New look and feel for CRANberries
The CRANberries site just got a facelift. A few technical details, as well as backstory, useful links, and more are in a new about page. In a nutshell, it still uses the same static blog generator but an current css/js framework and theme. Enjoy!
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Erroneous posts
Sorry about that---it would appear that the current CRANberries design and implementation (arguably rather big words for a weekend hack that has now been running for over five years) was not robust to the occassional Comcast outage. I have now added a simple test to immediately quit if CRAN cannot be pinged which should protect us from such false reports occurring again. At least, that's the plan. We will continue to debug and improve the running and live system.
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CRANberries is back
Apologies for the service interruption but Comcast had decided to throw me a particularly nasty curveball. A more detailed post may appear on my blog in a bit. In the meantime, enjoy the pent-up listing of fifty-five new entries and sorry about the service interruption.
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Small cranberries.r enhancement
As you may have noticed, the cranberries.r script was fooled into believing that cairoDevice was new at version 2.8, then at version 2.6.1, then at 2.8, again and 2.6.1 and on and on.

I had taken one shortcut in relying on the assumption that I would get unique package names from available.packages(), and that seemingly was not the case. I added another lookup in the sql backend to the script: for every possible new package, we explicitly test whether the package and version combination exists or not. This will prevent the 'cairoDevice package loop' from showing a few more iterations. Sorry for the useless entries, but we should be back in good service now.
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Nothing to hide...
Following must have been a well-deserved vacation, the CRAN admins are back at work and CRAN's src/contrib directory is once again being populated at a steady rate. As a result, CRANberries and Planet R are once again listing new and updated packages as they appear on the CRAN mirrors.

However, yesterday's initial 'flood' a new posts appears to have triggered a 'flood prevention' mechanism in the Planet agggregators and/or Google Reader. Looking at my input directory, I noticed over sixty new entries between 'new' and 'updated' entries :

edd@ron:~> find cranberries/bloginput/cran/ -type f -name \*txt -ctime -3 -cmin +1200 | wc -l
63
edd@ron:~>   

However, Google Reader only showed me 40 posts. So if you're a keen consumer of CRANberries, and intent of catching all news (yes, I'm talking to both of you ), you can go to the 'blog' form of the RSS feed and look at all entries for August 25 to get the full picture. As the title of this posts, nuttin' to hide here.
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Service disruption
The five-year old server on which CRANberries was running decided yesterday that it was time to retire its harddisks. Unfortunately, this occurred in a way to render the disks -- which now use lvm2 for volume management -- unreadable so we had to backtrack to the last (networked) backup from the day before yesterday. So CRAN packages added or updated since the last entry on the backup will now appear twice as the CRANberries database has been restored from the backup with an as-of date of July 19. We're sorry about the inconvenience.

Oh, and if anyone knows how to fix lvm partition info, I'd greatly appreciate an email at the usual address.
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