Mokka mit Schlag » Software Development

Dreams do come true. Chandler 1.0 has been
released. The client component is written in mostly Python and the server in mostly Java. I’ll have to try this out a little later today.

I’m beginning to feel like I can write this story on autopilot:

Our companies web site uses a content managment system whose interface is all browser based. Turning the GSA loose on our web site using an administrative account ended up wiping out 85% of our web site’s content thru the execution of delete actions from web page links in the administrative interface of the content managment system.

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The CMS system we use is built in coldfusion (which we’re rapidly moving away from to .NET sometime next year.). These coldfusion pages have buttons / images all hyperlinked to perfrom different actions for content records, content folders, and unfortunately whole web site instances. One of these hyperlinked image buttons deletes the content when clicked, which the crawler furiously did last night.

And just in case anybody didn’t get the point the first two times I ran this story:
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I tried Firefox 3 on Windows and I liked it there, but on the Mac? Bleah. It looks like a bad knockoff of Safari but without the attention to detail that signifies Apple products. A lot of the icons are ugly, and off by just a pixel here or there. You’d think one pixel wouldn’t make that much difference but it does. Plus I actually preferred the traditional Firefox 2 chrome to the Safari style brushed metal widgets.

Plus it’s perceptually much slower than Firefox 2. I’m a 20 WPM typist at best and I’m typing faster than Firefox can enter text into this form. The characters are several words behind where I’m typing about half the time.
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While I wasn’t looking, WordPress somehow decategorized most, but not all, of the over 700 posts on this site. However it did this mostly to older posts so I didn’t notice at first. However the result of this is that most of the URLs have now changed, and many things that shouldn’t be in the birding category now seem to be; for instance, this post about Mac OS X Leopard. In addition the category pages such as Sci Fi now are virtually empty.

I can see no alternative but to go through and manually recategorize all 730 posts on this site as time permits. If I do 10 a day I’ll be finished in three months. Bleah.

I am increasingly unpleased with WordPress. I’m going to stop recommending it to others, and will seriously consider any alternatives that come along.

For a change this is about software bugs, not insects. :-) Ever have a reverse mystery bug? This is not one that’s hard to find or understand, but one that’s brutally easy to understand and fix. The mystery is how the code ever worked in the first place. I had one of those this morning.

The AppleScript I use to manage the quotes of the day on Cafe con Leche stopped working mysteriously. Running the script with the result log open made the problem obvious: it couldn’t find the file index.html in my cafeconleche directory. Well, that’s an easy fix. The file isn’t named index.html and hasn’t been for many moons. It’s named index.phtml (because it uses PHP to include some files). I changed the name of the file the script was trying to open to index.phtml, and all was well.

But here’s what I don’t understand: why didn’t this break yesterday? and the day before that? and the day before that? It was working just fine until this morning. was there a symlink from the old index.html name, and if so why did it vanish? Was my script updated previously, and somehow got replaced by an older version? And if so, how and why?
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I couldn’t figure out how to fix the comments problem introduced by the recent upgrade so I restored the database from backup, and ran the upgrade one more time. There were still a number of error messages:
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