What happened, toward the end of October 2024, was that my server hosting the pictures died. Not surprising since it was vintage 1993, about 200MHz, 64MB memory, a 1GB disk, and perhaps $50,000 when new. And, it used about 250W; my electric use dropped 5KwH/day when I shut it off.

Actually, it was a redundant pair of servers and they both had a pattern of getting flaky and then getting better after a year or two offline. So I'd shift from one to the other and back again. This time, both stayed bad. Parts and maintenance are either not available or prohibitively expensive. Vintage gear gets like that.

So, I have to put the pictures elsewhere. I have them on their original disk, which I have hooked to the root DanceDB server...but the coding expects them elsewhere so I cannot easily make them visible. Ad hoc coding that grows over time is like that (see Micro$oft).

My aim is to move all of it to a more modern server (relatively modern, perhaps a 2007-vintage Mac Mini) and recode from scratch: more modular, less hardware-specific, and at least as bulletproof. If previous such projects are any indication, it'll be about 50x faster...so it's worth the effort. Plus, I can modernize the appearance somewhat; what was fine in the 1990s is a bit dated 25+ years later.

-ted