Mokka mit Schlag » Software Development

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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OK, I think I’ve at least partially deborked the upgrade. There are still some problems with comments needing moderation. Holler if you notice any remaining problems. I still can’t figure out how to assign a category to a new post. I’m not sure if that’s remaining borkage or the new blog interface. (OK, got it: it’s the interface.)

The proximate cause was that the WordPress scripts did not have permission to create and drop tables. The underlying cause was a combination of classic programmer errors:
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I’ve upgraded WordPress on this site to version 2.5.1. For the first time, things did not go perfectly smoothly so please holler if you notice any problems.
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This is what happens when computer book titles are too sexy:

And here I thought they were recommending this because of all the gay porn I’d been buying. :-)

I’m not 100% sure why this site when down for a few hours yesterday. I thought it was a dead hard drive, and then a dead power adapter. Now I don’t know since it seems to all be working again. In any case I’ve been planning a move to a hosting service, and now seems like as good a time as any. I’m moving across the country in a couple of weeks though I haven’t yet found a place to live, so keeping the site going in the spare bedroom no longer seems like an easy choice. I hope to have the site transferred over to a more reliable host next week (or sooner if the Mac Mini goes down again.)