No flat file backup’s yet emerged.

Disk Warrior 3.0 can be downloaded directly from the Alsoft website, so that’s a good thing. But it failed to fix the problem. So I’m gonna have to reformat the volume. Which means picking through the bogus drive by hand to try to keep as much of the data on the disk as possible.

The source of the problem is multifold; first, when Bellerophon crashes, I typically don’t take the time to run the various disk-fix procedures on the drive, because running something like DW on the volumes will take about 8 hours on the slow, elderly machine.

Secondly, there was some pre-existing file corruption down in the bowels of the drive that led to difficulties in attempting to back up – so instead of finding the bad file and dealing with it I kept putting off dealing with it. Oops.

Finally, the corruption in the b-tree happened to hit in such a way as to prevent the various tools from fixing the disk. The fickle finger of fate, indeed.

So, I spent spome time prepping the substitute server to multihome and so forth; it’s running the venerable QuidProQuo under OS 9.1.2, and is a 9500 with a g3 upgrade. I do have it set up to boot into OSX as well, but haven’t set up mail and PHP and all that good stuff. Yet. In theory, it’s also to act as a backup server. Oops!

This time, I don’t even have a recent flat-file backup. Or maybe I do, but I haven’t found it yet.

However, the datafiles are all unaffected – yet, alas, the MT perl fils are all on the volume rendered comatose by the fickle finger of fate.

E-mail should remain unaffected.

Did I say arrgh?

For the technically inclined: the volume containing my web-published data has suffered a kind of B-tree error that, while troublesome, should be repairable (Disk First Aid reports “Keys not Found”). The volume is not mountable from OSX, and the standard procedure is boot into OS 9 and run Disk Warrior. Alas, unmountable state of the volume is such as to actually prevent the boot cycle from completing.

On May 6, Alsoft released DiskWarrior 3.0 with OSX-native directory rebuilding. The Alsoft website reports that they are rather backordered. Is there a copy in Seattle? Inquiring minds want to avoid doing a disk reinitialization.

Did I mention? Aaargh.

Martian Technology offers something that’s this close to my ideal home server.

What it lacks is web-oriented services, but obviously one could buy it and then install the services one’s self.

[via Cringely, who saw it in the NYT but do not link over theah.]

I blog this so I can find it easy again when I beat Ken in online poker.

Just a quick jaunt up the timestream to check on Ken’s winnings and to drop in on Future Jahna. I’ll be back in normal temporal reality Monday.

And did I tell ya? I got SIFF press creds! I’ll be blogging it, baby! ‘Course, I got the cred based on Cinescape and I will be developing a polished piece for them as well, and maybe some stuff for Tablet locally.

I had overlooked a search template pathing issue when I upgraded – sorry about that, searchers. All should be well now.

Finally. Boy am I a slowpoke. Hm, say, where all the pretty wimminz, I mean, new features at?

An another thing: that Miegs Field entry generated about six spurious trackbacks over at MeFi. WTF? I stripped the ping tags from the input box each time I saved the entry…. looks like I have to disable autodiscovery. Foo.

Sorry for the outage today – bellerophon wouldn’t reboot for several hours, who knows why. I’m remembering St. Patrick today, in the form of a massive hangover, and have declined to attempt detailed technical attention as a result.

So. Again, my apologies.

On a constitutional with Viv this morning, I saw that the current ish of Cinescape is out; in the magazine, I have several pieces, including an article based on a long interview I had with none other than childhood favorite Michael Moorcock. As is the case for the previous interview-based piece from the magazine, I will post that material here, probably over the course of the next week.

This means, in all likelihood, that no 100-post stunt blogging will be forthcoming. I’ll revisit and reconsider the issue after the interview is all in place.

Pursuant to my pointing out that some folks engaged in stunt blogging back ’round January, Felicity has applied stylus to wax, and bravely stepped into the breach.

As I write this, it’s just over 12 hours in, and she’s doing well – post 59 went up at 10:23 am.

A substantial portion of the posts have concerned her former career as a classical musician – a violinist, I think, but she’s not clarifed it that I saw within the boundaries of the 100 Thrilling Posts.

She wonders I might be considering such a stunt myself. In all honesty, I have to say yes. However, there are two things that force me to defer until at least a bit later – possibly Tuesday or Wednesday.

First, it’s been print week for Cinescape, and thus my short pointer-posts this week.

Second, honestly, 100 posts in 24 hours seems insufficiently challenging – I guesstimate the total word count would be about 5400 words, and I already know I can do that in a day. I want to not know if I can accomplish the goal.

Some further theme is needed, or some further constraint. 100 posts in three hours, like. Or maybe 100 posts with one hand tied behind my back. Or 100 drawings in six hours, scanned and posted. Or 100 good drawings in 12 hours, scanned and posted that same day.

Or rules: The first twenty-six posts must not use the letter a, b, c, corresponding to the numeric position of the letter, and thereafter, cycle back through the rules. Or something.

Each post is a two-sentence reflection upon a word chosen at random from a dictionary, but the whole must relate a coherent theme or story which is allowed to emerge organically from the series.

So obviously I’m thinking about it.

Ragga fragga bowsrabberl humbert grunk and so forth.

In my insomnia, I have the bright idea – “why, I’ll do that gol durn MySQL upgrade I’ve been puttin’ off.”

All goes well, when I see that the Ken Goldstein project has been disrupted. Somewhere within the guts of PostNuke, a well-intentioned geek has applied a regularizing lower-case to the name of the database that postnuke uses.

Which, of course, has been named with a scheme that includes an uppercase letter – not by me, I hasten to add! It’s the default postnuke everything!

So, hm, sez I, and mosey over to the postnuke website, to see that they recommend an upgrade and patch. Ok, sure, boys. So I get the materials.

The recommended upgrade procedure is: remove your old version, making a backup of everything, then add it back, bit by bit, after you’ve set up the new version. Geez.

Now, I have some insomnia, but, uh, that will have to wait.