Everything I used to bore people on newsgroups and mailing lists with, now in one inconvenient place.
I upgraded to WordPress 2.0 a few days ago. I just noticed today that the comment count isn’t incrementing when people post comments (although they do decrement when I delete a test comment). So there’s all those posts on my main page that say “Comments (0)” even though they have comments. And they’re not showing up in my “unread comments” plugin either.
I think I’m going to have to try turning off some plugins to see if that makes a difference. I hope it’s not SpamKarma.
Upgraded to WordPress 2.0. Looks like my highly customized Maple theme still works, as do all the important plugins. I still haven’t upgraded to Spam Karma 2.0, because the original Spam Karma works just fine for the pitiful small volume of spam I get these days.
The new editor looks nice.
…it’s because I’ve had to commit Seppuku to appease our Japanese customers.
A few days ago, based on a code review (which I unfortunately did on our 5.0 code base instead of the 3.6 code that they are using) and an examination of the customer logs, I confidently said that this mysterious changing value that they are seeing is due to one of them mucking around with changing values in Webmin. I found at least one case where that had happened, and like House my default assumption is that the user is always lying, because that’s usually the case. My confidence was reported up the line by my boss, and from him to the Japanese support people, and from them to the customer.
So yesterday I was taking another look at the logs, and I found that as well as the case where they had messed around with the values themselves, I found another case where the values had changed “spontaneously”. Oh oh. And then I remembered the cache of these values I’d put in in 3.1, and how hard it had been to get everybody who used the cache to understand that if they used the cache they had to listen for a particular message, and when they got that message they had to call a method to flush and reload the cache, and how some of the other developers don’t seem to get the concept of Singletons and how something they call in one thread can affect something that happens after that thread is dead and another one spawned off, and because of that in 4.0 I’d gotten rid of the cache entirely.
After apologizing, I’m going to have some backporting to do.
Why is it that when called on to apologize to the touchy Japanese customers I feel this Basil Fawlty voice in the back of my mind saying “Don’t mention the war” over and over again? I have trouble reconciling the delicate sensibilities of the Japanese and with the brutal butchers who bayonetted Canadian nurses in Hong Kong at Christmas 1941 or who casually beheaded surrendered prisoners being force marched in Bataan. I guess that’s not very culturally sensitive of me.
1) You can’t even count on your own project’s QA team members not to lie and say “I didn’t change anything” when they really mean “I manually edited this vital configuration file and totally botched the syntax of the start time parameter”.
2) If you need to get a screen dump of the login screen on a machine that isn’t network attached, and so therefore you can’t just use VNC to do it, you can do
chvt 7 ; sleep 5 ; XAUTHORITY=/var/gdm/:0.Xauth DISPLAY=:0.0 xwd -root > login.xwd
You youngsters might want to use the import program instead of xwd if it’s available. But then you’ll never know the joys of stringing together a half dozen pnm commands and getting it right the first time. Damn kids. Get off my lawn.
Vicki and I both upgraded to Firefox 1.5 (on Mac OS X) in the last couple of weeks. Vicki went first, and she had a problem with something that went away when she uninstalled all the extensions she uses and reinstalled them. Then after a short time she found it was so unstable that she switched to Safari. Then I noticed that I couldn’t get Flash to work on any site. I tried uninstalling FlashBlock, and that didn’t help. I tried upgrading to Flash 8, and that didn’t help. Eventually I discovered that if I go into my profiles directory (in ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/foo) and deleted all the extensions related files and directories, Flash worked again. I installed FlashBlock and the Google Toolbar, but I can’t seem to find the BugMeNot extension. Oh well, I guess I’ll have to do that the old fashioned way.
But it seems like Firefox really screwed up when it comes to upgrading when you have extensions installed.