Fake’s Tank

It’s not just me that isn’t picture perfect (though it fits so well with my grunge ways! haha), your favorite pop artists also need touch ups.

When installing Windows on my iMac using BootCamp, I deleted my whole Mac hard drive ending up with XP taking up 100% of my computer.

I had the preconceived notion that BootCamp doesn’t spoof Microsoft’s installer into thinking there is only one hard-drive of the manually allocated space, nor does BootCamp somehow manages to protect OSX’s files using special user file rights. Windows Setup found 3 partitions (wtf?) that I went on deleting carelessly. This is really my fault in a obvious lack of attention to what I was doing.

Fortunately, I’m the happy owner of Time Capsule and Leopard so my whole Mac was backed up to the minute. Thing is, in all the excitement that comes with mistakingly wiping off your drive, I had forgot I could use that backup.

In a nice implementation of their solution, Apple noticed I had a Time Capsule running during Leopard’s installation process and asked me to use the backup it had found. Things went very smoothly afterwards. After a long wait, all my stuff was back where it had been before my mistake. I had to change the file system from NTFS to whatever Mac uses previously though.

Apart for it not working wirelessly with my Xbox 360 (which in the end is Microsoft’s fault) and sometimes having connection hiccups I really only have good words for my Time Capsule.

I nearly lost the rights to The Music Tank’s domain name. I tried to transfer the dot com from Domain Registry of Canada to Go Daddy but I got caught with a very bad timing and my subscription had ended before the transfer was completed.

Fortunately, DROC’s customer server service allowed me to renew the dot com and gave me a price discount for the trouble. Ironically, the lowered yearly fee for the domain is still more expensive than Go Daddy’s (without including the Diggnation code). However, I’m just happy I didn’t lose The Music Tank’s branding which I have already worked 9 years on (no matter how successful it has been).

While registering on Go Daddy, I also purchased Francois Faubert.com as my portfolio’s domain name. It’s so cheap that it would be crazy for someone working full time in the web design business not to do it.

I guess it means I’m old enough now to assume my real name and not necessarily exclusively live behind my accustomed “Fake” nickname.

A friend working for Cornerstone Promotion sent me this clip a few days back, check it out it’s disturbingly funny :

Not often in my web life have I been happy with my hosting provider. I think I’ve tried a different one every year since I began playing around HTML.

The more I dig into the services offered by my shared MediaTemple box, the more I’m happy to pay the 20$ a month.

For example, I’ve been looking for a free place for me to store my projects using svn for a while now. I had found Unfuddle, which seemed like a decent service for the kind of work I needed to version. However, I needed to be able to create more than one projects.

Then I remembered MediaTemple gave access to both ssh connections and svn commands, even on shared box. I set up two different projects in about an hour earlier today with great ease because I had some experience with the basic commands and from the documentation MediaTemple provides on their website.

Neat.

I think the worst part of the whole host transfer deal was the relatively old age of my last MySQL backup. I always keep updated versions of my PHP files close by, may it only be because I am always working on something new, so at least all the programming logic has migrated successfully.

However, all the tables and database structure I had built stayed with Abnormis. Hopefully my old server will come back online so I can get some of the content back, but I am really just interested in how I had built my tables. I don’t even remember most lengths and data types of the columns. Even my PHP source code can’t give me much hints at the moment.

At least this morning I was able to reconnect the user table. This means future posters and tankers can already join the Tank… and do nothing afterward. Hopefully I’ll have the news working by early afternoon.

The moral of the story is that a backup, when you are developing, is always too old.

And damn do I need to fix the transparent issues with IE 6 as soon as possible.

I have just switched my hosting plan from Abnormis’s to MediaTemple’s. Four days of downtime (therefore breaking the 99-plus % guaranteed uptime period) was too long for my hard-earned dollars.

I intend to describe how great Media Temple’s service is in another post, how it’s the best shared-hosting package I could experience, and how happy I am with the transfer in another post. Right now, I mainly want to warn that lost content will be popping back as I regain access to more recent backups from the old server.

These delayed recoveries will have an impact on both this blog and The Music Tank.

There’s a video online of an appearance of the people doing most of the voices on The Simpsons: inside the actors. It’s very cool.

Fake’s Tank now uses the Hemingway theme. You’ve probably seen variants of this theme on the web already but I’ll be modifying the looks soon customize the look of the website. I just needed a base template to save time on conception. It’s much easier to modify a CSS file than copy/pasting all the Wordpress functions into a new template after all.

I’m also thinking of removing the band hosting service on The Music Tank as there’s absolutely no way I can compete against MySpace (may it only be bandwidth-wise). Nonetheless, I might try to make a CMS out of the existing code not to make it a complete waste of time and energy. We’ll see in time how it morphs.

The priority however will be completing the ROTE game in a decent amount of time. Already, I’ve come to the conclusion I’d really need help making the game’s graphics. I can give you details of where the game is headed if you want to share your graphical talent with me by drawing isometric tiles for the game (or by drawing the sprites). Drop me a line if you are interested.

Like most people on the internet, I’ve tried a few times to start a blog. I tried before blogs even existed and LiveJournal was still better than MySpace.

However as a professional web designer, I see many of my contemporaries use a blogging system to distribute their knowledge to the rest of the community. While I am aware I’m not quite part of any so-called community I know I have learned a lot from past designing experiences. I just want to share what I might know to kind of give back to those who shared their knowledge to the web designing community.

Like an hermit, linked by a mere link somewhere on The Music Tank, this blog is going to be — I hope — enjoyable to a few wanderers.

Again, I do wonder how long it will take before I stop updating