Category: Geekery

Developer dumbassedness

Every morning, there is an ISO of the new build of our software in the drop box. If any of your code is new in this build, you’re expected to “integration test” your code to make sure it at least doesn’t make anything worse. Most people do it on the Integration Test Plex but some of us have our own mini-plexes cobbled together out of obsolete equipment.

This morning, I installed the ISO on my mini-plex as per usual. Only problem: my entire content directory was missing, and none of the software would run because it had evidently been compiled with Java 1.6 and the mini-plex has Java 1.5 installed on it. It turns out that one of the developers who doesn’t work with us very closely put together a new installation procedure that requires a special DVD instead of our normal installation procedure that is supposed to reformat our content directory as XFS, and upgrade it to CentOS 5.1. When I complained that nobody told us that we needed to follow a special upgrade procedure, he said “why didn’t you wait until it passed integration testing?”. Because I was trying to integration test it, dumbass!

Some upgrades work, and others don’t

After yesterday’s success upgrading Gallery, I decided it was time to upgrade the Browncroft Neighborhood Association CMS. It was running Drupal 5.1, and I see from the Drupal web site that the currently supported versions are 5.7 and 6.1. So first I tried upgrading to 5.7, and that worked fine. Then I tried upgrading to 6.1, and that failed horribly. Fortunately, both times I made a copy of the site on a test address in order to try the upgrade, which allowed me to try a few different approaches.

The upgrade to 5.7 didn’t require all the stuff they always tell you to do, like turning off all the optional modules and setting your theme to the default. The second upgrade failed silently a couple of times until I did it by the book and *did* turn off the optional modules. And that’s when I discovered that the upgrade script failed on some “ALTER TABLE” commands, which makes me think that it was expecting a newer version of PostgreSQL than the one I have installed.

I note that Debian Etch has both PostgreSQL 7.4 and PostgreSQL 8.1 packages available. I installed 7.4 because it was the default. But from work, I know 8.1 has more “ALTER TABLE” commands than 7.4. So now I’m trying to figure out just how I go about changing my 7.4 installation to 8.1 without breaking Drupal, Gallery, and all my custom configuration. So, lazyweb? Anybody out there do that upgrade and know?

Another weekend, another upgrade

A year or so ago, I tried to upgrade my Gallery from Gallery 2.1 to Gallery 2.2. I was promised all sorts of amazing new things if I did so, including much better CAPCHAs so I could re-enable comments. But the upgrade blew up terribly and required a very time consuming restore from backup. So I got some help from the nice people on the Gallery forums, fixed some database problems, and tried again. This time I’d been smart enough to make the backup locally, so the restore wasn’t quite so painful, but suffice it to say it blew up again. The nice people on the forums gave me more things to try to fix the database, but I’d had my fill of restoring from backups and so while I did the things they suggested to fix the database, I didn’t do the upgrade.

Today I decided to be adventurous, and I tried the upgrade. And lo and behold, it actually worked! Only a few little glitches, mostly errors when trying to rebuild thumbnails, but I think that’s because Gallery currently doesn’t handle PDFs very well.

The upshot is, if you’re a user of the gallery, and see anything wrong, please let me know. I’m going to turn on comments, so let me know if you see spam as well.

The change of life

I’ve always been a book learner. I’ve learned just about everything I know about computers from books, sometimes from books bought in order to learn something I said I knew to be read in between the time I said I knew it and the time I’ve started the job where I was supposed to know it. Hell, even when I was in school I used to read in class instead of paying attention to the professors. But lately, between my internet addiction and all the other distractions in life, I just don’t seem to be able to get through text books the way I used to. Glancing over at my book shelf, I can see books on Ruby on Rails and Ajax that I intended to read once and become and instant expert on, just like I always used to, but which I ended up reading two or three chapters, wandering away, and never coming back. And that’s not to mention the growing pile of unread or barely skimmed magazines that has to be culled every few months for fear of them taking over the house.
Continue reading “The change of life”

For the first time since learning Java, I wish I was doing C++

I started doing C++ back just before cfront 2.0 just came out. For those of you not paying attention, cfront was a program that turned C++ code into C code, and then fed that into the C compiler. There wasn’t any such thing as native C++ compiler, or C++-aware debuggers. It was “fun”, especially when you got a core dump and you had to read a symbol like “foo_vt0_bar_xyzzy” and figure out that this meant that it had something to do with a virtual method in foo called something like bar. And of course, the line numbers in the backtrace were no help at all because the generated code bore little resemblance to what you’d written. Cfront 2.0 was when multiple inheritance was first introduced into C++, and I think it was around 1989 or so. I know I went to Usenix in Baltimore a few months later to take a class in C++ from Stanley Lippman, who’d written a book whose title he’d insisted on pronouncing as if the word “primer” was derived from “prim” rather than “prime”.
Continue reading “For the first time since learning Java, I wish I was doing C++”