Sleepless in MySQL

It’s not often that you wake up in the mid­dle of the night with the solu­tion to a prob­lem. In this case, the prob­lem was this blog. If you’ve read any­thing between yes­ter­day and today, you’d have either seen noth­ing, the out-0f-the-box Word­Press ‘Hello World’ post­ing, or some­thing from me about Blog Amnesia.

What fol­lows is some­what geeky, so if you don’t care about data­bases, domain names or any of that, feel free to skip to the end:

The sit­u­a­tion was that in the mid­dle of the move from one ISP to another, the export file I had from the pre­vi­ous copy of the blog refused to be imported by the new copy. I had down­loaded a backup of all of the files, graph­ics, and other data, but all of the posts, com­ments, cat­e­gories, blogroll and any other text were still locked up in the MySQL data­base on the old sys­tem. What’s worse, in order to install the new copy, I had edited the DNS records to point loudmurmurs.com to the new ISP, so I had lit­er­ally lost my con­nec­tion to the old site.

Then, at 3:51 AM, I awoke with a start. Maybe I could con­nect to the old site, through its IP address. But where would that be? Of course! The FTP pro­gram I had used to upload files when I first set it up at that address! For­tu­nately I had never both­ered to replace the IP with the domain name after the site went live.

So, I crept over to my office, (not want­ing to wake Pam) fired up the browser and copied the IP address in: It worked! I con­nected to the web-based Con­trol Panel for the site on the old ISP, and launched PHP­MyAd­min. Through that web inter­face, I man­aged to export the data­base of post­ings, com­ments, and other data to a MySQL export file, which I down­loaded to my computer.

Then I went to import that file into the new, empty blog: No dice. I kept get­ting errors. ‘OK, at least I have the data’, I told myself, and went back to bed.

In the morn­ing, as I exam­ined the errors, it became clear that the SQL export file that I was cre­at­ing needed to over­write the exist­ing data, even if it had some dupli­cate entries and needed to cre­ate some new tables. Why was I cre­at­ing new tables? To make mat­ters worse, I dis­cov­ered that I was mov­ing data from a ver­sion 2.25 Word­Press data­base, to v 2.3 and data tables had dif­fer­ent names, dif­fer­ent rela­tion­ships, etc. — Oh great…

After about 3 or 4 tries, I suc­ceeded in import­ing all the data.

Then I looked at my new blog. I was very relieved when I saw the first page, look­ing pretty much as it should, but then I saw that none of the links worked, and that there were no Cat­e­gories. So, I brought up the new blog’s Dash­board. ‘You need to upgrade your Word­Press Data­base’, it said. I clicked on Con­tinue. After a minor glitch reported by the upgrade script, I saw the stan­dard blog Dash­board. I gulped, and clicked on the ‘View Site’ link…

This time, every­thing from the past 2 1/2 years was there, and as far as I can tell, it all seems to be work­ing. My dreams of IP addresses, PHP­MyAd­min and MySQL ended up get­ting back my 265 post­ings and 419 com­ments. I guess that it really is true that you con­tinue to work on prob­lems in your sleep. This is first time, how­ever, that I ever awoke with a ‘Eureka’.

The Autumn Semester

For those not famil­iar with the prac­tice, blog­gers some­times see an inter­est­ing idea that they think might stim­u­late some cre­ativ­ity out in the world, so they invite oth­ers (by ‘tag­ging’ them) to try their hand at the same sub­ject or meme…
So, my friend and fel­low blog­ger Mak­taaq, I accept your chal­lenge, which is:

…to describe 5–6 imag­i­nary courses, each intended to ‘fix up some­thing in my life’ (or, as I also inter­pret it, improve it, given newly acquired knowl­edge or skills). I get to use at least one course from the tag­ger, since it’s more fun to go to classes with a friend. Finally, I get to tag 5 oth­ers, which I’ll do at the end. So, School is In Session…

First, the courses I’d take with Mak­taaq? Let’s start with the obvious:

Arach­nid Wran­gling 102
On suc­cess­ful com­ple­tion of the course you will be able to undergo suc­cess­ful removal of spi­ders and scor­pi­ons from your envi­ron­ment, both with uten­sils and bare hands.
Pre­req­ui­site: Insect Squash­ing 101.

We’ve dis­cov­ered that while there are rel­a­tively few insects to be found in our home here (cer­tainly far fewer than the num­bers that we used to deal with back in Boston and in trips to Ver­mont and New Hamp­shire), there are a lot of spi­ders. And by a lot, I mean that every other week I have to kill one in the tub in the morn­ing, and that’s no fun before a shower or even hav­ing fully woken up. Pam is very fright­ened of spi­ders, and a large one in the kitchen had her wear­ing shoes for dish wash­ing, since my inef­fec­tual swipe at him caused him to scurry under the stove.
Here’s the other course of Maktaaq’s that I’d also take:

Dec­o­ra­tive Flour­ishes 499
Impress poten­tial lovers and intim­i­date your min­ions with a mere pen! This stu­dio course is for any­one who needs a dra­matic sig­na­ture. Using Eliz­a­bethan and Medieval Euro­pean sources, stu­dents will learn develop their own exag­ger­ated hand­writ­ing through the study of Celtic crosses, curlicues, flour­ishes and twisty things. Assign­ments include sign­ing credit cards and spray can tag­ging. Pre­req­ui­site: Scrib­bling 100.

While I do have a fairly fancy sig­na­ture, I’ve always been impressed with cal­lig­ra­phy, etc. Besides, when­ever I do actu­ally write any­thing, it often looks like a bad ver­sion of Archi­tect print­ing.
And what other courses would I take? Let’s see…

Orga­ni­za­tion for the Neatness-Challenged 4002
Not sure how to get your mess under con­trol? This class will deal with spa­tial and tem­po­ral orga­ni­za­tional effec­tive­ness in a vari­ety of spaces and sit­u­a­tions. Get some valu­able tips for deal­ing with infor­ma­tion and paper over­load.
Pre­req­ui­site: Paper Shred­ding 4001

British Colum­bia Geog­ra­phy 399
Clue­less about where all of those places in the Lower Main­land are? Can’t tell Nootka from Bella Coola (or even Bela Lugosi?) This course will get you straight­ened out, with numer­ous field trips to var­i­ous BC geo­log­i­cal and cul­tural land­marks. Stu­dents will com­pare topo­log­i­cal maps to actual ter­rain via heli­copter and float-plane fly-overs, and at the end of the semes­ter, the class will pool their newly gained knowl­edge at a Spa retreat in Tofino.
Pre­req­ui­site: None, except for a hefty tuition fee

Speed Read­ing 205
Using a vari­ety of tech­niques, stu­dents will endeavor to dou­ble, triple, and even­tu­ally quin­tu­ple their read­ing speed while gain­ing com­pre­hen­sion and reten­tion of mate­r­ial, with the ulti­mate goal of ingest­ing Dostoevsky’s The Broth­ers Kara­ma­zov in 23 min­utes.
Pre­req­ui­site: Read­ing Glasses for those who are los­ing their vision. That means you, Drucker.

Effi­cient Sleep Tech­niques 102
Are you get­ting enough sleep? More accu­rately, is your sleep get­ting you enough? Learn how to cram 7–8 hours of sleep into a sin­gle hour. Through 5 minute ‘power naps’, learn to oper­ate at peak effi­ciency fort weeks with­out sig­nif­i­cant time spent toss­ing and turn­ing in bed. At the end of the course, stu­dents will be graded on the qual­ity and inten­sity of their snooz­ing. Extra credit will include nap­ping prac­tice as well as indi­vid­ual projects in directed dream­ing.
Pre­req­ui­site: Begin­ning Sleep 101

Now, who do I tag? Let’s see what Isabel, Gene, Nancy, John and Monique can with this…

Good Meal, Weak Greenback

Back West

I know it’s been a week, but I did want to get some stuff in, even if it is just a lit­tle stale. Pam asked me where I’d like to go out to cel­e­brate my birth­day, and after some thought, I set­tled on a place we had been before, but it had been quite a while. It was West, which wowed all of us back in June of 2006, when we ate there with my par­ents, who were visiting.

West is the kind of place where you go for a big-deal meal, the kind where you are cel­e­brat­ing, the food is top-notch in every way, and the ser­vice is always atten­tive and pro­fes­sional. They rou­tinely win all sorts of awards for the food, ser­vice and wine (which are framed and hung along the hall­way on the way to the rest rooms).

Lit­tle had changed from our first visit — and this is a good thing. I started with a Leek soup, which held a del­i­cate sliver of potato in a ring, like the han­dle of a small bas­ket, arched over a fas­ci­nat­ing ‘hour-long cooked egg’ (an egg that had been care­fully cooked over low heat until it was some­where between a solid and a sauce) in the cen­tre of it. Pam had three gor­geous ‘beet sand­wiches’, each made of 2 slices of thin crim­son beet slices sur­rounded local goat cheese, topped with a rasp­berry sauce and lemon shreds. My main course was a duck breast (always my favourite, and after all, it was my birth­day din­ner) with a rich, brown sauce, served over a small mound of chopped kale and some other ingre­di­ent (couldn’t place it) that added flavour and rich­ness. Pam had Arc­tic Char, served over deep green leaves of barely-cooked baby spinach. We each opted for a glass of dif­fer­ent wine, for me a Span­ish red (not a Rioja, another favourite, but close). Pam chose a New Zealand Sauvi­gnon Blanc, a cit­rusy wine my par­ents intro­duced us to years ago.

The kitchen then made a mis­take, and sent Pam a dessert that she hadn’t ordered (and with the ‘Happy Birth­day’ writ­ten on to the plate in choco­late sauce; They assumed it was her hav­ing the birth­day), and shortly later they brought our reg­u­lar desserts — for Pam a pineap­ple tart made with almond frangi­pani (about which I later learned, “There is an unclear lin­guis­tic con­nec­tion between frangi­pani the flower; Frangi­pani, the noble­man per­fume maker to King Louis XIII of France and the food prod­uct.”). For me, I indulged in 3 cheeses, includ­ing a ter­rific goat camem­bert called ‘Juli­ette’ that I had tasted at the food show ear­lier in the year and had been search­ing for ever since, and an absolutely phe­nom­e­nal bleu cheese, a Bleu D’Auvergne. (Now I know that Auvergne is not only good for folk songs but also cheese!). With my cheese, I had a glass of Sauternes, which I’d describe as a bit of con­cen­trated sun­shine, and just as pow­er­ful. I’ve never had much Sauternes, being a big Port lover, so this was a pleas­ant sur­prise. Oddly enough, the wine and cheese were the most mem­o­rable part of the meal, despite the duck being very good (but just not as mem­o­rable). I think I’ve been miss­ing good wine so much that when I get it I really enjoy it.

Loonie Power
Unless you’ve been fol­low­ing the exchange rate between the US and Canada as we have (and for most folks in the US it’s not a topic of con­ver­sa­tion), you might be sur­prised to find out that for the first time in 30 years, the Cana­dian Dol­lar is on par, and on its way to being worth more than the US Dol­lar. Thank good­ness we didn’t wait longer to move up here, or we’d be a lot poorer. When we first arrived, the exchange rate was roughly 1.25 Cana­dian to 1.00 in the dol­lar. That can make a big dif­fer­ence when you’re buy­ing a house or liv­ing off sav­ings from con­verted US dol­lars while wait­ing for work per­mits, etc.

I don’t know how per­ma­nent this exchange rate will be, nor do I have a clue how high the Cana­dian dol­lar will even­tu­ally go. Some say that it will con­tinue to rise, and oth­ers say that the Cana­dian econ­omy (par­tic­u­larly the man­u­fac­tur­ing, raw mate­ri­als and even the local film indus­try) can’t han­dle this, as the for­mer weak­ness of the Cana­dian cur­rency meant that US busi­ness could depend on an auto­matic ‘dis­count’ of sorts for com­pa­ra­ble goods and ser­vices. Nev­er­the­less, as trade with the US is always going to be a big part of the econ­omy here (or at least until Canada can really get its act together regard­ing trade with China and oth­ers), this new world where our dol­lars are worth the same (or more) as US dol­lars is going to take some get­ting used to. The only thing I can add is that it just looks like another fail­ure that Bush, or WPIUSH can claim. There is noth­ing this man touches that does not end up being lost, be it cur­rency value or human lives.

In the near term, I am sure that we’ll be going shop­ping ‘south of the bor­der’ (and I don’t mean Mex­ico), more often. Even gaso­line via Point Roberts might be worth the dis­tance and the wait.

The Puppet Speaks for Me

I know I’ve blogged in the past about this, but here’s more Cana­dian iPhone Angst.

It’s so frus­trat­ing that Europe is going to buy this before we do. Heck, at this rate, Botswana, East Timor and (yes, iiiss nii­ice!) Kaza­khstan will get the iPhone before we do. Or so it feels that way when taunted this way.

By the way, Apple is not the only one taunt­ing us. I keep get­ting mes­sages on the TiVo about how we can down­load free pilots for all of the new shows on the US Net­works with the Ama­zon ‘Unboxed’ fea­ture on our TiVo. Except when I get to the screen to do the down­load, I get an error mes­sage com­plain­ing that I don’t have a US billing address, so for­get it. Sim­i­larly, if I go to nbc.com (who I won’t even dig­nify with a link), where I’m sup­posed to be able to see pre­vi­ous episodes of shows like “30 Rock” or “Heroes”, they actu­ally check my IP address and block me from see­ing the video, even though we do, in fact get the NBC net­work here:

Hey, these are old episodes, not even the new stuff. Why don’t they just come out and tell me to go and bit­torent the stuff myself. Oh right, I for­got; that would be illegal.

In the words of the pup­pet frog: “FIX IT!”

So now I'm a Online Advocate?

A cou­ple of weeks ago I got an email and sub­se­quently a quick phone call from a reporter for the Wes­t­en­der news­pa­per, a local (and when I say local, I mean really local, as in West End of Van­cou­ver). Magda Ibrahim and I had a short chat about the electricity-powered buses around town, in par­tic­u­lar, the new ones. She took some quotes from me, and put it into the issue I found in our lobby this after­noon. Of course, it has an online equiv­a­lent.

The part where I’m quoted is right near the beginning:

David Drucker, an online advo­cate for an improved tran­sit sys­tem in Van­cou­ver, says his main con­cern is that the new trol­leys appear to have the same flaws as the old ones.

“It’s nice to see the invest­ment, and they’re obvi­ously being well used, but $273 mil­lion is a lot of money, and I’d have expected the sys­tem to be vastly improved with that,” says Drucker. “The over­head lines them­selves are not really bad, but it’s quite a shame that the bus poles lose their con­nec­tion to them so often. Not a week goes by that I don’t see some dri­ver trudg­ing out with their tem­po­rary orange uni­form to coax the poles back into their over­head tracks.

“A design that keeps the poles more con­nected might help the sit­u­a­tion, or, at the very least, clear direc­tions and warn­ings to dri­vers of the most pre­car­i­ous places — if they don’t know already.”

Drucker adds that he is not impressed with the seat­ing in the new trol­leys; they have 30 seats — eight fewer than the old ones — but can hold an extra 12 peo­ple in total because of increased stand­ing room. The pull-down seats at the front of the bus have proved to be a strug­gle for older people.

Not bad, I’d say. The only thing she didn’t include was my com­ment about that odd seat at the front left of the bus, right behind the dri­ver. It isn’t so much a seat as a strange, cush­ion that looks like it might be some­thing to lean against, although no one does.

At any rate, here I am, now an expert. (Hardly) I’m just a rider, and these days, it seems I’m rid­ing the diesel ones (the 84 to and from the VCC/Clark Sky­train and the 123 from work to and from the Brent­wood Sta­tion). Still, I guess those two years or so being car-less in the city gave me the right to 15 min­utes of West Ender fame. Or per­haps 5. At least I didn’t sound like an idiot, did I?