Alden Bates' Weblog

After a comment on my entry about the weird redirects I was experiencing, I contacted my web host to get them to check out the server. The end result was that tetrap.com and its associated sites were all moved to another server. So hopefully that should deal with the redirect problem, but I'm keeping an eye on it just in case.

The only major difference between the two servers is that the newer one is running a newer version of PHP. The only thing that'll have any chance of affecting is Zeus Blog - none of the rest of the site uses PHP.

I'd like to give a big thanks to the support team at Host for Web for their help!

A little over a month ago, Transformers Animated started its third season on Cartoon Network over in the States. Also around this time, the Transformers Wiki was experiencing some downtime problems, apparently due to the amount of traffic it was getting. So the fellow hosting the site decided to upgrade the aging copy of MediaWiki powering the Wiki.

Unfortunately the attempt to do so corrupted the database. No problem! Just restore the database from the last nightly backup! Except the nightly backups, it appears, had never actually worked, so the Wiki ended up with a copy of the database from some eight months prior, shortly before it split from Wikia.

Wailing and gnashing of teeth ensued. Eight months of work lost!

However a month later and I think the Wiki is well on the road to recovery. Hundreds, if not thousands of person-hours on the part of the community, spent saving over eight thousand articles out of Google's cache and tidying the results of the conversion script, restoring templates and reloading images. Time spent due to a moment's carelessness and a lack of proper backups.

So, if you've been wondering why this blog has lain quiet for the last month or so, that's partly why.

Gee, blink and half the month goes by!

Good Monday was good because it brought me The Next Doctor on Prime (which I'd already seen) and Planet of the Dead, which I hadn't. The problem with Doctor Who doing a year with just 4 specials in is that there's not as much lee-way when you get a duff story. Planet of the Dead, the Easter special, is a bit duff, and it's all we're getting until some vague date in November.

Spoilers follow...

Continue reading "The Next Doctor/Planet of the Dead"