martinmurphy.com - Martin Murphy

Saw this on LifeHacker, it’s a fun video from the onion about the Internet crashing:

Friday Fun: The Internet Crash of 2007 - Lifehacker

Well, after my earlier problems with the automated Fantastico upgrade, I did the “manual” upgrade to my Wordpress installation. I was moving from 2.0.6 to 2.2.1 following the instructions from Wordpress.

It all went perfectly. Well done on the instructions (and the software).

At the end of the upgrade instructions, there’s a section called
Special note for Fantastico Upgrades, which mentions removing the DB_CHARSET and DB_COLLATE parameters if upgrading with Fantistico. Presumably the DB_CHARSET parameter is what affected the accented characters in my earlier upgrade attempt. So, if upgrading Wordpress using Fantistico, read the manual instructions! (pity I didn’t see this earlier.) I expect this will soon find itself into the Fantastico procedures, or at least the documentation, however I think I’ll stick with the manual upgrade in future.

• Don’t upgrade just because there is a newer version available.
• Check the release notes and other documentation for any problems with the new software.
• Verify the upgrade in a test environment first. This is not always a realistic option, but if you don’t do it then backups become even more important.
• Backup your current live system (and verify the backup).
• Allow enough time for the upgrade of the live system.
• Verify everything is working correctly after the upgrade. This is the point where the problems appeared for me. However, I was able to revert to the earlier version - which had luckily been backed up by the software doing the installation and not me (I should learn to follow my own advice.)

In case you’re wondering, the problem was “just” a visual, where accented characters were not being displayed correctly in Wordpress 2.2, hopefully 2.2.1 fixes it. I’ll have to wait until I get some more time to do a test and a hand install, rather than the automated Fantastico install.

Just saw this post on TUAW: RubyCocoa 0.11.0 released - The Unofficial Apple Weblog TUAW

Looks interesting for anyone wanting to develop Mac applications in Ruby.

There is a new “blogging initiative” at work (well I think it’s new, I’m not there long myself). The company line seems to be that blogging is good for both the employer and the employee. The company has offered to setup blog hosting on their servers. It seems like a reasonable idea, but, I’m not convinced that the company website needs to be associated with the latest news at the local dog show, cinema, or companies alluding to the discovery perpetual motion machines. I’m equally unconvinced that local movie-goers, dog-lovers, or mad scientists are interested in advances in the state-of-the-art in telecommunications software and systems.

So I would suggest that personal blogs are good for subjects that the blogger is interested in, and that work blogs are useful for dissemenating project related info on a per project basis. In addition, seperate work CV pages can be used for “these are our incredibly smart employees” and “why you should put money into our project” pages. And because of hypertext links (which are fundanemtal to “the web”) all of these can be associated, while keeping their individual identies.
I’m interested in what other people think about this.

Wow! it’s been a while since the last post. Looks like August never happened. I must at least think about blogging a bit more often.

Mícheál Ó Foghlú links to this PDF slideset. I haven’t read it yet, but it sounds interesting.