Month: October 2006

Dreamhost appear to have disabled comments here at the Daily Grind too, as of about seven hours ago. They’ve not told me of this yet, which is somewhat annoying. Right now, I can’t back up my database without the server crapping out, which is making it rather risky to update Movable Type to the most recent version – it turns out that MT hasn’t been deleting junk comments, and my database now contains more than 140,000 of them. Any attempt to delete them smacks into the PHP memory allocation limit. Bleurgh.

Bear with me…

This doesn’t quite apply to all Deletetheweb hostees, but it does apply to most, and also to a few others of you. Apologies for being vague, but it’s going to take me too long to work out who’s affected, compared to just fixing stuff. It doesn’t affect people on WordPress, nor people who think they know me but aren’t, in fact, hosted on my account at Dreamhost. You know who you aren’t.

Dreamhost have disabled Trackback for our Movable Type blogs – we were being targeted by spammers with sufficient alacrity to give the server hissy fits. Bastards. Uhhh… that’s the spammers who were bastards, not Dreamhost support, who with one exception are being lovely about it.

The exception is that one installation has had mt-comments.cgi disabled also. At the moment, Dreamhost aren’t telling me the path of the file they nuked, so I’m not sure who’s lacking comments. I think it’s Alan, but I’m not quite sure.

Whatever – expect a round of emergency updates later today. There may be some downtime, and it’s just possible that I might nuke your entire install by accident. I’ll try to take backups of everything first, but you know what I’m like.

This begs the question of what I do with inactive hostees – eg. Jim and Simon. I can’t leave you as you are, but unless I can sort updating more easily I can’t justify the time it could take. I’ll check the current Movable Type license terms: I may roll a bunch of blogs together under one installation. But that may be more hassle than it’s worth too… hmm…

Any comments or opinions, etc, please send as soon as. Thanks awfully.

To throw a tad more semiconductor die release agent on the Google+YouTube stuff: the amount of dosh the big G has just coughed up for the piffling video upstart is reported to be around the £850m mark. Which, where I come from, is a lot of money. It also happens to be roughly the annual production spend of (UK national commercial TV broadcaster) ITV1.

Simultaneously, it’s reported that ITV is having problems finding a suitable chief exec. Also, their advertising revenue is predicted to be down 13% year-on-year, with a further 10% predicted fall for next year. Ouchie.

The question is – where is that advertising money going? If even some of it ends up at YouTube, then (given that they have 67 staff and no production expenses, since they don’t actually make anything), the price Google have paid starts to look plausible. And ITV’s difficulty in attracting a head honcho speaks well of the potential candidates – they’re evidently savvy enough to recognise a colander disguised as a boat when they see one.

Does anyone else see a spooky parallel between the Airbus A380 delays being due to problems with wiring the entertainment system, and Douglas Adam’s flight delayed ‘awaiting the delivery of lemon-scented paper napkins, for your convenience’ – for millennia?

(Bonus marks for anyone who can tell me which Hitch-Hikers’ book that’s from. Stuffed if I can remember.)

Here’s a lovely and fascinating Flash map of the Middle East/Eastern Med/etc, with an animation showing the rise and fall of controlling powers for the last three thousand years or so. I love this sort of thing, in part because it reinforces the idea that ‘stability’ and ‘permanence’ exist maybe on the scale of cities, but are otherwise a bit meaningless. Then again, I also like these maps because they remind me of Vinci, a board game that magnificently captures that grand sweep of the growth and decline of civilisations.

The bit that’s weird is that the hosting site, Maps of War, is otherwise… well, scroll down a bit and tell me what you think of their map ‘Iraqi Pressure-vault.’ Er… huh? Thanks, that makes things much… um… clearer.