Update

Yes, I haven’t been post­ing much lately. I have been busy at one level and lazy at a dif­fer­ent level. I have been shut-in most of the time due to all the snow and no vehi­cle that I can drive in it. The Mustang peeks out the garage and just refuses to move. As such, I should be able to be post­ing more. But alas, I haven’t — thus, the claim to lazi­ness. But let me tell you what I have been doing a bit.

First, I am still help­ing the research team at Flatland so have been involved in the Bible stud­ies that appear on that site (http://www.flatlandchurch.com/teaching). For exam­ple, I wrote the prose part of this week’s stud­ies. Jim, our illus­tri­ous leader of the team, wrote the ques­tions. He is really good at that.

Second, I have been work­ing on client sites. Troubleshooting both code and server con­fig­u­ra­tions, new code, fix­ing old are all a part of it. I enjoy this but seem to work twice as much on it as I charge. I need to work on being bet­ter at my esti­ma­tions, both cost and time.

Finally, I have been work­ing on my own server. I am mov­ing every­thing even­tu­ally I believe to RackSpace Cloud (RSC). I find that it gives me the free­dom to make changes with­out wor­ry­ing about knock­ing my server off-line for days at a time. Currently, my server is located in a place I have no phys­i­cal access. If I mess some­thing up to the point it won’t boot, I can’t fix it.

At RSC, if I mess some­thing up, I can restore the entire server within min­utes to the state it was in prior to mess­ing it up… at least restore it to the stage it was at when the server was last backed up. I will need to work on mak­ing sure that I have proper pro­ce­dures in place to back up data before major changes that could require a restora­tion so I don’t loose things. But, I believe this is a good thing to do.

I am also split­ting my sin­gle server into two spe­cial­ized server con­fig­u­ra­tions, one for web host­ing, one for e-mail. This allows me to allo­cate resources bet­ter for each pur­pose and even install only that which I need for each server so that they are end­ing up sig­nif­i­cantly dif­fer­ent. But that is ok, it makes each one really good at what it is sup­pose to do. Also, because of the way RSC works, I can allo­cate server resources dif­fer­ently. More RAM for one or the other (and cor­re­spond­ing drive space and CPU power).

One of the things that I have wanted to do for a while was to learn how to setup and use PostgreSQL instead of MySQL. This I have been doing with the mail server. PostgreSQL gives me more secu­rity of mind and now that I am learn­ing how it works, it isn’t as daunt­ing as it first seemed. It cer­tainly is dif­fer­ent than MySQL but not really any more dif­fi­cult… maybe even eas­ier in some ways.

Also, the move to RackSpace may open up other oppor­tu­ni­ties. I need to increase the amount of income I am mak­ing to help out our recov­ery from the finan­cial dis­as­ter we have found our­selves in. The move to RSC may allow me to offer addi­tional ser­vices to clients, new and old.

And so, although I have been quiet, it doesn’t mean I am dead, just preoccupied.