I’ve been working on the look of gallery a bit too… now it looks a bit less like it did in 1998. I think it might actually be easier to use, too.

That’s right, folks, I’m entering the world of 2005 right here and now: inline flash video! I felt I should do it so I could bring you the genius of The Michael Showalter Showalter:

These guys have been hit or miss since The State, but I think this is them back at the top of their game.

As I seem to do every couple of years, I’ve once again undertaken to fix up overt a bit. As you can see, things look a bit different already, but as all web developers do, I have more and bigger plans in the offing.

Yes, it has come to this. To comment on overt now you have to prove that you’re not a machine. I’m using both one of those type-in-code thingys and also running comments through Spamassassin. Always with the arms race, naughty little spammers.

Long-time overt readers will remember when I rolled my own photo gallery using ColdFusion and an Access database. A few years ago I replaced my own software with Gallery, a PHP-based photo album that was way better than anything I wrote could ever be. It had it’s faults, like storing everything in flat files and being kind of ugly, but it was very functional.

A couple of years ago they started on a rewriting of Gallery from the ground up, based on a mySQL backend for speed and all CSS’ed up for prettiness. It’s taken a while, but the code is finally ready for prime-time so I moved overt’s gallery over to the new version. Such excitement! It looks exactly the same! But it should give a lot more flexibility in the future, plus I get to stick these nifty “random photo” blocks everywhere now (see right). Let me know if something looks borked to you. I know that viewing comments on pics still kind of sucks, I’m thinking about writing something myself to fix it up.

We just stumbled in a little while ago from an amazing trip to New York. I didn’t post any updates after the first day because, basically, we were always either out or asleep. Soon pictures will be posted with the full narration of our adventures.

Also, the new server is live (whee!). You might notice an improvement in performance (I do, anyway). Let me know if anything seems weird.

So, our year with Servepath (SUCK!) is almost over, and Ali found a great place to colo in Michigan, so we’re going to set ourselves up with a little server there and hopefully things will work out better. It’s actually not all that little–the new box is a 2.8GHz P4 with a gig of RAM and 240GB of space… quite a step up from our current 20GB. I imagine the switch over to the new server will be sometime in the next couple of weeks. Nothing should change for anyone using overt, but there might be a few problems here or there. Just let me know if there is any trouble.

So, I just recently switched my website from postnuke over to WordPress. As part of the process, I wrote a simple PHP script to convert all of the entries from the postnuke site over to WordPress. Although postnuke is a pretty heavy-duty CMS, there might be a few people out there who will make the same switch, so I decided to clean up the script a little and post it on the site for anyone who needs it. You can get it here. I put it under the GPL, so you can probably use it with no worries. If you do use it, send me an email or post a comment or something. I should add that it would be generous to say that I’m a novice at PHP. I’m sure there’s plenty I did wrong writing the script, but it works (for me), and that was enough.

Update 12 August 2005: I should have mentioned that this script was written for WordPress 1.2, and will require some massaging to work with 1.5. Check the comments for more info.

Here it is. It’s still not totally done, but close enough that I wanted to transfer all the old posts over. Please let me know if you encounter any errors or explosions or whatever. And yes, I’m going to change the pic up top…

I’m working on putting together a reasonable stylesheet for WordPress. Once I do, I’m going to try to get all my content migrated over from postnuke, which has proven to be unwieldy in the end. Hopefully I’ll gain some flexibility and simplicity with the move.

One of the interesting things about running a server and owning a domain is getting all sorts of spam trying to sell you services promoting your site or brand, or offering to design logos and websites for you. This morning I got the most ridiculous of the spams I’ve seen yet: a spam offering spam services. It’s good to know that, if need be, I can send 3 million emails an hour. For your edification:

BULK ISP –DEDICATED SERVER
Providing you with 100% total bulk email and hosting solutions

BULK ISP offers:
Bandwidth: 1.5 M/S Upload and Download
Unlimited Email addresses “POP 3 Boxes”
Host up to twenty of your own websites
You can use it also as an smtp server to send your email
80 Gig hard drive Pentium 4 was build to send millions of emails
Send up to 10 million Opt-in emails a day 

Guarantee 30 days of service month to month no contract

FREE 24 hours 7 days a week technical support

Full access to the server using terminal service or Pc, anywhere or any other      remote access software you prefer

Set up time is two hours

The server comes with the following:
MOTHERBOARD:  Intel 
PROCESSOR:  PENTIUM®-4  1.8GHz 512K CACHE
MEMORY:  512MB PC2100 DDR ECC REGISTERED
HARD DRIVE:  IBM 80.0 GB EIDE HD 7200RPM
CASE: Super Micro 2 U Rackmount
CD-ROM DRIVE: C52X max.
OPERATING SYSTEM: WINDOWS 2000 SERVER / WINDOWS 2003 SERVER/ Red hat 7.3/ mandrake / or whatever OS you prefer

You will also receive two years free membership with www.ewasher.us to clean your emails  

Prices are as low as $2000 a month with $100.00 set up fee.  Please call or email me when you are ready to begin.

150,000(messages)/hour – $1,500.00   total     
300,000/hour – $3,000.00                 24/7 Free Phone and email technical support
600, 000/hour – $6,000.00
2 million/hour – $12,000.00
3 million/hour – $16,000.00   (UNLIMITED CAPACITY LICENSE)

EMAIL LISTS
We also offer you a 100% guaranteed deliverable semi opt-in email list.  Our emails go through ewasher to ensure their delivery.  If any of the emails bounce back we will replace them with emails that are deliverable free of charge.  You will receive 30 million emails for only $5000.00.  These will be yours to own.

If you’re reading this, then I’ve succeeded in moving www.overt.org over to the new server! Also, gallery now lives here, too. I’m trying to incrementally move things over to avoid any big explosions. In the next few days I’m going to do the trickiest switch: moving everyone’s email over. I’ll make sure to let everyone who uses overt for email know before that happens, though.

So, the time has finally come for me to move overt to another server, one I actually pay for. I ended up picking ServePath (www.servepath.com) for hosting, and it seems to be working out well so far.

The process of moving all the mail and web and what not over to the new server is somewhat arduous, which is why I left a couple of months for it to happen. It’s been consuming a lot of my free time recently, but it’s really a kind of recreation for me anyway (no, really).

When the time comes to actually make the switch, I’ll figure out a plan for letting everyone know about any possible downtime.

Yesterday in the midafternoon, you may have noticed that overt was unavailable for maybe an hour or so. This was actually not do to the DNS change as I had warned, but rather to the fact that the breaker that overt was plugged into was tripped. This meant that the machine had to be rebooted (thank you, george). It’s interesting to note that before the power was cut, overt had been up and running without a reboot for almost 250 days.

I’m still waiting for the domain name transfer to finish up. I don’t expect there will be any hiccup in name resolution, but if you notice some funky behaviour, maybe wait an hour or two before freaking out.

After over three and a half years of service, my home-brew blog-like site was really starting to show its age. So, just like my old picture site, I’ve decided to retire it in favor of a open-source package: postnuke.

Since I’m leaving to go to grad school and abandoning all my friends, i’m going to try to keep overt updated more frequently with what’s happening in my life. I’ve also got the peer pressure of all my friends’ well-maintained blogs to egg me on. So, we’ll see whether this ends up being the last post for another half year…

I’ve finally given up on my hand-written picture software and moved to a GPL’d PHP picture gallery called, appropriately, “gallery.” Now you can add comments, sort pictures and albums, and all the pictures load faster. To see, go to gallery.overt.org.

I have added server-side image resizing in the pictures area. What does this mean for you? It means two things:

1. Dynamically generated thumbnails! You no longer have to download the whole picture when you are viewing thumbnails in the event view. You’ll just get little thumbnails instead.
2. Selectable viewing resolutions. Now, you can view a picture at several resolutions, not just the one at which it was taken. By default, images will appear at 800×600.

I hope this makes things easier for low-bandwidth users.

I finally got around to reorganizing my pictures into “events.” You can now see all of the pictures that I’ve been putting of posting (since last September) on the pictures page

Ship of Fools has recently passed two milestones:
10 years of CPU time and our second member with over a year of CPU time logged.

overt.org now has a delicious, nutritious quote of the day at the top of the sidebar. yum!