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The Thin Line gets real hosting

RickyRobinson.id.au and The Thin Line have been moved off the computers in my bedroom to a real webhosting service. There’s a number of reasons for this. First, my blogging software has a memory leak in it somewhere, which necessitates the restarting of Tomcat every so often. I think the problem lies in the way I’ve configured Tomcat (probably with the database connection pooling stuff) rather than in the code itself. In times past, I might have had the time and the actual desire to track down this problem; I have neither of those two things right now. I’d rather be writing blog entries than debugging my crappy blog software. :-) Second, I’ll be moving house soon. I’ll be taking my workstation with me, which has the Tomcat install on it, but leaving the firewall, which was doubling as the web server. So my blog configuration was actually distributed across two machines, and separating the computers would completely break my blog. Now you’re wondering why on Earth I had such a convoluted setup. Well, when Tomcat was running on the firewall/gateway, which is a very low end machine, my blog site loaded very, very slowly. It improved enormously when I switched it over to my workstation, which just goes to show that network communication is by no means always the bottleneck in a network/distributed application (requests for my blog were still coming through Apache on the gateway, and were forwarded to Tomcat on my workstation via the Apache JServ Protocol). I suppose I could have moved Apache to my workstation too and just done port forwarding on the firewall, but for whatever reason I didn’t go down that track. Anyway, the long and the short of it is that the process of moving would mean my website and my blog would have been offline for quite some time. Lastly, I’ve given up trying to update my blogging system with the latest cool feature. I got as far as adding an RSS feed and pinging Technorati whenever a new post is added, but where’s the commenting system and support for trackback and so on and so forth?

So, I got myself some web hosting, transfered my web site to the web host, installed WordPress and then imported my blog via RSS. For now I’m just using one of the WordPress templates. I might try to revert to the gray look later on.

Hopefully your browsers and aggregators are being automatically redirected to the appropriate URLs. Just in case the feed redirection isn’t working for you, the RSS feed can now be found here.

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Engaged

It is with much elation that I announce that Karen and I are engaged, and due to be married next year, probably in mid-April. We’ve been engaged since our Queen’s Birthday weekend holiday in Noosa, but I delayed announcing it here so we could tell all our friends and family first. Needless to say, we’re both looking forward to April next year!

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Blair, the metrosexual

I found this article about the amount of money Tony Blair spends on make up each year highly amusing.

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It’s been a slow Saturday

So…

I Am A: Lawful Good Human Ranger Bard

Alignment:
Lawful Good characters are the epitome of all that is just and good. They believe in order and governments that work for the benefit of all, and generally do not mind doing direct work to further their beliefs.

Race:
Humans are the ‘average’ race. They have the shortest life spans, and because of this, they tend to avoid the racial prejudices that other races are known for. They are also very curious and tend to live ‘for the moment’.

Primary Class:
Rangers are the defenders of nature and the elements. They are in tune with the Earth, and work to keep it safe and healthy.

Secondary Class:
Bards are the entertainers. They sing, dance, and play instruments to make other people happy, and, frequently, make money. They also tend to dabble in magic a bit.

Deity:
Mielikki is the Neutral Good goddess of the forest and autumn. She is also known as the Lady of the Forest, and is the Patron of Rangers. Her followers are devoted to nature, and believe in the positive and outreaching elements of it. They use light armor, and a variety of weapons suitable for hunting, which they are quite skilled at. Mielikki’s symbol is a unicorn head.

Find out What D&D Character Are You?, courtesy of NeppyMan (e-mail)

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Guus Hiddink

One of the world’s most widely respected football coaches, Guus Hiddink, has been appointed as the new coach of the Australian national team. Hiddink, a dutchman, has twice taken teams to the World Cup semi-finals: the Netherlands in 1998 and, more remarkably, South Korea in 2002. He has now been charged with enormous task of guiding Australia into the 2006 World Cup, which means overcoming the fifth placed South American qualifier in November, assuming Australia first manages to beat the Solomon Islands in September. Hiddink’s first game as manager of Australia will be the first leg of the playoff with the Solomon Islands.

Until November, Hiddink will share his time between the club team PSV Eindhoven and the Australian national team. In last season’s European Champions League, the world’s top club competition, Hiddink was at the helm as PSV made it to the semi-finals of that competition, and so nearly overcame AC Milan to make it to the final.

In Guus Hiddink, the FFA have appointed the best man they could have. But now Hiddink faces a challenge the like of which he has never faced before. Let’s hope he can do what his predecessors could not.

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Random observations

Suffering

Ecthelion says:

Suffering is cause by desire. Stop desiring to waste you money on sparkly stuff and you’ll be a lot happier!

A contrary point of view is that one ought to spend all one’s money, so that one has none left, and only then will one be happy because it is only then that the really important things in life become apparent. I leave it to someone else to test this theory.

Of course, Master Yoda, whom is totally unconcerned with money, would say:

Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.

Ecthelion et al, pleez bewear tha Monkey King; not a fliverous fret.

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Random’s new coat

Karen made this cute new coat for Random. Unfortunately the material didn’t prove to be the sturdiest choice, as Random’s already managed to pull a few threads. I suspect there might be a corduroy coat in the making soon.

Randoms's new coat

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Updated page

I updated the People page on my web site. Basically, somebody finally got a web site. I was forbidden, under pain of death, to link directly to the new web site directly from my blog, but this seems like a neat little loophole. Anyway, make sure you scroll all the way down to the bottom of the People page to find the new link. :-)

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Blog Survey

Take the MIT Weblog Survey