That is in the past now. Time to move on.

Happy Day

Not only did I get to see my two youngest sons sing in the Spring concert today, but I've also reached a significant milestone in backporting customizations to that friend's site that I've been working on. Looks like the obstacle that has been in my way for the past two months will soon be behind me. Now for the conversion of the live database, and the installation of the latest stable, and customized, software for my friend.

The joy of hearing well played and sung live music, and the joy of completing a task long time coming. This is a day to savor.