January 30th, 2007:

Fifth time’s the charm :-)

Jan 30th, 2007
by hadar.
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I googled to see whether other people were having trouble with the upgrade to WordPress 2.1. Most were successful on their first try, but a few people had problems that were similar to me.

I made two changes and tried again:

  1. I ensured that my user had full permissions on the DB
  2. I performed the upgrade from a fresh directory untar of 2.1 (previously, I untarr’ed on top of 2.0.7)

I doubt that #2 had any effect, but I may as well be complete in my report.

This time, everything went fine. This post is being brought to you courtesy of WordPress 2.1. Whew ;-)

Just joined Technorati

Jan 30th, 2007
by hadar.
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I thought I might keep this blog a secret, since I have nothing useful to say (seriously!). But, on the off chance that I can ruin someone else’s day by having them read this, that might make me feel a tad better about the things that I am ranting about to begin with ;-)

Technorati Profile

This is the post where I’m claiming my blog with them…

I’m officially a fool…

Jan 30th, 2007
by hadar.
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This (meaning, the title of this post) is not news to anyone who knows me :-)

For the purposes of this post, I interpret being a fool to “continuing to waste time trying to get the Dell Latitude L400 to be a stable machine for my purposes”. It should have been obvious to everyone (including me) that nothing was going to make this machine do what I want it to (for those needing a refresher, read this).

Anyway, as I mentioned at the end of that post, perhaps Windows 2000 would solve the problem. Yeah, right, what a fool…

Yesterday, I spent 8+ hours (mostly working on my real laptop, but keeping an eye on the “install”, “updates”, etc.) getting Windows 2000 running on the Dell. As with all previous attempts (with XP and Linux), hours and hours go by with the machine taking updates one after another, and not crashing even once. One actually deludes oneself into thinking “this time, it’s gonna work”…

I blogged about the results late in the afternoon, in a very long, detailed posting. Of course, it got lost, as you will see if you read my previous post today. :-(

I don’t have the energy, or inclination, to repeat all of the details. Suffice it to say that after 5 minutes (or less!) of streaming on the Slingbox, the machine halts every time. I would now guess that it’s perhaps a resource exhaustion issue, but the machine has even died in Linux, during a web browser session (which doesn’t preclude resource utilization, but doesn’t highlight it either).

Anyway, the machine is now relegated to the junk heap at worst, and at best, it will be a “spare” machine for guests to use as a browser toy (the vaunted “thin client”).

Good riddance!

Testing 1-2-3

Jan 30th, 2007
by hadar.
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I’m not a happy camper. I started out with WordPress 2.05. After the first post or two (or three), I upgraded to 2.07. That upgrade went flawlessly.

This past weekend, I upgraded to WordPress 2.1. The upgrade “failed”. The previous blog posts showed up fine, but I saw a SQL error in the part that shows which categories each post is in. A little digging, and it became obvious that one of the schema changes failed. Turns out that my “user” (at the MySQL level) had insert/update/delete rights, but not alter, etc. Ugh.

Nothing I did after granting those rights made it possible to re-run the “upgrade.php” script correctly. At least not that I could tell…

After reading some forum posts, I installed phpMyAdmin, and while looking at the updated schema file, I hand-edited the DB to add the appropriate columns and one new table. It seemed to work, as the SQL error went away.

Then yesterday, I wrote another long post complaining about my saga with the old Dell laptop. When I hit save, it “appeared” to save, but the post was gone, forever… The title was there, with a blank post. Another test, and sure enough, no posts were making it to the DB.

Man, the people that “encouraged” me to start blogging owe me quite a number of hours to be added back to my life (not that I’m anything less than a world-class time-waster all on my own, but I really didn’t need any help here) ;-)

So, I exported all of my previous posts (yep, all 5 of them). Today, I created a new DB, updated the wp-config.php to point to the new DB, made sure to grant my user ALL privileges on that DB, and re-ran the “wp-install.php” script. After that worked, I imported my posts, and voila, they are all back.

This post will be the “test” as to whether that solves my problem of posting in general…

Finally, while WordPress 2.1 seems to have cooler features in it, so far, in Firefox 2.0.0.1, the UI is hosed. The textarea that I am writing in spills into the sidebar on the right hand side (that worked perfectly in 2.07), and the only “fix” is to maximize the window to the entire screen (I’m running 1600×1200), which is annoying, to say the least…

P.S. No such luck. This post failed too. I have reverted back to 2.0.7. Even with a fresh install of 2.1, and no imports, I can’t post anything by a blank with a title :-( . This is a fresh install of 2.0.7, with the original posts imported, and this one as the “new” one…

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