For several weeks at work I’ve been prepping for a server move; this week we flipped the switch. It was the most serious migration I’ve ever done, and it went very well. Some notes:

• Previously we shared a dedicated box at a certain very large colo provider. A few weeks ago, in the course of swapping out a failing drive in our box, staffers at the colo 1) wiped out the live backup of the drive and then 2) destroyed the contents of the failing drive, overwriting it with a week-old backup. A week is a lot for us, with a couple limited-access applications (Django apps, naturally) seeing steady daily use by hundreds of users. This just firmed my resolve to go with a smaller provider (JohnCompanies) who has taken good care of me over the past three years.

For a long time, through several PowerBooks, I’ve been mystified at occasional unrequested shifts in left/right audio balance. I figured that in my frantic typing I was hitting some undocumented keyboard shortcut. Nope. The real answer:

In some cases the audio balance may unexpectedly drift towards the left or right channel. This can happen if you rapidly press the volume up or down keys while the computer’s microprocessor is under heavy load.

From Slate.com: textcasting.

The text is actually contained in a 15-minute audio file. (It’s 15 minutes of silence, which is how we make the file so small.) Play the file as you would any other podcast, and then hit the iPod’s center button two or three times until you reach the description field, which contains the full TP text. You can scroll through the text using the iPod’s scroll wheel.

All this for the lack of a feed reader.

I’ve been getting unrequested messages from the eBay Developer Zone site over the last couple days about email address changes. I have a Developer Zone account, but I haven’t touched it for months if not longer. I sent an e-mail to them about it, but haven’t heard anything.

I just got yet another one of these and I think I see what’s up. Check out the registered email address. Somebody found a hole.

Late last year the Xiph QuickTime Components project took up where the moribund qtcomponents.sourceforge.net had left off – great news for lovers of open audio formats like Ogg Vorbis. (Vorbis encodes music at higher quality than MP3 at equivalent bitrates, and is unencumbered by patents and licensing.) The latest release of the components, earlier this month, features Intel compatability and preliminary support for FLAC (a lossless encoding).

The thing that makes this project so useful is that QuickTime components can transparently provide services to any OS X application relying on QuickTime – such as iTunes. So while you can’t play Ogg Vorbis (or Speex or FLAC or…) files on your new iPod, you can play them in iTunes. Getting there.

A new “bleeding edge” version of TextMate appeared this evening, featuring extensive improvements to the bundle infrastructure. (If you’re not sure what this means, read my earlier post on how bundles are the heart of TextMate’s stupendousness.) Allan Oddgaard has put a lot of thought into the balance between distributed bundles and user customizations, and has developed some really elegant solutions that allow you to benefit from improvements in the bundles (some of which move at a rapid clip thanks to motivated community developers) while retaining your specific customizations.

After the frameworks post I kept thinking about this. Of course any generalizations I make are heavily colored by my own direct experience, but the progression seems to go along these lines:

1. Make static web pages.

2. Make modular pages using simple includes (in SSI, PHP, ASP, or what have you).

3. Make pages with more involved functionality (form submissions to database, basic CRUD).

4. Get sick of re-building dynamic stuff for every project; write your own kinda portable library or framework.