It's Named After a Cat

WikiPerdido is named after KittyPerdido, the silly cat who came with our house.

Intuit and Ernie

WikiPerdido was originally hosted on Ernie, a 233-MHz PC sitting under my desk.

Ernie used to be Aunt Winnie's PC, but in 2003, she was forced to abandon Ernie when Intuit's over zealous copy protection of Turbo Tax totally overwhelmed this poor little machine; simply trying to install Turbo Tax blue-screened the PC. Aunt Winnie acquired a new HP Pavilion, and Ernie collected dust in the garage.

Things looked grim for Ernie, but I dusted it off, revitalized it with a shot of Linux, and found it a nice new home under my desk. It's a shame that so many old (but otherwise useful) computers are discarded simply because they are unable to run the latest Windows software.

I figured out that by using dyndns.org, I could actually host a website on Ernie. I installed apache, MoinMoin, and yappa-ng (a photogallery). Look, I'm on the interwebs!

Diaspora

In 2005 or thereabouts, WikiPerdido was forced to move when Comcast blocked my port 80 (comcast sucks). Rather than diddling around with port mapping, I moved WikiPerdido to a "real" hosting site, 1and1. This worked well for several years until mid-2007, when things went awry. First, 1and1 shut down my website without warning (the credit card I had given them was cancelled; they didn't notice until 3 months later). My experience with their billing department soured my impression, to put it mildly. Then 1and1 saw technical problems resulting in a week of downtime. Enough already.

Now I'm hosted on a server named Sampson. How fitting: Sampson is named after a cat.

Administration

See also
PersonalProjects