A “Quick” Upgrade
Married in Ohio was intermittently inaccessible late Monday evening while I was performing a software upgrade. It should have been offline less than 5 minutes; but it ended up being almost 10 times that long. I learn something every upgrade even though I don’t want too. It certainly would be a lot easier if I had a scratch monkey. Our blog certainly isn’t as valuable as Mabel; but it is still very frustrating when things don’t go as planned. Anyway, my point wasn’t to complain about software upgrades; we’re all very familiar with how much of a headache those can be. Excerpt; for a slight increase in speed; you should not notice anything different. If you do see something weird, please let me know via a comment, the shoutbox, or an email.
Um, what is a scratch monkey?
scratch monkey: n.
As in “Before testing or reconfiguring, always mount a scratch monkey”, a proverb used to advise caution when dealing with irreplaceable data or devices. Used to refer to any scratch volume hooked to a computer during any risky operation as a replacement for some precious resource or data that might otherwise get trashed.
This term preserves the memory of Mabel, the Swimming Wonder Monkey, star of a biological research program at the University of Toronto. Mabel was not (so the legend goes) your ordinary monkey; the university had spent years teaching her how to swim, breathing through a regulator, in order to study the effects of different gas mixtures on her physiology. Mabel suffered an untimely demise one day when a DEC field circus engineer troubleshooting a crash on the program’s VAX inadvertently interfered with some custom hardware that was wired to Mabel.
It is reported that, after calming down an understandably irate customer sufficiently to ascertain the facts of the matter, a DEC troubleshooter called up the field circus manager responsible and asked him sweetly, “Can you swim?” Not all the consequences to humans were so amusing; the sysop of the machine in question was nearly thrown in jail at the behest of certain clueless droids at the local ‘humane’ society. The moral is clear: When in doubt, always mount a scratch monkey.
I saw that you use WordPress. WordPress is cool! That’s what I use.
It’s so much faster than blogger. I hate blogger! Blogger freezes, stops running, or goes into a loop.
Kate: I am also my own System administrator. Usually, it doesn’t cause problems; but sometimes, not having a test system makes things much harder than it would be otherwise. On Sunday, I had one extra file from an older version of Apache. It was from a version I installed several years ago but didn’t cause any problems with any of the upgrades prior to the one on Sunday. Root causes are always so simple once you find them.
I really love WordPress. I’ve been using it since version 1.5. We were on blogger for a couple of months but WP is so much nicer. In addition to the base package being better, there are lots of cool plugins and widgets. I’m pretty good with PHP so I can “fix” plugins if they don’t do exactly what I want or make my own if need be.