Upgraded mySQL to 5.x this weekend. Wasn’t paying attention when I did so, and nailed all my development databases along the way. Not to mention the new password hash making a hash of things as well. Another very good reason not to upgrade when you’re overtired. Sigh.
My development disc is overcrowded. I need to clean house, digital as well as analog. Deeper sigh.
Apple has released their first Intel-based portable. If I could read the web page I might even be interested in buying it. Aside from the general tiny print that Apple always insists on, what fool decided medium-grey-on-black was a good choice for text?
We all have our rituals to prepare for Christmas. For me it involves Alistair Sim.
Funny how it seems some people are born to do just one thing superbly. I know I’ve seen Sim in other roles, but for the life of me I can’t recall any of them offhand. But his role as the title character in Minter’s “Scrooge” is unforgettable; Sim is the Ebenezer Scrooge that all the rest of the pretenders are judged by. Only one (George C Scott) comes anywhere close to the energy, cantakerousness, and joy (at the end) that Sim embues his performance with. Aside from Scott, the only other Scrooge worth spending any time with is Jim Backus, in Mr Magoo’s Christmas. Once you’ve seen Sim, everyone else is simply a waste of time.
Today is the day we should all dance around the room, singing “I don’t know anything, I never did know anything, but now I know that I don’t know, all of a Christmas Morning.” Because we don’t. Know anything of real value, that is.
We don’t know why God chose the path He chose. He obviously knew what He was beginning back in Eden, where it would lead, and just what it would cost. And knowing all this, He still chose that path. My King chose to die for me. And from that decision flows everything else.
Such is the mystery, and such is the power, of Christmas.
The drupal sql file for postgresql ran into two fatal bugs. One with “alter sequence” and another with “anyelement”. Possibly this is a hosting issue, because I only have access to 7.3.10 on my host and drupal says 7.4, but I suspect there’s even more trouble ahead, so this experiment is officially over. I had hoped to pick up some further experience working with both packages, but it is not to be.
I’m not ready to blame this one on drupal, though I admit it wasn’t easy finding out what version of postgresql was required. (There’s no “system requirements” listing on the website. You need to dig through their FAQ section to find it.) But since the version I was using wasn’t the one they specified, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that the errors encountered are due to that. As a user, it doesn’t matter where the error lies; the error just means I can’t use the product.
The drupal community is pretty vocal when one criticizes the product; one only wishes the development community around it was just as enthusiastic about the user-friendliness of the product. (Yes, I know I’m welcome to come in and contribute to this end. But that requires first an answer to the question “Why should I?” If I’m a user of the product, that response has a little validity; if I’m just wandering around trying to find out if the product is worth committing my time and energies to, the question takes on more importance. No one has successfully answered the question “Why is it so hard just to set up a working version of this product?” and I’ll have to have a working product before I can even begin to decide whether it’s close enough to usable that I should spend my time getting it the rest of the way there.)
I’ve got a copy of Douglasss, Little, and Smith’s book, I’m playing around with it on mySQL, where it was easier to install, so maybe I’ll have some answers for myself on this question. But I’ll have to find another excuse to play around with PostgreSQL. A friend of mine who is a db developer by trade tells me it’s necessary because the bugs in mySQL make it difficult to use in an enterprise environment (not meaning to start a db discussion, too, but I’m just reporting the reason why I’m adding that particular tool to my box. Once I’ve gained the requisite familiarity with both, I’ll make up my own mind about the bugs, if they even still exist by that time.)
Continuing the journey, I run aground.
Have just hit a complete showstopper while evaluating Drupal as a CMS. True, I only discovered it when testing the Event Module, but the deficiency infects every drupal module I’ve seen. They make no differentiation between the ability to create a content item and the ability to publish it.
I’ve a number of community sites I develop, where the list of people allowed to submit stories/content items is larger than the list of people allowed to post to the website. Any CMS that wants to invade my space has to provide that functionality.
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