The power outage made for a very interesting problem. I had inadvertently broken PHP by turning on compression in php.ini when apparently I wasn’t supposed to. This was back when I was trying to get the WordPress compression working. I didn’t know PHP’s configuration wasn’t working until the server was forced to reboot due to the power outage. The initial problem was that the server was not set to turn back on automatically after power loss, which I had set intentionally fearing damage if it attempted to turn on during a brownout, but perhaps I should enable that ability. Even once it turned on, after a fsck (over 330 or so days of uptime I think) it hanged on setting the clock and needed a hard reboot, which necessitated that I go over to the server physically and reboot it. Before this I set the DNS entries to my dad’s house so that I could display an explanation of what had happened, and I changed my password for my DNS service as it had gone too long without being reset, and subsequently forgot to correct it in the call to the update script. I managed to get the DNS fixed, then I found PHP was broken, then in the course of my attempts to fix that, lighttpd refused to start at all. I was unaware that I could only declare one error.log, so it appeared that it was not giving any error output, but it was writing to the last error log I had declared, and I was checking the wrong one. Thanks to incredible help from the folk in #lighttpd on freenode, it’s working again.
In other events, I set up Skype on my Grandma’s machine, and I hope she finds it useful. I’ve been working on Breakout in AP Comp Sci and physics collision is interesting, but I think if I end up making a game I’ll be using a physics library for sure. MIT didn’t accept me, as I anticipated. I’ll be going to University of Michigan, but I still have work to do and forms to fill out on the way.