Corruption

I've just returned from a week out of town (MacWorld in NYC) - two interesting things have happened. First off, this website got a mention in the New York Times! (free registration required - then look halfway down the page for "A Man and His Stuff") That's a very pleasant experience. Secondly, on the same day the website was mentioned the http server (apache) started to die for no apparent reason.

If you're reading this on or after the 20th, then you're lucky, because it's still not clear to me why this is happening. I've turned off translations - except for the links below - just to see if it'll make any difference (not so far), and I've also removed the links to the search page (htdig is not working correctly, and it won't update itself). The logs aren't showing anything particularly helpful either, but I'll get it sussed eventually.

OK, I think I've got it - the error_log had been corrupted, and when apache tried to log an error it was crapping out. I think. We'll see if it happens again, now that I've replaced the error_log. The Search page works again, after I manually updated the htdig databases, and that's a good sign, don't you think?

I'm going to leave the Translations links turned off, because I think the errors that were being added to the error_log had Unicode characters in them, which were causing the trouble.