If you're a programmer, you may have seen a little web site callled StackOverflow.com start showing up in your search results recently when looking for help with programming problems.  This site is a collaborative effort between two well-known programming bloggers: Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky.  What sets it apart (aside from some really good SEO) is that it's a seamless combination of a wikipedia-style site and a digg-style site.  That means that the best stuff rises to the top through voting a la Digg, and if you see something that isn't quite right (and you've earned enough "trust") you can fix it a la Wikipedia.  It's really a powerful combination.

One of the things about the site is that the owners are using a very permissive liscense for the content, and they're standing behind it to the point where they release a monthly dump of the entire database for anyone to use.  Now, normally I wouldn't bring up a programming topic like this on the family blog.  However, I have decided to make use of that data set.  If you look to the left, you'll see a new "StackQL" link in the Navigation section.  That links you to a page that allows anyone to query the database directly (within reason).  Some of those queries are potentially complicated and time consuming.  And it's hosted on the same server as this blog.

So, there you go. I'm posting about it here because it has the potential to impact the availability of this site.  It's not impossible to get a flood of queries there that would temporarily take this blog offline, and I wanted anyone who comes here to know about that.

Update: StackQL has moved to it's own dedicated host on a much faster connetion, so this should no longer be an issue.

The news is now 3 weeks old, but this site is running on a brand new server.  The old system was starting to become unstable due to age, and I was also worried about the age of the disk and important data we keep there. 

Some details on the new Server:

• It runs an ultra-low-power Atom processor.  That's hardly server material in normal circumstances, but this is an extremely low-traffic site.  There's no sense in paying for power I don't need.  And even though it's just an Atom, it's still a significant upgrade: dual core with hyperthreading for 4 logical processors, each at 1.6Ghz and 2Gb of RAM.  Compare that to my former 700Mhz PIII with 384MB RAM.
• The hard drive is now 4 times larger than before, with plans next year to move to a raid array of some kind with even more space.
• It uses Windows Server 2008.  It's not the absolute latest server operating system from Microsoft (R2 is out now), but it's close.
• Why yes, that is a ServerFault.com sticker on the side of the case.

A big part of the transition to the new server was moving this blog.  And thats where the problems came in.  You may have noticed over the past few weeks that pages could sometimes take much longer to load than they should.  There was a problem with the old dasBlog software on this particular system that was causing significant slow downs.  As much as I tried, I was unable to track the issue down.  Therefore, as of right now this blog is now powered by BlogEngine.Net. 

BlogEngine.Net has a much younger (and more current) code base and has some nice new features, like the new Twitter widget on the left.  Keep looking over the next few weeks as I spend some time setting up a few more little quirks like that.  I even managed to get the link format working so that old bookmarks should still function (there may be some edge cases, but I think I got that vast majority of it).  Most importantly, pages load at an acceptable rate.

It's not all roses, though.  Getting my theme moved over was a lot of work, and there are still some rough edges here and there.  There are also definitely some quirks with the new software, and on more than one occasion I had to fix some obvious bugs in that code (I plan to submit patches back after I've had a chance to check them thoroughly).  Hopefully I found all the "gotchas".  Finally, I'm not sure the old rss feeds will work.  I know that one there were a few people with RSS subscriptions.  I hope to fix that glitch this weekend, but if that's you and stumble on it before then, it's probably best to just subscribe to the new feed url.  If anyone finds any other problems, please let me know via the contant e-mail icon at the top of every page.

Just a heads up that if I get the time I'm going to attempt updating the engine behind this site over the weekend.

I haven't done almost since the site went live nearly a year ago, and several new versions of the software have since been released that I hope will solve some issues I've seen. Perhaps it will open up some new features, as well.

So expect some down-time over the weekend.

I updated the banner image- hope you like it. I accidentally only got one shot in with Melody and even that one looks kinda blurred, but it's too much work putting these together to change it now.