boakes.org » Website

Reallocation of network services will result in some downtime between Thursday 9th and Sunday 12th February 2006 (4 weeks from today). I don’t expect a total black hole of nothingness, but some disruption and/or curious behaviour may be unavoidable.

It’s a windy night in Portsmouth and I can’t sleep, so I’ll be updating the blog to WordPress 2.0 during the next few hours. If the theme changes, or if things break, that’s expected during the upgrade process. More…

This is the first beta release of a WordPress plugin that can add Google Analytics to your website without you needing to code one single set of <>’s. More…

How can I tell my Apache server that MSIE prefers JPEG files over PNG? More…

A special trans-global thanks to Murky who pinged me from NZ a few moments ago after noticing that this site was spitting out SQL errors (instead of gracefully presenting pages full of useful content). The outage was caused by a large file that was taking up the temporary space that our content management database needs to function properly. Everything is back to normal now. Ta Murky.

If you’re using Internet Explorer (IE), you may notice that the images on this site are “disappearing”. Please do not adjust your set. Better-than-normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. More…

The server that runs this site experienced a memory problem last night at around 8pm GMT. More…

Last night at approximately 9pm GMT, one of the disks on our server took umbrage with it’s life of servitude and chose to self destruct in protest. More…

The server that runs this site has endured a minor injury to it’s long term storage (one of the disks, or the RAID card that the disks connect to, are kaput) - fortunately we have backups and a fairly resilient machine, so it’s serving the pages from it’s RAM cache at the moment. The bottom line is that this site will be off line for a little while fairly soon, as soon as we have the opportunity to work out what hardware is at fault, and buy a new one of it.

Read what follows, it affects how your message is handled.

• If you wish to comment on a specific article, for example if you want to know more about something we have written, this is not the place to comment. Please use the form at the bottom of that article’s page, or preferably, use the forum, where you can start a discussion on the topic.
• If you’re asking for help, help yourself, don’t ask on this page. Occasionally people mistakenly leave help requests here. Those messages get approved, but ignored, because this is not an “active” page. When we get time, we do the necessary housekeeping and move those messages to what we think is the correct place, but by then the moment has often passed. Your best bet is to ask on the forum, that way, we’ll see your message, and others will too, so you’ll get many hands making light work of your problem.
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