Various

This morning and the first part of the afternoon I was finishing off the cheese photos.

Most of the rest of the afternoon I was preparing my pog website update for tomorrow. Just as the sun was setting I went on a walk - to Lubenham, then across the fields to the canal, and back home.

In the evening I played Jenga and Fluxx with Mark, Sarah, Clare, and Billy.

I always have to check my Junk email folder on hotmail, because Hotmail puts legitimate emails in the junk, and you can't turn the junk filter off. However, today I found a trick to get round it, which is detailed here: Disabling Junk Filtering With Hotmail. I can't be 100% sure it is working, but it looks like it is (no items in the junk folder so far).

While doing my pog website update, I came across this auction for Looney Tunes Tasty Tops full set with case, which sold for US $1,025.01! They must be the most expensive pogs, surely? And I am pretty sure there were two sets of 100 produced (Super Tasty Tops and Mega Tasty Tops), each with around 100 pogs. So that full set is probably just one series.

Photo processing

Most of today I was still processing cheese photos. In the afternoon we went out to Foxton Locks (I think I forgot to say before that Mark, Sarah, and Levi came on boxing day and are with us at the moment). In the evening we played Fluxx and scrabble.

I had a problem with one of my images that I was editing. I had previously saved the image using a RAW file as a smart object, but wanted to crop the image. But when I did this, the image became corrupted. I tried opening the RAW file smart object, and it seemed that the RAW file in the smart object had become corrupted.

Unfortunately this must have had happened when I originally saved the file, as the backup had the same issue. Searching for a solution, it seems that a range of factors can cause this issue: Photoshop: Problem with files and layers becoming corrupt. There is no solution, so I had to just remove the smart object, then re-open the original RAW as a smart object, and copy it into the document in place of the corrupted layer.

I do note in that forum thread that one of the possible causes was a bug in Photoshop, which was fixed in CS6. It does seem rather off to me to only release a bug fix in a new version of the software. In my opinion the bug shouldn't have been there in the first place, and so the fix should be provided for all versions of the software that contain the bug.

Though having said that, it is no longer an issue since Adobe only offer software by subscription now, so you will always receive any bug fixes (or not have any software at all if you don't pay your subscription).

Washing up

Well, today was Christmas Day. That involves a nice big meal, which inevitably generates a lot of washing up. So quite a bit of the day was just spent washing up.

I also researched some ideas of sculpey to make for the next holiday at home. We went to church in the morning, though there weren't that many people there compared to the Christmas service in previous years.

Billy got Super Luigi U (twice) and Super Mario 3D Wii U, so I played on both of those with him for a while. I read a couple of stories from his Moomin comic strip book as well. And we played scrabble after dinner.

In the evening I went on Animal Crossing for a bit. Annoyingly, I forgot to go on it yesterday evening when it was Toy Day. And I had even made a list of what colour and type of present each of the villagers wanted.

Conkers

Today I was mostly processing cheese photos. I also went on Animal Crossing for a bit and helped Billy taking some photos for a YE Christmas video.

Being cheesy

Well, I'm quite pleased with myself today. I managed to get my pog website and photo tips website updates ready. I also processed quite a few of the cheese photos I've got to do. I went on Animal Crossing for a bit and saw K.K. as well. So I got quite a few different things done.

Buffering

Today I was doing more website stuff. I decided to look into fixing the an upstream response is buffered to a temporary file nginx warnings I was seeing in my logs. However, after doing some research, I couldn't really see whether the recommendation was to increase fastcgi_buffers size or switch fastcgi_buffering off. I would have thought that turning buffering off should be preferable, as then the client can start receiving the page ASAP rather than having to wait for the backend to finish processing the request. But most discussions were just about setting an optimum buffer size.

So I'm guessing that keeping fastcgi buffering and setting a good average buffer size is probably the recommended route. When I ran a request that buffered to file on the server on my local machine, I didn't get any buffering warning. So that makes the issue a bit more difficult to check the best buffer size and that it is working properly.

When looking at my config to try and see if I currently had any buffer statements in place, I found that I had client_body_buffer_size 2056k;. I'm not sure why I had that set, so I'm going to remove it for the moment.

After I looked into how many requests were giving a warning about being buffered to a temporary file, I decided not to change the the fastcgi_buffer settings, and just leave them at their default values. The error logs had a much smaller amount of lines than the access logs, so I think the vast majority of requests aren't being buffered to disk. (A very scientific way to check, I know.)

Moving hosts

Most of today was spent continuing to move my Hostgator sites over to WebFaction. When I thought about moving hosts, I just thought of copying the db and files over, then updating the DNS records. Simple. But actually it is a lot more involved than that. Setting up the domains, associating them with an 'app' etc. using the Webfaction control panel takes quite a bit of time.

Then there is the email accounts. I spent quite a while trying to figure out how to transfer the mail over from the HostGator based accounts to the WebFaction ones. Ideally you'd be able to export the mailbox from Thunderbird, change the mail account settings, then import the mailbox again. But despite my searching, I couldn't see any way to do this.

So instead I had to add the new mailbox while keeping the old one intact. Then move (select and drag) the mails from the old mailbox to the mailbox. A sent items folder didn't exist in the new mailbox, so I had to send a message first to create it. Then move over the sent items from the old mailbox. And when all the messages had been copied, I could then delete the old mailbox from the account settings, and I would also have to delete the SMTP record for the old account.

Quite a pain having to do this for each account I needed to move over. Luckily it was only 2 as 1 of the accounts didn't have any mails worth keeping, and another one was already using WebFaction for mail.

Then, SMTP settings on the sites themselves need modifying. I checked all my sites I was moving, and there was only one that needed updating because it was using MailPress.

Cron jobs needed copying over, and a process to archive the logs will need to be written. (HostGator has an option to automatically archive logs, WebFaction doesn't. You have to write your own.)

Anyway, hopefully I have set everything that needed to be set correctly now. The sites and emails seem to be working anyway.