At approximately 12:15 am this morning, January 2, the registration transfer I initiated last week, completed. Along with the DNS changes I made then, this meant my site now resolved to the new server at Blue Host.
I hope to post a much longer, more detailed version of the story soon, but for now it is enough to sit back and bask in the warm LCD glow of my site in its new home. Along the way I created two new sites, backed up several hundred megabytes of data (several times), researched dozens of minimalist Wordpress themes, and fretted endlessly about the details. Being a nerd meant I had to have a project plan, and I created one in Excel and used it throughout the process to keep track of all the little details involved.
The current theme is only a starting point. Over the coming weeks I want to mold it into my own look and feel. Some of pages that used to make up my site will reappear, others probably not. One new feature that I am excited about is the introduction of tags to my site. If a category is a large, fairly statically defined grouping of posts, then a tag is a fluid, cross-cutting keyword. You can see all the tags I’ve created so far by clicking on the Tags page link in the sidebar.
Comments have also returned to zanshin.net, after a long hiatus. Leave me a note, please.
Zanshin.net is moving to a new host this weekend. The DNS change has been initiated and should complete in the a day or so. (For the uninitiated, Domain Name Servers provide the translation between the URL you type (zanshin.net) and the actual IP address of the site. Moving to a new host requires that the whole hierarchy of DNS be updated with the new information. This can take 24-48 hours.)
Since I am also changing registrars, there is a lock-out period where changes can’t happen. Domain theft has caused the registrars to insert numerous layers of protection to insure that your site is not stolen from you. That lock-out period is what will complete early next year.
Hopefully all you, dear reader, will see, is a change in the site’s presentation from the old visual format, to a new (temporary) format. Should there be a brief outage, please come back later, and hopefully I’ll have all the tubes plugged in and working properly again.
Much to my chagrin I must admit that I had never read the following editorial before today. Sibylle pointed it out to me and I am pleased to present it here for you.
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus
In 1897, Frank Church, an editorial writer for The New York Sun, wrote this response to a letter from a young reader. It became one of the most famous editorials in American history.
We take pleasure in answering at once and thus prominently the communication below, expressing at the same time our great gratification that its faithful author is numbered among the friends of The Sun:
“Dear Editor: ‘I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, ‘If you see it in The Sun, it’s so.’ “Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus? “Virginia O’Hanlon”
Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The external light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.
Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.
You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.
No Santa Claus! Thank God! He lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.
www.kansascity.com | 12/23/2007 | Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus
Over the past couple weeks I have become increasingly aware that fewer and fewer people you meet say, “Merry Christmas.” While my interactions with other members of the public, or store clerks, is by no means a representative sample, it seems like we are suddenly afraid to say the two words that have always (in my experience) been said this time of year.
That it appears we are allowing fear over offending others to curtail our expression of joy and happiness at this time of year saddens me. Rather than tip-toe around the delicate sensibilities of others (or worse, the imagined delicate sensibilities) shouldn’t we ask them to learn to take care of themselves? If society is going to allow itself to be molded and shaped by the most fearful among us, then I fear our society is headed in the wrong direction.
When I say “Merry Christmas” to you or anyone else I meet I am not trying to impose a set of beliefs, or dictate the way one should feel or act. If the recipient of such a greeting prefers not to have “Merry Christmas” said to them, they should tell me that, calmly and rationally. Tell me what you would have me say instead. But don’t expect me to not say what pleases me.
So I say to you all, Merry Christmas. And I wish you and your families, friends, and loved ones the very best.
There is a new type of weblog available, called a tumblr or tumble blog. You can set one up in just a couple of minutes by visiting the tumblr home page. I did yesterday, and already I’ve got several postings.
Rather than leave the choices up to you, tumblr has specific posting types (links, video, audio, quotes, pictures, text, or chat) that you can add content through. There’s even a handy bookmark that you can use to popup a window while visiting a site you want to reference on your tumble blog. Just click the bookmark, and then add your note to the captured content and click save. The stock templates are decent as well. You could have a blog up and running, for free, in less than 5 minutes.
Read more about it here: Geek to Live.
After waiting a week for the “losing” domain registrar to relinquish their hold on a domain I am transferring, I was able to take the next step in migrating from my old host to my new one.
Domain fraud is apparently a real issue, as all the registrars have elaborate safety checks and balances built in to almost any transaction. While this a good it is a bit cumbersome at times. In order to move the And If You Did Know? domain I had to request a password from the old registrar and provide that to the new registrar as a way of establishing my bona fides. What I didn’t anticipate, although in hindsight this made perfect sense, was that I would be prevented from altering the name server information once the transfer process was underway. Had I added the new name servers to the list before initiating the transfer, I would have been done. By initiating the transfer I was locked out from updating the name servers.
The losing registrar held the transfer in limbo for a five days before actually releasing the domain. I was contacted and given a chance to refute the transfer request on the off chance that someone was trying to steal my domain registration. While I appreciated the care being taken to protect me, I found myself chaffing a bit as I had to wait.
This morning a quick dig of the domain showed that the old name server information was gone. I was able to complete the transfer process at the new registrar, and now am in the process of linking that domain to the source folder on my new server. Hopefully the site will be up and running by the time you read this posting.
Only two tasks remain to complete the migration: moving zanshin.net to its new home and establishing a domain for Sibylle’s profession site and transferring her site to its new home. With a long weekend coming up I am hoping to have everything moved and on the new server by early next week.
Last night I took the first major step towards moving all the sites I own or manage to Blue Host. Having learned from my first attempt at signing up, that the account name would be composed of characters from the initial domain name, I was faced with a bit of an issue. Of the three domains I wanted to move or create at Blue Host, none decomposed into an account name I was happy with.
So I created a new domain. I am now the proud owner of markhnichols.com.
When I first registered zanshin.net, nearly twelve years ago, I had toyed with the idea of a domain using my name. Now, I have a true vanity site. For now that site will be an online copy of my professional resume.
Now that I have an account at Blue Host it is time to start migrating the sites from Pair.com to their new home. The hidden advantage to creating a new site as the first under the account is that moving existing ones can be done leisurely. I can copy the contents and set everything up well before transferring the domain and updating the name server records. As a result, there shouldn’t be any down time as the sites move.
NB: There is nothing wrong with Pair in my view. I have been very happy with their services for a long time. My site has never been down, and on those few occasions that I needed help, they were prompt and courteous. My reasons for moving are purely monetary. I can host four sites (and more) at Blue Host for a year, for roughly what 6 month’s hosting at Pair cost.
It seems that the furor over the Beacon advertising framework in Facebook as finally reached a tipping point. Reversing an earlier statement, Mark Zuckerberg has apologized and Facebook now allows members to completely opt out of the Beacon “feature.”
I’m not sure if this is enough given the negative attention this has brought the service.
The new “opt out” settings only determine whether information collected by Beacon is displayed on Facebook, not whether that information is collected. In other words, your activities on participating sites is still collected and sent to Facebook’s servers. Facebook hasn’t jumped the shark at all, they are about to be devoured by a shark of their own creation.
I’m out and I intended to stay out.
Today marked the start of the 2007-2008 Car Hockey Season here in Kansas City. Freezing rain followed by a few inches of snow fall start this morning. By the time I left work at two o’clock, the roads were slick if not icy. Most people on the highway were driving a cautious 25 or 30 miles per hour. Not members of the Idiot Squad.
The Idiot Squad are all driving 4x4s or SUVs. (NB: Not all owners of urban Panzers are members of the Idiot Squad, and there are a few dunderheads in regular cars too.) What the pilots of these behemoth vehicles seems to have forgotten is that no matter how fancy their anti-skid, variable-assist-traction-controlled, anti-lock brake systems are, there is a finite limit to their adhesion on the road.
Sure, four-wheel drive gets you going faster than two. And being higher than most vehicles gets you about the spray of semi-frozen slush being tossed out from under neighboring cars tires. So you drive faster, slaloming through traffic with imagined impunity.
Until you need to stop, that is.
Then you discover, too late, that once you exceed the amount of traction you vehicle has, nothing in the world will stop you. Except other cars, the cement barrier in between you and on coming traffic, or the ditch off to the side of the road.
The only accident I saw on my commute home today was a large 4x4 pickup that lost traction and t-boned the center divider.
Do the rest of us a favor and slow down.
The first step in my site migration project is to backup all my data, all my content, everything. Since my hosting platform is Linux based, this was surprisingly easy.
First I issued this command:
$ tar cvf archive.tar *Next I compressed this archive using gzip. Like so:
$ gzip archive.tarThe resulting file, archive.tar.gzip, was then copied to my local computer.
Some parts of this site, and parts of the other sites I have hosted over the years at Pair, have made use of MySQL databases; I’ve used various referrer and site monitoring tools that all required relational databases for support. Before leaving Pair I want to back up the contents and structure of these data stores.
Using MySQL on my laptop I can issue a command in this format:
$ mysqldump --add-drop-table -h <hostname> -u <username> -p <databasename> | bzip2 -c database_yyyymmdd.bak.sql.bz2Once all 10 MySQL databases were dumped and compressed using this command I had a complete back up of my site: the presentation (HTML/CSS) files in the public_html directory and the underlying databases that feed the various sites their content.