I realized the Monty Hall PHP program I had written didn’t really have any kind of description of what you should do on the page. So I went back through my blog and found the description and fixed that sucker up. So if you went there in the past and didn’t get what you were supposed to do, go ahead and give it another shot.

I also fixed my blogroll because a bug from Mauricio’s blog had been causing it to choke. That is now fixed as well and you can go ahead and check that page again.

You may have noticed a new addition to the top of my page. I’ve decided to add in some Google ads to my page. Nothing else will change, I’m just trying to help earn a little extra cash. I’m new to the AdSense program, so be patient with me if things look weird or ugly until I get the hang of it. For now, it looks like they are showing PSAs, which they show if there aren’t any ads to serve up. Thanks guys.

In Sept I had 12,106 visitors to my server! That’s the highest yet!

I had an errant center tag because of wordpress’ wysiwyg. I wish they would put it back to the way it was!

there are some rendering problems with my blog right now and it is putting the sidebar - usually on the right side here, all the way at the bottom - very annoying. Just wanted to let you know where it is.

This server is now running on a FreeBSD box instead of Fedora Core 1. It’s also 1 GHz instead of 300Mhz. Man, I have gone from being scared to install anything that wasn’t an RPM package a few years ago to where yesterday I compiled a custom kernel for the first time ever!! That is a right of passage all free and open source hackers go through on their way to fully grokking the OS. It always sounded a bit scary and risky to me - recompiling the one program that determines how EVERYTHING on your computer talks to the hardware. But I did it after just two tries! This whole experience has been a lot of fun and now we FINALLY have enough space on the server to allow the members to post all they need to and I can post more screenshots, pictures, and civ4 save files!

Well, I’ll tell you one thing - FreeBSD does NOT hold your hand like Linux does. This has had both frustrating and enlightening effects. On the one hand, it’s been very annoying to have to deal with all manner of config files I never had to deal with before. Apache and MySQL didn’t just work as soon as I compiled them. Apache needed me to change the server’s name to an name actually resolvable and MySQL needed me to chown the directory it had installed to. Webalizer wasn’t automatically installed and I had to manually configure it.

I now have a FreeBSD 6.1 computer which will eventually take over the job of the server. It could take anywhere from a few hours to a few days to get everything set up correctly, but I’ll be sure to make a post when it’s ready.

Danielle’s job is getting rid of some old computers - all of which are way, way better than my current server. My current server is a P II 333 Hz computer!!! And it only has a 4 GB hard drive, most of which is full! By contrast, the cheapest computer they’re selling at Danielle’s work is an 800 Mhz machine and we’re trying for a 1 Ghz machine! The hard drives on all the computers were 20 GB. Given its track record, I will be switching over from a Fedora Core 1 server to a FreeBSD 6.0-series server. I’ve been itchin’ to do this ever since I first read about the BSDs and their legendary status in the server world. Also, I’ll be able to implement a nice clean server as this server was originally a desktop install subsequently made into a server. Thus it’s cluttered with a bunch of useless stuff. I’ll also be able to implement file quotas from the beginning for those whose sites I am hosting here. It’ll be a fun little adventure for me, and a chance to start with the right intentions. Here’s hoping everyone didn’t already bid out the computers!

Sorry for the outage of the server - we had a power outage here last night. Everything should be back up now.