Akatombo Web Log

Friday, October 06, 2006

When Good Disks Go Bad

Apologies to anyone who tried to access the site in the last 24 hours or so.  The hard disk on our database server pooped out, and though we had a good backup, it was a very time consuming process to get back up and going, mostly because the disk that was slowly dying was the boot disk of the system.  We unfortunately had no raid in place and so I had to reconstruct the server setup completely from the backup which is, by the way, not as fun as it may sound.  At any rate, things are back up and going and we plan to have things running on a raid once we finish migrating to a new server—tentatively scheduled for the weekend after next.  In all my time working with computers I have been extremely fortunate and this is the first hard disk I’ve ever had fail on me, so it was quite a surprise, and I learned a lot in dealing with it.  Thanks a lot to friend and guru Tod McQuillin for assistance when I got stuck, stupid, and/or frozen in sheer Unix-induced terror.

Please let us know by e-mail or in the comments if you encounter any strangeness.  I need some sleep now.

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Podcasting!

Though the audio quality and many other aspects of the first episode leave a lot to be desired, I hereby proudly announce Episode 1 of the new podcast that will be hosted on the Akatombo Media website.  The hosts are yours truly, and Stuart Woodward.  Topics will likely include Japan, technology, and making things (tinkering) though nothing is set in stone.  We don’t even have an official name for the show yet.

The fact that we are able to release the podcast now is a very happy tribute to the success of our (read Akatombo Media’s) work in other areas.  Both CEATEC JAPAN 2006 and JISSO PROTEC 2006 are currently underway running on the specialty cms product we have designed for managing the websites of exhibitions.  The CEATEC website especially is running on multiple web servers with incredibly high traffic, but our cms has been running nearly flawlessly—allowing me to spend the time that I need to be on call and immediately available to solve problems, working on editing audio and converting an iWeb generated podcast site into a temporary home for our podcast.  If any of you happen to be involved in an Exhibition or Convention type organization and are interested in talking to us about how our cms product might help you, please don’t hesitate to contact us and we’ll answer any questions you may have and put you in touch with our sales agent.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the podcast and please comment with your suggestions for the show or any problems that you find.  We may even do a proper intro next time.

Incidentally, the RSS feed for the podcast is separate from the normal feeds for the site, so to subscribe to the podcast in your aggregator, use http://www.akatombo.com/podcast/rss.xml or Click here to subscribe in iTunes.

UPDATE: The iTunes Subscription url was wrong.  Please try again if you had encountered the error before.