If you tried to visit the Avian Waves website in the last 24 hours, you may have noticed that a spam page (with an embedded virus download) came up instead.  My site, itself, was not hacked.  No, it was much worse.  The DNS provider at Enom (the company the registrar I use, Arbor Domains, is a reseller for) was hacked.  A very large number of sites had their DNS redirected.

Time to switch to GoDaddy.  They are cheaper anyway.  Enom has proven they cannot be trusted with security.  Sorry, Arbor.  It's been a great ten plus year run.  But your DNS and registration tools haven't been updated since the early 2000s.  Plus, I need DNS service I can trust to not be hacked.  And if it is hacked, it needs to be fixed ASAP.

Apparently the hardware that my web server's VPS lives on completely died.  I mean died so bad that VPSLand didn't have any way to restore it!  Luckily I take nightly backups of everything important, so the website is back with no loss of content.  Unfortunately, SQL Server 2008 Express's installer has a serious amount of bugs that took me about 6 hours of debugging to figure out.  The entire site is driven off SQL 2008, so I had no way to get the site back without it.  It seems something that was in VPSLand's standard deployment image made SQL 2008's installer unhappy.  It took a lot of registry deletions to get it to work.  More about that later (if I remember).

Anyway.  The site is finally back up!  Hooray!

Apparently there was a bug in my website forums that was preventing new users from registering. OOPS! Sorry about that. All fixed now!

I decided having multiple blogs (Music and Tech) was pretty confusing, so I introduced topics (a.k.a. "tags") to my blog. The two previous blogs were unified and then the topics were applied (among others) so that they are actually still sorted basically the same. You can see in the upper left hand corner the various topics you can filter by, in case you aren't interested in all the wonderful things I have to say. Any old links to previous music/tech blog entries should still work. Please let me know if they don't!

CDs are finally in the process of getting pressed. Late 2007, I think I said, right? So late that it's 2008 now, apparently. ;-) All singles will be for sale shortly after I get the CDs in retail outlets (like CD Baby).

Next step... I need to start writing new tracks and get back to work on RD Tabs and XS BAP.

I have upgraded the forums from YAF 1.9.0 to YAF 1.9.1.  They do great work for free forums!  If you run an ASP.Net website, I highly recommend it.

Here's the website.

Let me know if you run into any problems!

Anybody who has been using the Avian Waves Forums has noticed that it was not integrated into the main website.  This is due to the code being from another author, who makes the amazing open source YetAnotherForum.Net.  it's C#, so I can't integrate it directly into the main Avian Waves website since I write primarily in VB.Net.  However, I found a clever way to integrate it by exporting the main website's current "skin" (even if I change it) and retrieving this through the skinnable features of YAF.  The advantage is now it looks like the rest of the website, but can be easily upgraded since it is still technically a separate web application.  Fun stuff!  Enjoy!

The new URL is www.avianwaves.com/Forums but the old URL forums.avianwaves.com will still work.

Friend me on MySpace!  My page is located here: http://www.myspace.com/avianwaves

Still saving up money to press the CDs... Soon.  Soon!  SOON I will finally have an album out after 7 years of absense and reinventing my music...

:-)

I just installed forums software for the Avian Waves website.  No longer do you have to post bugs as comments in blogs!  The first two sections are for RD Tabs and XS BAP, with more to follow in the future.  I will try to reply and post often.

Enjoy!

http://forums.avianwaves.com

I received several requests for a donation link for my two more popular free applications, RD Tabs and XS BAP.  I must say I really appreciate the support!  Thank you for offering.  I will continue to update these applications (and come up with new applications) whenever I have free time.  I added the link on the applications' web pages, but if you feel extra-giving right now, click here!  :-)  Happy New Year!

The new version of the Avian Waves website is now online!  It took much longer than expected to complete, but I think it is now finally done.  It may still need some tweaks here and there, so please contact me if you find any issues.

My debut album has just arrived from the mastering studio (www.gklabs.com) where it was sweetened to crystal clarity!  All that is left is some artwork tweaks and CD duplication.  The album should be available very early 2007.  I am excited for it to finally go on sale, professionally mastered and professionally pressed.