Coming Soon to a Blog Near You ...

A gentle notice that our little blog will be changing appearance slightly, perhaps as soon as tonight.

The only visible affects should be:

• Reverting to the default MovableType layout for now.
  
• Easier and faster commenting (we hope to turn off requiring authentication).
  

The underlying change is that we're moving to a new server (one which was originally planned to be installed two years ago!). This however includes:

• Upgrading the hardware from a Pentium II to a dual processor Pentium III with three times the memory, twice the clock speed, twice the disk, and other improvements.
  
• Upgrading the OS from FreeBSD 4.11 to FreeBSD 6.0 (a jump of 5 releases).
  
• Upgrade the major version of the Apache HTTP (web) server.
  
• Switching to a more powerful back end database (MySQL).
  
• Upgrading to MovableType 3.2.
  
• Dynamically generating some of the blog pages when they are first accessed.
  

(But aside from that, we're not touching anything.)

Since this is an entirely new server, it should be a smooth cut over after we get the bugs out. (Cross your fingers for us.)

p.s. Yes, Pentium III's are obsolete, this machine was retired from front line desktop service back in August 2003. The two years did not make it run faster, but it's replacing a machine which was state of the art in 1998.