Van Gils Blogs

Just before our vacation started I was assigned a new task at work (university of Nijmegen, still). We are moving to a new building in early August. The move has to be coordinated and the person in charge dropped the ball for several reasons (lack of cooperation seemed to be one of them). Anyway, They (our head of department) told me they neede someone who’s willing to get the job done and isn’t afraid of using all means available (viz., nagging people untill they do what they’re supposed to do.

Anyway, I accepted the job (which means that I have a job untill the end of August), knowing that it would be a tough cookie. I started working on it last Tuesday and already my inbox is filled with message from collegues asking a million things. Today I received all the material that Marianne (the person who used to be in charge of making arrangements) had collected. Very organized, and very helpfull once I have worked my way through everything. I ended up making a Website to keep track of things I did / have to do. It’ll be a big challenge to organize everything on such short notice. Time to bang some heads together and get some people into gear !!

Unfortunately the hosting company where this blog lives had some problems last night. As I understand it from my buddies, they my virtual server running on a RAID-system with two disks. One of the disks had died recently and new disks were ordered and were scheduled to be replaced this morning…. Unfortunately the second disk died also, las night

I spotted the fact that the box was borked this morning. I left a message on the irc-channel where I know the admins hang out most of the time and left for work. Before I reached work I had SMS’ses and voicemails from all three of the admins explaining the problem and telling me they were working on the fix. That is, they were trying to salvage as much of the data as possible as well as working on getting the machine up and running again.

The team definately deserves some compliments. Especialy Jurrit worked hard on getting back my data, on fixing wordpress and so on (hope he hasn’t gotten any gray hairs over it yet!). Most of the wordpress stuff worked when he was done, I only had to fix the categories again. While doing so I also found a bug in wordpress so I reported it. Progress on that can be read here.

All I have to do, now, is to setup my photogallery again, stay tuned!

I have posted before about the problem of managing photos, and adding them to a nice gallery. Previously I used some scripts/tools to generate an index and then upload the whole thing. Well, that may work fairly well but I got fed up with it after a while. I have browsed the Web for a while, in search of a good tool to help me do what I want. I selected Gallery2 as a tool. Easy to setup and loads of features. The result (with our vacation pictures) can be found here