Category: TheHackerWorkshop.com

I started this blog as a personal project, mainly as a way for me to document my own projects and to motivate myself to tinker some more. I never really imagined that anyone would have the slightest interest in what I had to write.

I was a couple of days late paying the renewal registration for my domain last week, so GoDaddy 'parked' thehackerworkshop.com. I was surprised and flattered that several of you wrote to me, pleading to get the site back up.

This, more than anything, is motivation for me to get the workshop built and get back to hacking. I've still got (at least) a few weeks of construction and move-in before I can start tinkering again, but knowing that there are people out there who are reading my writing is just incredible.

Thanks for the comments. You can't imagine how much they're appreciated.

Wow, I just realized that it's been a long, long time since I've posted any content.

I promise that I'm not neglecting my hacking/making! In fact, I've been spending vast amounts of time on a project that I hope to release shortly. Surprisingly, it's a software project, but it's definitely hardware related. In short, I recently realized how hard it can be to write sketches for the Gameduino platform and I want to remedy that.

I'm not ready to release any details yet, but I'm spending tens of hours per week on this project (which my wife and sons aren't too thrilled about) and am making steady, measurable progress.

I'm very excited about the project and can't wait to get it out to the world. It's just not ready yet. I just wanted to stop by here and assure you (that is, the two people who read my blog) that I am indeed hard at work on a worthy hacking project and the lack of posts on my blog doesn't indicate a lack of interest on my part.

Well, somehow some vandals managed to take control of my website and replace my content with their own. I don't know how it happened and because it took a while for me to discover the issue, my ISP wasn't much help determining the root cause.

The good news is that the WordPress database was intact, and that I had a backup of my theme files. I was able to restore (for the most part) with little difficulty. I lost a custom table in one of my posts, and I'll have to replace a few graphics files. All in all, not a terrible spot to be in. I mentioned a while back that I wanted to invest some time in automated backups of my site. Guess what I never got around to. Maybe this will motivate me.

My old ISP, MochaHost.com, did some kind of "migration" that has left me without web or email access for over a week. Their incompetent support staff seems to think that the issue is 'fixed' when this site's home page took 50+ seconds to load, and I couldn't access my IMAP email box. They blamed it on the Plesk control panel (you know, the one that they apparently decided to install before doing any testing).

Screw 'em. I got a new web host.

My warning: don't do business with MochaHost. Their service (even when it was 'working' by a loose definition of the term) is unreliable and slow. And an outage that lasts for over a week is simply inexcusable in anyone's book. They haven't offered to move my sites to a working server. Their response has been, "this issue is due to a bug in <software that they decided to install>. We're looking at finding a different control panel for our users." They offered me a preview of the new control panel but didn't offer to move my data to the server with the new control panel.

As I said: screw 'em. MochaHost sucks.

I had to rebuild the website this weekend. I had installed WordPress and, without really knowing what I was doing, hacked a theme I'd downloaded (one that was not designed for WordPress) into it. I somehow managed to break my RSS feeds in the process.

So I gave myself a crash course in WordPress, CSS, and themes this weekend. I'm still working on polishing it (comments aren't working yet, for instance) but at least now it's a maintainable structure.

In the process, I exported and imported all the existing content. It seems that Categories and Tags didn't survive the export/import. Not a big loss. I recreated them by hand. (Easy to do when there's only ~16 posts in the history of the site.)

I'll try to get comments working as soon as possible. You know, for the two readers I currently have.

The RSS feeds for the blog entries and comments are.... broken. In a really odd way. I'm aware of the problem and am working on it. Google Reader and Firefox are able to somehow parse the feeds, but Outlook and IE (rightly) complain about the RSS.