It looks like the site can now run again with PHP 4. This means that everything should work again as expected.

If you didn’t notice the site went down.

It’s “only” eleven hours that I work on it without moving my ass from the chair. I’ve done all sort of crazy stuff, messed with mysql, started to upload chunks of an old backup to see what exactly broke it.

Nothing. The site just didn’t load. Zero error messages and a blank page that didn’t even refresh without shutting down the browser entirely. I thought it was a security issue since I don’t update Drupal from a few months but now I believe the problem is different.

I deleted everything and put up a backup taken 15 days ago. The site was still broken.

Now I think, after 10000001 experiments and endless upload/downloads/dumps/resets, that something doesn’t work at Dreamhost.

If you can read this now it’s NOT because I nailed down the problem. This is an half broken backup that has at least all my entries working (not the comments, the newest ones aren’t lost and should return as I update the DB). It’s nowhere different from the version that didn’t work. What I did was to change the configuration from php 4 to php 5 and CGI.

And it seems to work even if I cannot pass the right parameters through the .htaccess (like to keep alive the sessions and cookies).

So expect the site to not work. I hope someone at Dreamhost figures out what stopped to work or I’ll have to start building the PHP locally. And I really don’t want to mess with that.

Enjoy this temporary version.

EDIT – The site is back to its last backup and “should” work. If it doesn’t it could be because I’m messing with it or because I just cannot be lucky and more problems must arise. Since it is using another configuration the sesssions will be messed and the site will log out registered users after half an hour. If Dreamhost doesn’t figure out the problem it will stay. I just cannot do anything about it if I cannot pass the parameters through the .htaccess

64.124.85.71 – become.com
65.54.188.16 – msnbot.msn.com

Two hours hammering my poor site. The first one for the most part.

Are you having fun?

There were some problems with the database today producing errors while using the search function and other actions. They should be solved now.

The search function is also not reliable anyway since it misses to check many entries. I’ll need to rebuild the index. Someday in a distant future.

Maybe it’s time to change my e-mails:

Who will pay me back the time I’ll waste to skim through that mess?

I turned on my PC again after a week chasing other interests but I’m thinking to extend my vacation.

It feels like going back to meaningless dicussions about an industry stuck at the Stone Age and that hasn’t anymore anything to say that doesn’t revolve around a flashing sign: We whore for money.

It’s all so arid, repetitive, emptied, muffled. I’m starting to think that the best medicine for this industry could be about “stop caring”. Stop giving it an attention it doesn’t deserve.

P.S.
I really do not have a clue about how some users managed to get access to add entries to the site.
EDIT- Got it, it happens through the forum. I have to figure out how to define those permissions.

I’m out for a week to chase other interests.

I “should” be back next Sunday, I’m sure the internet can do without me without major shifts in the Force.

This is just a preemptive announce. In the next days, weeks or months the path I’ve traced by wandering aimlessly along these years could reach an end and I could walk away and vanish in a similar way as I arrived, without being noticed and without the need of drama. Maybe it will be another false alarm and I’ll be still around here writing about the same arguments in my odd style, maybe not. I’m the first to be unaware about what will happen and I don’t know which possibility scares me more. The reasons this time aren’t about a feeling of frustration that many times brought me near the decision to “give up”. About what? I don’t know. I still have an e-mail from Lum where he wrote: “I guess what you need to determine is what you want to accomplish with your writing”. I still have no clue.

But as I said this isn’t the usual pattern and this time the choice depends more on personal reasons and my concrete situation. I do not know if I can afford anymore the dedication I had for all this time. If something around me is going to change, a lot of what I do and I am will easily crumble. Everything you do has a cost somewhere and I guess I’m going to have to pay mine even if I don’t really want to.

When it’s time to conclude something, it is natural to look back and draw some general considerations, see what I was able to achieve, see what it could have been possible… Well, I don’t have much to say right now. I don’t think I’ve been of any use. Not only for the impact and interest that what I write causes, but useless also for myself in the first place. Some other times I feel satisified, instead. Like if I was able to write everything I needed to. I think I just enjoyed to play for some time with a position that doesn’t belong to me and that I cannot really afford. I’m a stranger or a ghost.

However, I do not regret or blame anything. It has just been an odd path leading nowhere. A quirk.

EDIT- I closed the comments because I don’t intend to be pathetic or suggest a discussion about these points. There isn’t really anything to say from my point of view, everyone just takes what he wants.

Back from the movie theater. In a line: I liked it more than the first episide and less than the second.

I didn’t feel really immersed this time, I watched the whole movie feeling sort of emotionally detached even if some passages are slightly more effective and well executed. If I had something to write on during the show I could have filled pages and pages. To begin with it’s my first movie in a theatre with a digital support but the only difference I noticed is that the image doesn’t show any sort of “impurities” like it always happen with the normal film. The first part of the movie is great. I loved the whole scene in the space but I wished it showed some more the “choral” aspect of the movie and linger some more to describe the battle instead of just focusing on the two “heroes” gliding around cheerfully in the mess of the battle thanks to irritant luck and super-powers. That’s a general trend of the last three movies where each character becomes just the classic, predictable hero while all the other elements remain as an irrelevant backdrop. But at least the start is fast and spiffy, then the movie slows down and did very little to keep me intrigued.

In particular I noticed two problems. The first is tied to the emotional involvement. Not only it’s weak for the most part due to the predictability of the scenes and behaviours, but even the actors themselves show no involvement. The love story between Padme and Anakin is weak, I loved her in the second movie but in this episode she just sits there whining and mourning pathetically all the time. All the charm she gained (Uhm, someone saw “Closer” by the way?) is completely lost and even her aseptic death is sort of irrelevant and not involving. There’s no “feeling” between her and Anakin and the same happens between Anakin and Obi-Wan Kenobi. They are supposed to be good friends after all they went through together but all they are able to communicate is a rather cold friendship and some failed attempts at humor. You cannot feel any affection in their actions. As I said this is noticeable throughout all the movie, all the actors sort of sit there and play their role like if they felt actually ridicule with those dresses. The dialogues do not help this situation, they are often silly and pretentious and this add to the “faked” feeling that in this movie is more evident than ever.

Again all these elements affect the movie as a whole. The “baddie” of the first part is just too stupid and out of place. It’s humorous on a meta-level that in my opinion breaks completely the atmosphere. An asthmatic robot is an obvious and inappropriate mock of Darth Vader, in particular when the movie would need some seriousness due to what is supposed to go on. Lucas announced that this movie is more “dark” but this is definitely not what I saw. The humor is always inappropriate and uneffective, the actors do not show any emotional involvement, the characters look more and more like super heroes completely alienated and “opaque” for the public and the scenes are just too quick and already predetermined to revive some interest. Watching the movie feels more like a “practice” of something you know too well than a discovery. It fails to surprise, it fails to communicate. Some passages are “muffled” and awkward (I didn’t like the howling Darth Vader at the end).

At least there are some valid and still actual archetypes. The corruption of the power, the reasonings about war, peace, democracy are all actual and effective. Anakin’s journey toward the dark side works better than how I expected if it wasn’t for some parts a bit too forced (the murder of the Jedi childs, some dialogues with Palpatine) or badly acted (the murder of Samule Jackson). And finally Yoda remains the best part of the movie on every aspect.

Visually there are some good passages but still not on par with the second episode that I felt more evocative, imaginative and varied. Great is the zoomed out scene with Anakin and Obi-Wan hanging on a structure that is about to fall in the lava. Due to the distance and the dark light you cannot locate the bodies but you can still easily follow the scene thanks to the shiny neon-swords. I liked a lot the idea. As in the second movie these swords become even more an “icon”, a recognizable symbol everywhere.

In general I’d say that the serie would need some renovation and less self-complacency. It became a bit too much autoreferential to recapture the magic of the first trilogy. There was some more story and less plastic (but if the plastic is in the space, I love it).