Well, this past Unplugged Sunday has really taken hold. About 3-4 PM, hurricane Ike rolled into central Ohio bringing hurricane force 75-80 MPH winds that just tore things up. We were without power for about 18 hours and as of this morning still have no internet (I’m typing this on my lunch break at work.) Nothing like what Texas experienced, but the worst hurricane I’ve experienced in Ohio. Thankfuly, the wind came alone, no rain to add insult to injury.
There are still over 150,000 without power here in the Columbus area and it all won’t be back to normal until next week some time. My neighborhood of relatively young trees (12-15 years) still saw many go down, some roofs & gutters were lost as well. We fared just fine, in fact because our patio was on the leeward side of the house, Emily and I spent a little while outside watching the wind. The kids enjoyed two beautiful fall days off school. The Columbus City Schools (not our district) has taken 4 days off this week due to power issues. The state only allows 5 ‘calamity’ days per year, and we haven’t seen any snow yet.
Depending on when things come back on at home, I may be silent for a little while longer. Not that anyone likely noticed …
I Remember
Seven years and the memory starts to fade, but like my parent’s generation and JFK’s assassination, I remember just where I was standing when Tower 1 fell and the world changed.
I was in Big Bear, a supermarket that no longer exists, standing in line buying 1 pound bags of M&Ms for a project at work. The store had brought a TV on a cart up to the check out area and those of us in line watched as the tower came down. I don’t remember any words being spoken, no words were necessary – or adequate.
Before I sat in our morning scheduling meeting and we laughed that some knucklehead had flown his plane into the WTC. We assumed it had been one guy in a Cessna at that time. We were naive.
I spent the rest of the workday trying to stay on task, but in reality hitting refresh on CNN.com.
I spent the night until I couldn’t keep my eyes open watching CNN, waiting for the amazing rescue story that never came.
Seven years later and it wasn’t until I read some other posts that I paused to think about that day. Memories fade, but I’m not sure that this one should.
Where were you? What do you remember?
Unplugged Sunday Followup
What a great day it was, though. Starting with an outdoor church service, then a few hours of letterboxing followed by a little relaxing & reading, dinner on the patio, cutting the grass and then a game of Rummikub with Maria & the girls.
Ironically, the day started with some surprise clouds rolling in which prompted a check of the weather radar on TV to see if we were going to be rained out at church, and letterboxing clues are all listed on line, so we had to get on to find those. But we limited out ‘plugged in’ activities to those two things, which were only to make our unplugged day a success.
The hint that this was overdue came as the day rolled on and I felt increasingly compelled to check-in online with my email and blogs. Yeah, I’m too plugged in.
A very good day, and, I should point out, it was almost entirely my wife’s idea.
Should have done this sooner.
Family Unplugged Sundays
We’ve decided that Sundays we are going off the grid. Ok, not quite off the grid, we’ll still use lights, the dishwasher, the oven, etc, but we won’t be on the computer or the TV. We’ll play games, go to the park, take a bike ride, read a book, have people over and try to do things together as a family.
We’re a family of loners, frankly, and Maria and I don’t think that’s good. Left to our own, I think we’d eventually all find our own corner of the house, with a TV or computer, and sink into our own little world. After the kids go to bed, Maria and I pretty much do just that, she to her office and me in the recliner, each on our laptops. (I decided that I can use the chair in her office, so we’re at least in the same room)
Unplugged Sundays is one small step against that trend. So, if you email me on Sunday, don’t expect and answer until Monday. I’ll be unplugged.
Adventures in Upgrading: MT 4.21 Gotchas
FYI – There’s a good list of possible gotchas for the upgrade to MT 4.21 on the movabletype.org forums.
Additionally, it’s been reported on the MT ProNet that Arvind’s MT Blogroll plugin (whch I use to generate my hopelessly outdated blogroll at left) has to be completely wiped out or the upgrade will stall. Arvind has instructions on his site on how to upgrade MT Blogroll to his mew MT 4 plugin, Linkroller. I’m going to give that a shot and see what happens before I ‘nuke’ my MT Blogroll install.
Mark 15
Mark 15:1-5 – It can’t be said so much that the Jews or Pilate killed Jesus as that Jesus refused to stop them. Whether he would have been successful in answering their false accusations is immaterial, he didn’t even try. He was determined to fulfill his mission and any words he might say may prevent that. And so he was silent.
Mark 15:6-15 – I seem to remember other Gospels indicating that it was Pilate who brought Barabbas out as an alternative to Jesus. This seems to imply that the leaders put forth his name. If it was Pilate, I wonder if he chose someone so bad (a murderer) that he thought they would surely choose Jesus instead.
Mark 15:21 – “Simon … the father of Alexander and Rufus” I wonder, did the group that Mark was writing do know Alexander and Rufus? Were they disciples? Why else, except that they were known, would Mark mention them?
Mark 15:24 – Earlier (verses 16-20), the soldiers are mocking him, here they are fighting over his things. They are treating him just as they did any other man condemned to die. I wonder, did any of these soldiers later come to faith, to understand that this man, who’s undergarments they fought over, this man was God. Did they look back and see the epic moment in history they participated in?
Mark 15:35-36 – All those around mocked him, but when Jesus finally called on God, they anticipated, hoped for, a miracle. Because they believed? No, I think it’s the same reason Nascar fans love the crashes, people flock to Circe de Soleil and hurricanes get so much coverage – we love a good spectacle. God coming down to rescue Jesus would have been a spectacle indeed.
Mark 15:37-47 – The matter of his death is told in such a matter of fact way here. No drama, no emotion. He died. The curtain was torn. He was buried. A stone was rolled in. It seems odd that the even that Mel Gibson made an entire movie of is told here in less than 50, simple verses. I think that a lot is hidden in those 47 verses.
Adventures in Upgrading: How to Do Fresh Install (I Think)
I mentioned that I was going to blog through my MT 4.2 upgrade experience. This is the second post in that series.
Update 10/09/2008 – Added instructions on pointing Typekey to your new install.
Update 10/04/2008 – After some feedback on the MT support forums, I’ve changed this to separate the MT upgrade from upgrading plugins. Still would like any clarification from folks who know better.
In my first Adventures in Upgrading post I said this about Six Apart’s recommended install method for MT:
What I think is wrong is that in step 4 it directs you to copy the new MT files over top of the old MT files. Nothing wrong with that in general, and even if something went wrong you could re-install the old version of MT, but I prefer to leave the old version intact and install the new along side, in a separate directory. Why? Because if (when?) something does go wrong that’s not easily fixed, you can simply re-load the database backup you made in step 1 and go back to the old version until you figure out what went wrong. If you’ve overwritten the old installation with the new, you have to re-overwrite the new with the old to go back. The upgrade page mentions this, but as an alternate method rather than the preferred method. That’s backwards, in my opinion.
Well, I’ve since learned why Six Apart recommends the copy over method. The fresh install method is significantly more challenging and it’s easier to mess it up. It’s been a while since I did an upgrade (the upgrade to MT 3.33 was two years ago) and I had forgotten the extra work needed when doing a clean install. The old upgrade guide for MT 3.33 at Learning Movable Type lists 14 steps for a fresh install, vs. 6 for the overwrite install at movabletype.org. For the many users, the overwrite install is probably the better choice. For major upgrades like this one, I still like the clean slate approach.
The problem is, I don’t know which of those extra steps are still needed and which are not or if there are others that should be added because there is no documented ‘fresh install’ instructions, that I have found, for MT 4.2. The Six Apart Upgrade guide mentions the fresh install as does the Community Upgrade Guide on the MT wiki (down as of this writing), but no where is it described in detail. I’ve asked on the MT support forums about it, but haven’t gotten any answer yet.
Looking at the old MT 3.33 post at Learning Movable Type, here is my interpretation of the steps as they apply to MT 4.2:
- Do not attempt to do an upgrade late at night when you are about to go to sleep and no one on earth is awake who can help you if you screw up.
- Back up your database. (See Backing Up Your Blog).
- Create a new directory on your server for the MT4.2 program files. If your existing MT files are in a directory called “mt” or “mt_3-2”, label this new directory something like “mt42” or “mt4”, so you can tell the difference.
- Download MT4.2 from Six Apart.
- Unzip the file to your local PC and upload the files to the new directory on your server. If your new directory is in the cgi-bin, make sure you upload the mt-static directory outside of the cgi-bin, to somewhere in your public_html directory. Upload the images in the mt-static directory as binary files. Upload all other files as text. If you have command line access to your server, you can save a bunch of upload time by downloading the tar.gz file (instead of the zip), uploading it to the server and unzipping there. Instructions on doing that here.
- If you have made custom search templates, copy those over to the new search template directory.
- Compare your old mt-config.cgi settings to the new settings in mt-config.cgi-original. Using a text editor, copy the relevant settings over to the new config file. Most importantly, put your DB info and password in the new mt-config.cgi-original where indicated. Also note that you should have a new cgi path on the config file, as you have put your MT files in a new directory. A complete listing of MT Configuration Directives can be found here. Copy over directives from your old mt-config.cgi file that are not default directives into your new mt-config.cgi-original file.
- Change the name of mt-config.cgi-original to mt-config.cgi. Set permissions of all the cgi files in the new installation to 755, with the exception of the mt-config.cgi file. Set the permissions of mt-config.cgi to 644. This is important because your database login info is there and you don’t want to grant everyone access to it.
- Point your web browser to the location of the new mt.cgi file. The program should automatically recognize that you are doing an upgrade and it should prompt you to upgrade. If this doesn’t happen, make sure you have done all the previous steps. You might also want to clear your browser cache before pointing to the new mt.cgi file.
- Rebuild all of your blogs.
- Copy or install all your plugins to the new plugin directory in the new MT directory. You need to do some digging here and find out which ones need new versions and which don’t. For the ones that don’t, you can copy these from your old MT directory to the new MT directory in the same place (if they are in the extlib directory, copy them to the new extlib directory). For the plugins that have a new version, install that version per the instructions from the developer.
For any more complicated plugins that have their own upgrade or install routine (aside from simply copying the files over), you may want to do them one at a time, rebuilding in between, so that the install processes aren’t trying to run simultaneously. - Rebuild all of your blogs again. Frankly, I’m not sure if all these rebuilds are necessary. You may only need one rebuild after all the upgrade processes the main MT upgrade and any plugin upgrades) are complete. If not needed, I think that the only thing multiple rebuilds will do is waste your time.
- Once everything is working, remove permissions from your old CGI scripts. After you have completed your upgrade change the permissions of the current mt-upgrade.cgi to 644. After everything’s been working for a while, you can remove the old installation folder from your server.
- If you use Typekey, you’ll need to update your Tyepkey profile so that it points to the new installation. Log in to your Typekey account and you’ll find the settings at the bottom of your Acount Profile page. Any other services that interact with your MT installation (like Flickr’s email to blog feature) will need to be updated as well.
So there you go, how to do the clean install. Keep in mind that this is the thinking of a guy who hasn’t done an upgrade in 2 years and is not a professional MT guru. If anyone has any additional info or corrections, please add it in the comments.
Designers
Q – How many designers does it take to change a light bulb?
A – Who says it has to be a light bulb?
[rim shot]
I think I have a reader or two who will appreciate this old joke.
Adventures in Upgrading: Getting Ready
I mentioned that I was going to blog through my MT 4.2 upgrade experience. This is the first post in that series.
The first step in any upgrade is knowing what you’re in for. How hard is this going to be? What do I need to know ahead of time? What are the possible gotchas? I like to be prepared and frankly usually spend too much time in this “Getting Ready” phase. There are two reasons for that:
- I want to know everything that I possibly might need to know so that nothing will go wrong. (That doesn’t work, something usually does go wrong anyway.)
- I’m lazy, so the longer I prepare, the longer I can put off doing the actual work. 😛
Regardless, being prepared is a good idea. Going to the Movable Type website, you’ll find a page titled Movable Type 4.2 Upgrade Guide. You’ll be forgiven if you think this is the actual upgrade guide, it’s not. It’s a guide for the new stuff in MT 4.2 that you should be aware of when upgrading. In fact, the first step there is to follow the steps in the Official Movable Type Upgrade Guide. Still, there are some good points in the 4.2 guide about obsolete plugins and upgrading your templates as well as links to some 4.2 specific documentation.
The actual upgrade guide, in my view, is a little light on details and, frankly, I think it leads folks the wrong way. It lists 6 steps, including one step each for downloading, unzipping and copying the files. Honestly, the upgrade is pretty simple, but if you’re like me and you’ve mucked around quite a bit with templates and custom CSS (and you barely know what you’re doing), you need to make sure you’re not going to break stuff in the process. I guess this page is the over view, with links to other pages that you might need depending on your installation. Fair enough.
What I think is wrong is that in step 4 it directs you to copy the new MT files over top of the old MT files. Nothing wrong with that in general, and even if something went wrong you could re-install the old version of MT, but I prefer to leave the old version intact and install the new along side, in a separate directory. Why? Because if (when?) something does go wrong that’s not easily fixed, you can simply re-load the database backup you made in step 1 and go back to the old version until you figure out what went wrong. If you’ve overwritten the old installation with the new, you have to re-overwrite the new with the old to go back. The upgrade page mentions this, but as an alternate method rather than the preferred method. That’s backwards, in my opinion. [Update: See post #2, it’s not so backwards after all.]
I’ve already mentioned that there are two upgrade docs, one that’s more a supplement and one the official, recommended process. (Interestingly, there’s also a ‘community generated’ upgrade guide in the MT Wiki. Oddly, it’s not linked to from the main page, but that’s just as well as it as primarily written by a guy who’s only ever done one actual upgrade. Namely, me.) Between those two documents, there are close to a dozen other linked documents to review to see if they apply to you. For a guy like me who likes to know it all ahead of time, that’s a little overwhelming. I suspect that most folks will just dive right in and see what happens.
Most of that is stuff you can worry about later, after you upgrade. Changes to make so you can take advantage of new features. One area that you should pay close attention to ahead of time, however, is plugins. Especially if, like me, you rely pretty heavily on plugins to make your site work the way you want it to. That, as far as I’m concerned, is the achilles heal of the upgrade process. I’ll cover than in the next post.
MT 4.2 is Here!
MT 4.2, the new version of Movable Type, the software that powers salguod.net is finally here. After a long beta period, it was released last week. Since the release of MT4 over a year ago, I’ve been itching to upgrade. Unfortunately, until a couple of months ago, a couple of important plugins that I uses weren’t upgraded for use with MT4, so I couldn’t upgrade. Once that was solved, decided to wait until the release of the next version, and that’s MT 4.2.
A lot of good stuff in this release, which focused on performance improvements. It’s supposedly significantly faster than other flavors of MT4, but since I’ve never run them, I can’t tell.
I’ll be upgrading soon, so things may get a little wonky at times around here. I’m planning on trying to blog through the process as well, so look for my posts on Adventures in Upgrading.
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