Anyone who comes to my page occasionally may have noticed the weather panel and link to more detailed information is currently missing.  The reason is simple: the server at home which does all the grunt work, gathering, processing and pushing the data out went pop a few weeks ago.  It's taking longer than I had hoped to replace and in the meantime, I decided to pull down the weather stuff.  It will make a triumphal return as soon as the new server is built and functioning.  Bear with me folks!

Well, after wrangling the old Geeklog and Gallery2 setup into complete oblivion (my bad) I decided I'd had enough mokeying around with it and have gone with a fork of the original Geeklog code - GLFusion .  The really nice thing about GLFusion was that it was simple side-step from the old CMS as the backed databases etc were practically identical!  Secondly, GLFusion integrates Mediagallery into the setup so I now have a true integrated (as opposed to embedded) media system :)  Woot.  Anyway, everyone's accounts are safe and the old content is all here.  Have a dig around and by all means tell me what you think - or leave a comment to this post.  Anyway, it's bloody late (or is that early) and I need some sleep!  Have fun people!

The Gray Matter is now up and running with the fine folk at Bluehost. It's taken a little more wrangling than I'd expected but it's all done now.  If you're having trouble with your e-mail, call me - I'll walk you through what needs to be done.  Enough of this - I'm going to play with some toys.

Warning - nerd content follows!!

For those who might be curious, the problem was that the content management system I use (Geeklog) uses serialised values in a database for storing most of the configuration.  This is a much faster way for PHP to grab configuartion values rather than parsing a text file.  Unfortunately, this also means that when you move from one hosting provider, unless every file has exactly the same location as the previous provider (basically, this will never happen) the whole setup goes to hell in a handbasket until you refresh dozens of serialised values with the new locations.  If you find yourself in the fine ship "S.S. Futzed" then you need to cruise on over to Geeklog's explanation and have a good read - there's some code you can use to fix the problem in about 3 minutes...and that includes the time to cut-and-paste into a file and upload the code into a file on the web server and run it! :) 

Found this theme after my last theme exploded as a result of the content management system upgrade. Anyway, I was getting bored with the old one :P Enjoy the new look and I will beaver away at the backend getting all the little bits and pieces ported over to the new look and feel. It will take a while as I'm on holidays now, so don't expect much until the new year!

Some people may have noticed the 12 hour gap in the weather graphs. This has now been fixed and came about because of small API change after a routine update on the monitoring system. The API change resulted in me having to recompile spine from the Cacti Monitoring System. For the curious, cacti does all the polling, SNMP does the actual monitoring (via some phunky scripts I wrote) and the graphs are generated every hour then uploaded to the web server at the co-lo. So consequently debugging such a convoluted system can be a little time consuming :P

Some people may be aware that my old ISP decided to increase my monthly access from $120/mth (paid quarterly in advance) to $500/mth!! Consequently I told them to shove it and went with the only real alternative in my area...Telstra Wireless 3G. It's expensive at $130/mth for 10GB but it's fast and reliable (surprisingly fast actually)...which is a LOT more than I can say for my old ISP. As anyone who had mail hosting on my old server knows, if my link was down for 2-3 days a month then it was good month. If the speed was anything over 2-3Mbps, it was fast for a change (they promised me 12Mbps...but it never happened). Compared to the new link which is routinely over 3Mbps and never goes down...it makes me wonder how the heck Fish Internet are going to survive with their price gouging, poor service, next-to-no-customer-support, service offering. Couple that with the dragon who answers their phones (yeh, good luck getting past her!) I hope they go the way of other $#!t-house ISP's - down the proverbial gurgler. Good bye, and good riddence to them; they'll never get another cent out me and I'll make sure to tell everyone who can't get ADSL in our area to give them a wide berth.

So seeing as I no longer have a static IP (can't get them on Wireless 3G) and the small bandwidth quota, I decided to move all my hosting off-site and use the same provider my employer uses. Actually, I'm piggy-backing off their hosting account (with the boss' blessing). So this site is now on a faster server sitting in a data centre somewhere and I don't have to monkey around with it to keep all the lights blinking...that's someone else's job! Yay!! Everything is back up and running, including the galleries, but the weather stuff will take me a little longer to sort out. The problem with the weather is that the weather station is sitting on my desk at home (with the sensors outside) and the server is sitting in Sydney somewhere. Consequently I've got to figure out a sensible way to get not only data but the graphs (which are generated on my server) onto the hosted server. Real-time updates aren't going to workable but I'm thinking sensor data every 3 minutes and graphs every 15 minutes. We'll wait and see :)

For those who need help setting up their e-mail, I will be updating the support page in th next day or so. Right now though, there are some lawns that need to be mowed!!

Yesterday from about 2pm to 8pm Aust EST, my ISP had some serious routing problems. This, unfortunately, isolated my network from vast tracts of the Internet for the duration. Some people could get to my site, whereas others could not. As far as I know, locally TPG, Internode and IInet subscribers would have been unable to reach my site, but Optus and Bigpond subscribers could. International ISP's seemed to be very hit-and-miss. I have no idea what went pop for my ISP, but it was intensely frustrating! Apologies to anyone who had mail problems with my site or couldn't access the web site.

As you might notice, the random photo block is gone and I have installed a new Mini Slide Show. This is a Adobe Flash based player so you will need to download Flash Player if all you see is a blank box.

The photos will refresh every 5 seconds and will cost you a few kilobytes (2-3KB) for each image. If you click on an image, it will take straight to the correct location in the galleries. So watch and enjoy :)

Happy Easter! Welcome to the new and improved Gray Matter. What? You can't tell the difference? Sheesh! The lack of gratitude is insulting :P Seriously though, all the changes are in the back-end and have very little effect on how the site looks. The upgrade has vastly improved spam detection for comments and track-backs along with a number of other security fixes. Kudos to all the developers over at Geeklog! I've also clarified the copyright for all the work on this site and added a short warning to all potential bandwidth leechers on the About Us page. You leech, your site will have a referrer ban slapped on it :)

Anyway, just wanted to put a quick note to explain the downtime yesterday (if anyone noticed) and say happy easter! Take care y'all.

You may have noticed that The Gray Matter has a new domain. I've registered "gray.net.au" recently and have now moved everything to the new domain. Along with the new domain, I have installed a new (and vastly improved) gallery to house all our photos. Please follow the Photos link and check it out. As before, only registered users can see the full-size images in most of the galleries, so if you haven't already registered, now is a good time! Let me know if you find any broken links or weird happenings...there were plenty over the weekend and I can guarantee I haven't nailed all the bugs :P