Web Server Catastrophe

On March 5th, the server that has faithfully run the Brianstorms blog (as well as all my other personal sites) crashed big-time. Power supply basically gave out, as did the motherboard. And neither of those were any help for the ancient 8.4GB IDE drive, which is now corrupted.

The good news, sorta, is I had backups. The bad news, for sure, is that this machine was so old, that the operating system and even the database format used by the MovableType blog software have for all intents and purposes become obsolete. Specifically, FreeBSD -- who uses that anymore? Well, in 2001, it was a pretty hot, well-regsrded-as-secure, operating system alternative to Linux. So I went with it. And this machine worked like a champ for all these years.

Mistakes were made, however. I never upgraded the blog software. I was just starting to, actually, beginning last month. It's actually pretty difficult to upgrade from super-ancient MovableType version 2.661 to version 3.0 and then version 3.1, and then version 3.2, which is the path you have to go through before you can upgrade to the current 4.x version supported by SixApart today.

But the big problem is the underlying data for the blog. In all those years I never installed mysql and so relied on MovableType's support for the primitive Berkeley DB flat-file data system to store the blog data. That turns out to have been a REALLY BAD THING.

See, somewhere along the lines, someone got the bright idea to update the internal file format of the Berkeley DB files. And that meant that new programs could not read old data unless the old data got converted. Well, that seems to have been a reasonable chore for a few years, but the problem here is that, face it, MORE THAN A FEW YEARS HAVE PASSED. Which means, in terms of a website, it is in DEEP VOODOO.

The good news is, you see that Brianstorms is up again. Well, the hardware running it is brand-new, super insanely fast, and should run for years reliably. However, I couldn't get FreeBSD to run on this new server, so I switched to Ubuntu Server, a very popular Linux alternative that lots of people seem to like these days. It installed on the machine flawlessly and I was up within 10 minutes. BUT . . . Ubuntu is 2009, and sure, it has support for Berkeley DB, at least the NEWER version. So, MovableTYpe when installed on Ubuntu, inherits the support for the newer version of Berkeley DB. And when I installed the backups of Brianstorms, complete with old-style DB format, MovableType couldn't read it.

I've been troubleshooting this mess for several days now and STILL cannot get MovableType to read the data. Yes, I've installed all sorts of Berkeley DB packages like the one on the Oracle site. Yes, I know about the MovableType Knowledge Base support page that talks about this very problem and what to do to solve it (I've followed those instructions to the letter and still, epic fail).

So, things are going to look strange on this blog for a while still. This post is not even a blog post -- I am manually typing in the index.html file using the VI editor, rather than using MovableType since that DOESN'T WORK ahem *grumble*. Indeed, I even manually hacked the RSS feed so that it would appear that this story is a new blog post.

If things don't work out in the next day or two, I'm going to just say screw it, and not restore the database at all. Instead, I'll create a brand-new Brianstorms from scratch, and link to all the archived pages from 2002 thru early 2009. But they'll be HTML only, non-searchable, and not part of the new MovableType. That's Plan Z, which may seem pretty drastic, but I've already tried PLan A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, and T. I'm running out of plans, and the last one is gonna be Z.

Stay tuned.

Danger! Live Microphone

Republican pundits think they're off the air. They're not. Funny how what they say off-air completely contradicts what they say on-air. How come?

Finger Dislocation.

Believe it not, this was not my broken finger today. It was my dislocated finger. Stumbled at the end of a movie in a darkened theatre; credits rolling; I start to get up, reach for arm rest, realize too late it's not there, but I've gotten up too fast, nowhere to grab ahold, lose balance, little finger goes between two theatre chairs as I fall back, finger bends like 90 degrees, SNAP, dislocation.

Five hours in the ER, three sessions of various docs pulling my finger apart with ferocious medieval intensity in an attempt to get the bones back together in their proper configuration; three sessions of x-rays; operating room prepped for a surgery; me not to happy about going under for surgery on my pinky; last attempt at re-setting my finger WORKED! No operation needed, went home with a splint and a prescription for painkillers.

All that just to see a movie.

Here's a shot of three doctors pulling with all their strength, trying to enable my dislocated finger bone to pop back into place:

I shared my surprise at the primitive solutions the docs employed for re-setting dislocated joints. One doc's reply: "This is nothing. You should see what they do for dislocated hips!"

Stanley Kubrick's Boxes

Fascinating documentary: Stanley Kubrick's Boxes, freely available in its entirety on Google Video. If you're a Kubrick fan, it is a must-see.

What I particularly loved were the (cinematographer's in-joke?) camera tracking shots straight down the center of aisle after aisle of shelving holding the aforementioned boxes. The dead-on-center camera perspective being a Kubrick trademark throughout his films:

Aggressive ... Prius Drivers!??

Nothing sillier looking, frankly, than watching Priuses speeding along at 80-90mph, weaving through traffic, cutting people off, and generally acting like _____ drivers (you fill in the blank).

I mean . . . Priuses?

But that is what I saw. A bunch of times. In the Bay Area, on I-5 in the middle of the state, and in the LA area on the drive home.

Drivers Beware: there's a new breed of madman, and he's behind the wheel of a Prius.

Eventful for iPhone

Find out more here.

Almost Five

Another week, and it'll pass $5 for sure.

AP Words

"I'm not the only one who's a little surprised," said the author of this blog post, "with the Associated Press's attitude towards bloggers. It seems antiquated. They are making themselves look out-of-touch with today's Internet."

Considering the threats from the AP and the fact that this entire post is lifted verbatim, at least one word at a time, from copyrighted AP news stories, this blogger would like to know what the AP is going to do about it.

Thanks to Google News (and of course, the Associated Press) for making this blog post possible.

BarCations

Bill Moyers Speech

Every American citizen should watch and listen to this speech.

Waiting for Godin

Try it. Go to his blog, and scroll to the very bottom of the browser page. No "next", no "previous", no links whatsoever. Considering this is Seth Godin, you'd think he'd want to make it very easy for you to keep reading.

Or maybe the point is, buy his books instead, and the blog is designed as the teaser?

Seth? What's the answer?

McGuinn Twittering

How many other people out there can answer this way to Twitter's question, "what are you doing?":

• "Had the greatest time today with astronauts! Went on the ramp to the shuttle."


• "Trying to put a photo on my Wikipedia page is extremely difficult! I put it up they delete it and say 'You aren't Roger McGuinn himself'"


• "Bruce Springsteen invited me on stage last night"


• "Watching "Forrest Gump" on AMC ... the movie that paid off my house in the 90s :-) Byrds "Turn Turn Turn" in it."

Reading Roger is the antidote to reading so many boring digerati wannabes.

Charlie Rose on Charlie Rose