Mayday! Mayday!

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Back in August I described my experience level as “somewhere between ‘power user’ and ‘geek’ — in other words, I know enough to be dangerous, but not enough to get paid for it.” While it was said somewhat tongue-in-cheek, it’s come through with a vengeance this week — especially the dangerous part.

What started as simply trying to install a MovableType plugin has, thanks to my own bumbling incompetence, rapidly devolved to the point where I may not be able to resurrect my server to its prior state without starting completely over from scratch. While I haven’t lost any information from any of the three sites I hosted (the sole consoling factor to any of this), I have managed to utterly and completely destroy all the various little connecting pieces of software that tied it all together.

Something in the old httpd.conf file (the configuration settings file for the Apache webserver) was causing issues after the system reinstall, to the point where CGI executables weren’t running, and Apache itself was sometimes refusing to start up. I’ve just reverted to the default httpd.conf file, and I’m going to need to go through the old and new files line-by-line, enabling features one by one, until I find whatever setting(s) is (are) causing the problems.

MySQL needs to be reinstalled. Once it’s reinstalled, I need to see if I can find the old MySQL database that MT was using, and then see if I can get the new MySQL installation to access it. If I can’t, then MT won’t be able to access any of the old posts, and we’ll have to start over from scratch there.

Perl is missing various libraries that MovableType uses. Off the top of my head, the Perl -> MySQL bridge that allowed MT to read the MySQL database that stored all the weblog entries for six (?) weblogs strewn across the three sites; and the image processing libraries that allowed MT and the Gallery photo album software on the hanscomfamily.com site to automatically generate thumbnails for uploaded images. There are probably more missing too that I just haven’t run across yet.

In other words, to borrow an old military acronym, everything is currently FUBAR.

What I really want to do right now is call in “sick” to work so I can dedicate the day to working on the system. Unfortunately, neither my bank account nor my slightly overdeveloped sense of responsibility to my job will let me do that, so things are just going to have to stay the way they are for the moment.

The worst thing about all this is that it’s not just my own site. If it were only my own personal playground, than while it would certainly be frustrating and aggravating, at least that way I would only be causing issues for me. However, since I have been hosting the sites for both my family and a friend, I’ve now managed to knock them offline too. Bleah. Not a good situation.

Anyway. Whining about it here isn’t really going to do much other than let me vent my frustration for a bit. Work beckons, and then this evening, I’ll be diving back into everything to see what else I can break.

Dammit

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Well, I managed to break my server. Attempting to log in to MovableType results in long strings of errors — apparently perl is completely hosed. Time to re-install Jaguar and hope that I don’t manage to nuke the websites that are on there.

This has not been my best couple of nights.

Update: OS reinstall is done, and all three websites are visible again. MT functionality hasn’t been restored yet, though — that’s my project for tomorrow night. Right now, it’s bedtime.

Not a good evening

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I host three sites on a computer here in my apartment — my old website (djwudi.com), my family’s website (hanscomfamily.com), and my friend Kirsten’s site (geekmuffin.com). All three sites have been getting hit over the last few weeks with the comment spam that is rapidly becoming such a hassle.

Tonight I attempted to install the MT-Blacklist plugin that has recently been released as a tool to combat these comment spammers. Unfortunately, after installing it, when I attempted to access it, I got the following error:

An error occurred: Can’t locate Storable.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/mt/extlib /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/mt/lib /System/Library/Perl/darwin /System/Library/Perl /Library/Perl/darwin /Library/Perl /Library/Perl /Network/Library/Perl/darwin /Network/Library/Perl /Network/Library/Perl .) at /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/mt/lib/MT/PluginData.pm line 9. BEGIN failed–compilation aborted at /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/mt/lib/MT/PluginData.pm line 9. Compilation failed in require at /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/mt/extlib/jayallen/Blacklist.pm line 18. BEGIN failed–compilation aborted at /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/mt/extlib/jayallen/Blacklist.pm line 18. Compilation failed in require at /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/mt/mt-blacklist.cgi line 29.

Well, that’s no good. I dinked around with fink for a while, attempting to get the mysteriously missing ‘storable.pm’ installed, only to continually get error message after error message. Eventually giving up in frustration, I decided to attempt one of the other, lower-tech methods of combatting the spambots — simply renaming the scripts that handle comment and trackback submission. However, when I attempted to do a rebuild on my old weblog, I ended up getting the same error message.

This worries me. It would appear that this ‘storable.pm’ is required for MovableType to function at all. However, now all of a sudden, I don’t have it, and I have no idea why. So now, I’m faced with reinstalling OS X, fink, and whatever other packages I had installed on the server — and I just hope I can remember them all — and hopefully do so while still managing to keep the information for all three weblogs. I could actually live if I lost what’s on my old weblog, as most of it is already imported into this weblog, and I’ve got the export files saved already, but I don’t have either a recent backup of the box or backups of the hanscomfamily.com or geekmuffin.com directories (yes, I know, bad sysadmin).

I think I’ll be able to reinstall without losing everything — but then, I thought things were hunky-dory up until this point, too. So I’m a little concerned.

End result — it’s past my bedtime, I’m tired, more than a little frustrated, and ready to go to bed. Hopefully things will look better when I get back to poking around tomorrow evening.

(I don’t think that MT-Blacklist caused any of the problems, in case anyone is wondering. I think it’s just either my goofing something up, a random server glitch, or a combination of the two. No worries on the MT-Blacklist front in and of itself.)

Rebecca, ecce! tantae clunes isti sunt!

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‘quislibet’ has translated Sir Mix-A-Lot’s ‘Baby Got Back’ into Latin, and given an English re-translation that gives some idea of how sucessful his translation efforts were. What follows is merely the beginning…here’s the rest!

Latin English (re-translated)
mehercle!
Rebecca, ecce! tantae clunes isti sunt!

amica esse videtur istorum hominum rhythmicorum.
sed, ut scis,
quis homines huiusmodi intellegere potest?
colloquuntur equidem cum ista eo tantum, quod scortum perfectum esse videtur.
clunes, aio, maiores esse!
nec possum credere quam rotondae sint.
en! quam exstant! nonne piget te earum?
ecce mulier Aethiops!

By Hercules!
Rebecca, behold! Such large buttocks she has!

She appears to be a girlfriend of one of those rhythmic-oration people.
But, as you know
Who can understand persons of this sort?
Verily, they converse with her for this reason only, namely, that she appears to be a complete whore.
Her buttocks, I say, are rather large!
Nor am I able to believe how round they are.
Lo! How they stand forth! Do they not disgust you?
Behold the black woman!

(via Cory Doctorow)

Welcome to America — now go home.

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The love story of Trevor Hughes and his fiancee began in an elementary school in the Himalayan foothills.

They were “global nomads.” He was a diplomat’s son. She the daughter of missionaries. They lived in Asia, attended school together, fell in love and want to get married in June.

But when Hughes’ fiancee, a German national, tried to visit him on a six-month tourist visa Monday, she was detained in Atlanta, handcuffed, jailed–even stripped of her diamond engagement ring.

Then, after 20 hours without food, she was put on a plane and shipped back to Stuttgart.

“This isn’t the America I fought for,” said Hughes, who served in the Navy and U.S. diplomatic corps. “You don’t expect that from a great country like ours.”

— Land of the Free?: Turned away at the border

(via Cory Doctorow)

Apple poised for big music push

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More and more, Apple is making a huge push into the music industry — and if the rumor mills are right, this week just may be their biggest foray yet.

Already having made a name for themselves over the past couple years with the one-two punch of the iPod and the iTunes Music Store, recently Apple has been exploring various exclusive promotions, such as live performances by bands at Apple Store locations that are later released exclusively through the iTMS.

Latest case in point: Thursday and Thrice, a pair of new rock acts from Island Records, are hyping an upcoming tour Wednesday (Oct. 15) with Apple in-stores on two coasts.

Thursday will take the stage at the Apple Store SoHo in New York. On the West Coast, Thrice will play at the Apple Store Third Street Promenade, located in Santa Monica, Calif. Each performance will be at 7 p.m. in their respective time zones.

The shows kick off a highly anticipated double bill — presented by Alternative Press magazine and MTV2 — which begins Oct. 17 in Pennsylvania.

The music performed at the events will be available exclusively for purchase at the iTunes Music Store.

Already, Apple Store performances can be found at the iTMS from Less Than Jake (iTMS link) and The Rising (iTMS link). I think this is a fascinating way to co-promote both the bands and Apple’s brand.

While it’s been known that Apple has a major event this Thursday that has a 90% or better chance of featuring the introduction of iTunes (and the iTMS) for Windows, according to both MacRumors and AppleInsider, there may be some nice surprises in store for Mac users, too. Possibilities include iTunes 5 (released for both Windows and Macintosh) featuring more encoding options, .wma support, and the ability to “borrow” tracks and albums from the iTMS before purchasing them; and iPod peripherals, perhaps featuring an add-on to allow recording directly to the iPod (touted as being aimed at students for recording classroom lectures).

Lots of fun toys coming down the pike, from the looks of it…

I used to believe…

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Randomly following links, I just stumbled across I used to believe, a site collecting all the wonderful and weird things that children believe about the world around them. It’s so worth spending some time going through.

When we were little, my mother had bought us a book titled, “How You Were Born”. In this book, there was an illustration of a sperm under a magnifying glass. For years, I thought the magnifying glass was a frying pan and was totally mystified by where and how the frying pan fit into the reproductive process.

I had a strange fear that if I closed my eyes in the bathtub, William Shakespeare would come up through the drain and kill me. I knew his name, but I had no idea who he was, so I just naturally assumed he was some sort of bathtub vampire.

'ello again

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Weekend’s done, time to start poking my head up again. Had a very pleasant weekend — Prairie came in, we spent Saturday housecleaning during the day and watching The Ring (not bad at all, for a modern horror movie) with her sister Hope in the evening, then spending time with my dad on Sunday as he passed through town for work.

Now back to the normal day-to-day…