Mokka mit Schlag

Recently my PowerMac G5 tower running Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger began ejecting all DVD discs. It will accept CDs, but it immediately ejects every DVD I insert: blank or preformatted, video or computer. Booting up off an older operating system on a different partition didn’t change this. It feels like a hardware problem, though I’m not 100% sure of that yet. Any suggestions? (For obvious reasons, running tools that are themselves provided on DVD is not an option.)

Update

It does indeed seem to be a hardware problem. I went down to the Apple Store at Fashion Island and picked up a Lacie external DVD burner, which, so far, seems to be working fine. Reinstalling the operating system and all data, by contrast, had no effect on the internal drive. One of these days I should probably just swap out the internal drive, but right now I can’t really be bothered, especially since the recent move and frequent travel have inspired me to switch to my Macbook as my primary machine.

I’m not 100% sure why this site when down for a few hours yesterday. I thought it was a dead hard drive, and then a dead power adapter. Now I don’t know since it seems to all be working again. In any case I’ve been planning a move to a hosting service, and now seems like as good a time as any. I’m moving across the country in a couple of weeks though I haven’t yet found a place to live, so keeping the site going in the spare bedroom no longer seems like an easy choice. I hope to have the site transferred over to a more reliable host next week (or sooner if the Mac Mini goes down again.)

Clover Looper moth, Caenurgina crassiuscula
Calvert Vaux Park, Brooklyn, NY, 2007-09-20

Calvert Vaux Park (nee Dreier-Offerman) is one of the little-known jewels in Brooklyn. Although small, it has one of the most diverse batches of fauna over the year anywhere in Kings County. Sadly it’s going to be “improved” in the near future with astroturf and various other items designed to make it a “destination park”.

Mike Freeman has retired the NYC Bird Report. However I do plan to leave the submission forms up for the indefinite future because I know some people liked to use them for creating personal day lists. Prospect Park submissions sent through that form will still be added to the Prospect Park database that tracks records going back more than a century, even if they are not currently available on the Web. Maybe one day I’ll have time to recreate the work Mike did, but I hope this is at least somewhat helpful for now.

In the meantime, I’ve been playing with creating a new site/forum/social network for Five Borough Birders at Ning. If people would like to use the blog to announce rarities, and post day lists and trip reports, please do so. It doesn’t merge and accumulate the reports from different observers like NYC Bird Report did, but it will let us at least see who’s reporting what. It also has some features NYC Bird report didn’t including general discussions and photo, video, and audio uploads.
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Buck Moth, Hemileuca maia
Metairie, Louisiana

Not a lot of moths up here in the cold Northeast right now (aside from one that flitted through my office at school a couple of weeks ago) but my parents found this one on their screen door in the somewhat warmer Southeast.

I’ve decided the time has come to move several sites out of my spare bedroom and off this box and onto a shared host somewhere. I probably should have done this years ago, but there’s something nice about having a server you can personally reboot or stick a CD into when necessary. I need to be able to serve three sites:

• xom.nu (static HTML)
• The Cafes (WordPress)
• www.elharo.com (static+WordPress+custom PHP)

These sites are not mission critical, but I would like them to stay up. Reliable backups that I can download periodically are a must. I would like them to respond much faster than they do currently. (Xom.nu is pretty fast, but the two blogs can be dog slow at times.)

Traffic is not too heavy, though I don’t track hard numbers. I would like to be able to quickly ramp up to withstand a Digg effect if necessary.

These sites can all live on the same IP address. (They do now.)

I’d like the flexibility to install my own Apache modules and custom PHP extensions and modify the various config files such as httpd.conf and php.ini. Ideally I’d like to be install other frameworks such as Ruby on Rails or eXist if I feel like playing with them. That is, root access to the box would be very helpful, even if it’s virtualized. However I can probably live without that if it raises the price too high. Alternately, I could perhaps live with 24/7 phone support from a reliable sys admin who can make changes like that for me. However the ability to install and manage my own WordPress extensions and modified code is a must.

Any suggestions? So far here’s who I’ve looked at:
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