It turns out that the tech people were upgrading Apache on my server and hadn’t informed the support people. I got a nice apology from the support guy I’de been dealing with.
Phew! It had crossed my mind that I may have to change hosting company.

Aaargh! My new domain zed1.net is down! My three new hostees are without their blogs! The server itself is up and running, I can ping it and ftp to it. But the web server is refusing connections. Grrr.
I couldn’t even use the support forum because that is down too. (I wonder if it’s on the same machine). I fired off an email to them a couple of hours ago, but have not had a reply yet.

Update: It was back by morning. I’m told it was back some time after midnight. Support replied but denied anything was wrong. I’ll follow that up.

This technology story over at CNN/Technology sounds very interesting.
Twins crack face recognition puzzle

The computer whiz-kids — 22-year-old identical twins, Michael and Alex Bronstein, almost impossible to tell apart — have applied a new technology to recognizing faces in a way that may yet revolutionize international security.

“I said it to them as a joke: if you succeed in building a system that can distinguish between the two of you, you’ll get (a grade of) 100,” said the twins’ professor, Ron Kimmel of the Technion Institute in Haifa. “They succeeded and got 100. They are brilliant.”

The technology scans and maps the human face as a three-dimensional surface, providing a far more accurate reference for identifying a person than current systems, most of which rely on two-dimensional images, Kimmel said.

Wow, I don’t believe it but I managed to post a geek-related story several hours before slashdot.
Go me!

At last the DNs updated between 7 and 8 this morning! And the subdomains worked straight away. But… As the hostees in question haven’t announced their new blogs yet, I cannot announce them either 🙁
Soon I’m sure. Still it gives me a chance to get some more things done: I’ve got the automated backup working. Although I may try to make it incremental, as I don’t fancy mailing myself 20mb every day!

Blech! I’m really cheesed off waiting for my domain (not this one) to transfer! It has taken more than ten days to get it sorted so far. Fingers crossed the DNS should be updated within the next 12 hours.
Once it has updated, I’ll be able to launch my two new (not so new) hostees.

It looks like Google have been granted a patent for their page ranking algorithm.
It makes a change for the US patents office to grant a valid software patent! Unlike some recent patents granted.

I’ve been doing a bit of graphic based web page design the last couple of days for one of my hostees. It’s been quite good fun! We’ve agreed on a look chosen from four that I put together. I need to redo the various elements and plug in the B2 engine next.
I’m doing it all by hand (PaintShop Pro and Epsilon programmer’s editor) of course rather than with some WYSIWYG application.