Monthly Archive for March, 2007

Energy-Star, Local Super Hero?

The other day I was on my way home from work (at dusk) and I noticed that the outside lights on my house were unusually bright? I mean, I had purchased 40 watt smaller incandescent bulbs quite some time ago and all-of-a-sudden they were uber-bright? Upon further examination, they were new compact fluorescent bulbs, which I have in the interior of my house.

I happened to glance next door and noticed my neighbor had the same bulbs in her fixtures, so I figured that she was being nice and energy efficient and replaced mine as well. Mystery solved, or so I thought…

Later that night after it got dark, I happened to glance out my front window and look down the street to find that nearly every house had the exact same uber-bright energy efficient bulbs in their outdoor light fixtures.

Is there some sort of energy-star, replacing our light-bulbs? It’s a mystery I tell you, a mystery. I’m not upset or anything like that, I’m happy… who do I thank? Is this a good Samaritan or my tax dollars at work?

DigitalOrphans Update

At approximately 3:05PM EDT today (Wednesday, March 21st, 2007) websrv01 encountered unexpected server downtime that lasted approximately 20 – 25 minutes. The cause of the downtime is currently unknown, a hard reboot of the server was required in order to restore service to the server.

We will post more information as to the cause after we determine what happened. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Haiku-to-time

A haiku dedicated to my favourite PHP function, strtotime():

oh strtotime() bliss
a function creating ease
such simplicity

DigitalOrphans Update v2.3

This is a notice to inform you that there are scheduled server maintenance updates planned for both websrv01 and websrv02 which will take place tonight, Thursday, March 8th at 10:00PM EST.

These updates will encompass all available Redhat Linux Updates, as well as prepare the server for Sunday’s new Daylight Savings Time changes. At the same time, we will be upgrading PHP on both servers: websrv01 will be upgraded to PHP 4.4.6 and websrv02 will be upgraded to PHP 5.2.1.

Downtime for this update should be minimal, around 3 – 5 minutes for the servers to be rebooted.