Sorry if the Wambooli web site has been acting weird on you for the past few days. It’s because of something called host migration.

If you’ve played Call of Duty, Modern Warfare 2, then you’ve probably seen the host migration screen. It’s annoying, but it’s not exactly the same thing Wambooli has experienced.

A host is something that provides a service.

Migration is to move.

For Call of Duty, host migration is when the person who is hosting the game leaves and another host has to be found. In that game, one of the player’s computers is designated as the host; their computer is the main one to which other computers are connected. When that person leaves, a new host must be found, so the host is migrated to another person.

For Wambooli, the host is a server (a large, fast computer) somewhere out on the Internet.

I don’t host Wambooli out of my office. The web site exists as documents and such on my computer, but I upload those files to the server — the host.

This past week, GoDaddy (the hosting service I use) moved the Wambooli server to a new address.

It takes a while for that new address to be known to the various computers that provide Internet service to the planet. So you may have logged into this site and seen a lot of errors or saw nothing at all. That’s because your Internet provider’s DNS servers hadn’t yet been updated.

DNS is the Domain Naming System. It’s the process by which a domain name such as wambooli.com gets translated into an IP address. You see, domain names like google.com or facebook.com are just text. That text is given to a DNS server, which then provides the actual address of the site, which is a number. All that happens in the background, so you never really have to mess with it.

Eventually, host migration is figured out by all the DNS servers, and once again the Wambooli web site is up and running.

Two other administrative notes:

First, the Porchcam has been acting weird for a while. Sometimes it gets stuck on the same image. Other times the software loses track of the webcam hardware, and you see a black screen with the text “No Device Found” or something like that. I’m working on the problem.

Second, I’ve closed registration to the blog. For some reason, the user name “nudecelebrity” was desired by someone in Russia. I keep deleting that account as soon as it was created, but they kept try to re-add it back. So I closed registration.

You don’t need to register on the blog to read it. You only need to register if you want to comment. If that’s the case, send me an email and I’ll configure your user account. Sorry about the trouble.

And if you really want the user name “nudecelebrity” then you’ll have to blog somewhere else!