Matt's Blog

So the debian upgrade went so well that today I upgraded to php 5.2. My drupal sites are working without any configuration changes whatsoever. I'm happy.

So the server is now running etch. The upgrade has gone effortlessly so far and I am terrified. Things can't be this easy.

A quote from C.A.R. "Quicksort" Hoare's 1981 address to the ACM, The Emperor s Old Clothes. It was framed in reference to the design of PL/1 but resonates very broadly.

``At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way - and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay.

So I have a cold. Sinuses blocked, pain, drooling, snot running down face, voice a whisper from the sore throat, and profoundly deaf. Time to go out to a midnight party!

I think I'll hust go to bed early.

Blogging is back. Hurray. The filtering code now actually filters. I am so happy.

Christmas dinner at Bec's house with Trevor as a guest.

So this is release candidate 1 and blogging is still broken. The permissions are all wrong and filtering doesn't work. The strange thing is this has been known about for over a month and patches have been submitted. I hope I don't have to look at this code. I'm not familiar with php and have no idea of the overall structure and APIs of drupal.

So I updated the server software to 6.0beta1 and the results seem ok so far. I am using only core modules in this blog so it was an easy choice to upgrade this instance of drupal. I have side by side installations of drupal based on version number and apache site config files pick their base directory as appropriate. The upgrade was pretty straight forward, but my attempts to set up a virgin site were more troublesome.

I went to my first ever meeting of the Windsor UNIX Users Group. This was there first meeting for a while and was just an informal chit-chat of five of us at the Coffee Exchange downtown. They were a very welcoming group and I hope that the WUUG manages to arrange more meetings in the future. Despite being a computer dilitente, I don't think I came across as a total idiot.

The discussion was pretty wide ranging, mostly people talking about the most recent interesting programming language/library/framework/device that had caught their fancy. I stammered a bit about Ruby on Rails and the Ruby programming language, not quite getting across their unique flavour, through sheer persistence capturing the attention of the group. I hope they invite me back.

I've just deleted 60 comment spams from my blog. It was just junk about prescription drugs that was supposed to influence google no doubt --- but I had turned html input off so it was just unformatted text making the whole exercise pointless for the spammer. Thst didn't stop them though. Now all anonymous comments will have to go through moderation before they will litter up the postings. Sigh.