Rather than write three separate tiny blog entries, I've decided to try an experiment and lump them all together into a completely unrelated mash-up of ideas.  Who doesn't love a mash-up?  Today we're going to feel the excitement of purchasing The Unincorporated Man, explore the mystical world of web server software troubleshooting and plug MiniCon where I'll be doing a panel on Steampunk.  

Wait, all those things are totally related after all, here on Radical Transparency Theatre.  

I'll start with the hardest topic: web server software.  About a week ago my main web server started experiencing unexplained worker process failures which are normally not fatal that were freezing entire sites.  The worker process is the little guy in the server who actually hands you the web pages when you visit a website.  Each site has their own worker process.  If the worker process stops, well, working, then it is normally replaced by a shiny new worker process wearing exactly the same little jumpsuit.  Last week they went on strike so when worker processes failed they had no replacements.

Why am I telling the world this instead of pretending that nothing happened?  Because I am on a first-name basis with my clients, and they already know what happened.  And I want any potential clients to know that if something should go wrong, I'm not going to try to hide it from them but rather apologize and make things work better than they did before.  I moved to my own servers because I was having endless trouble with various hosting companies being unresponsive and evasive about their server errors and hosting problems, pretending that they didn't happen or worse ignoring me and my clients.  Is it so hard to tell your customers the truth?

If you're not interested in the technical details then skip this paragraph.  It may sound like a foreign language.  The w3wp.exe process would fail, probably due to the newer MySQL ODBC drivers being incorrectly configured and incompatible with ColdFusion MX7 to boot.  Why it worked at all in the first place is a mystery, but installing PHP seems to have tossed it over the edge and the workers revolted.  Every time an application pool recycled the site would stop until a fresh reboot.  My tech guy was willing to debug the entire thing, but it seemed prudent to me to just upgrade to ColdFusion 8, which actually supports the MySQL 5.1 database drivers.  Once the upgrade finished the worker processes ended their strike and it's been 100% productivity ever since.

The moral of the story is, always give your workers what they want.  They want the latest upgrade?  Give it to them.  They want their own separate application pools?  Make it happen.  Shinier jumpsuits?  Sure!  They want bagels every morning?  Good luck stuffing them into the DVD drive.

As a consequence, www.theunincorporatedman.com was unstable during the first day of the book's availability, which is a Bad Thing.  Bad Things tend to make me twitchy, and I spent every waking moment (and some sleeping moments) in front of the server with duct tape and shoestrings with clenched teeth trying to keep it from falling apart before the upgrade was in place.  Now that the server is better than new, I've gone and purchased The Unincorporated Man so I can relax and unwind with a great book.

See how these things are all related?

So next Saturday at 2:30 I'll be at MiniCon discussing the Art of Steampunk (and prints of the Clockwork Frog will be available for sale).  We'll talk about what the genre is, and how seemingly disparate chunks of it are actually related, from the Maker Movement to Cosplay to Craftsmanship to literary themes--all tied together through mass production, authenticity, the Outsider, and the love of beautiful (yet functional) things.  

Unfortunately the Collaboration panel was canceled as the Artist Guest of Honor Stephan Martiniere has had a family emergency.  I was really looking forward to hanging out with him again, and I hope he's doing OK.  

I understand family emergencies, since I consider my servers to be a part of my family.  Or at least I do when I'm trying to make non-sequiturs into secuutus.  That's Latin for 'mash-up'.