Mind matters

This is post #100! Wuhuu!

Yesterday I got a job offer as a computer consultant at Benzler. I’ll start working there come september. 2500 kr more each month, that’s not half-bad! Told my boss today, she was very happy for me, but sad that I would be leaving my current work. Can understand that. I mean, I’m so perfect and good at what I do that everyone wants to hire me

Today I’m going to travel to see a couple of friends of mine (hello Mari!) over the weekend and on sunday I’ll be going to Torsby to train Aikido for a week. That’ll be splendid! I’ll be taking my computer with me and try to write something from each training day, including pictures (if someone brings a camera with them).

Yesterday me, Carro and Linda had a girl-evening (tjejkväll). One of my favourite activities, it has become (yoda-speak)! We ate at a local pizza place, bought lots of chocolate, talked about guys and watched Eddie Izzard. A splendid evening I say!

In other news, Edward will be moving since he’s got a new job in Stockholm! But since he hasn’t written anything about it in his blog, I’ll write it here instead. You’ll be missed here in Linköping, Edward! Traitor! Blooood, we need his bloood! Eh, I mean, hope you have a great time in Stockholm! Even though I’m not sure how that can be accomplished without us…

I was going to try to sum up the experience of writing the first 100 posts, but decided against it once I realised how boring such a sum up would be! Maybe I’ll bore you with it next time!

Today, when I was catching up with my daily feeds, my eye caught this story about an Iraqi minister of the Iraqi National Library and Archives (INLA). He started writing a blog in november 2006. It’s basically his diary, published by the British Library.

I started reading the entries for february and was caught. The life that unfolds on these pages is, for me, extremely fascinating, and worrying. I was fascinated by the story, since he details how life is in Bagdad right now and what he is doing in order to keep the INLA running and assuring the safety of his staff. It baffels me how people can live with such violence surrounding them…

After I had read the february entries, I read the rest of them too. He has some statistics about sectarian violence that his staff has had to endure and due to the New Security Plan, which was implemented in february, the violence has drastically dropped. So there’s hope in the february entries, which is good to have when you read the entries before that!

Here are som excerpts from his blog:

13 November, 2006
I received bad news, as soon as I arrived to my office. In my absent, INLA was bombed twice and snipers’ bullets broke several windows. Fortunately, no body was hurt. My staff withheld these information from me, when I contacted them. They claimed that they did not want me to be worried and to spoil my visit.

Diary for the Week 16-21 Dec.
My staff received their monthly salaries on Thursday, owing to the bravery of two of my employees, who work at the Accountancy Department. The two young women transferred the salaries (81 Millions Dinar = US$60,000) from the Bank to our building in secret. It took them five days to complete the operation. The Bank is located in a dangerous area, where the terrorists can attack at any moment.

31 January, 2007
A huge explosion shock our building. I hurriedly went to the second floor and saw a thick black smock rising from a car in al-Bab al-Mudham round-about (200 meters away from the NLA). I asked the security to prevent all members of staff from going outside the building, fearing that there might be another car-bomb. I learnt later that around 15 people were either killed or injured in the explosion. Among the victims were shoppers, passengers and drivers.

12 Febryary, 2007
Before leaving the building, I met Miss Ma., who lost her brother few weeks ago. She wept as soon as I offered her my condolences. She told me that her family decided to leave Baghdad permanently and live in Basra in the south. I promised to help as much as I could, and wished her good luck.

 

I highly recommend to read it! It certainly helped me gain some perspective on my life and my problems. They don’t seem that big now.

Link to the blog: http://www.bl.uk/iraqdiary.html

There are some amusing aspects of coding, or system administration, that I’ve come to know through the years. One of them is:

When you set out to fix a problem, you end up doing a lot more than what you originally intended.

This is what happened to me today. I was aware that my blog looked like it had been put through Liberaces wardrobe, on a bad hair day, when viewed with Internet Explorer. So now that I just had won $160 on blackjack bonus hunting, I thought that lady luck might be on my side. I might give this seemingly strange task a go.

I started IE and took a look at the page. The sidebar elements somehow bleeded into the main page area and all the texts ended up beneath the place where the footer was supposed to be, and all the fonts were screwed up in size. I thought that this might be a problem with the stylesheet. So I started checking it for anything that might cause this strange behaviour. I checked all the places where I had put code to avoid IE breaking, but none of them could cause the things I had seen. I took the opportunity to clean out some old code in the CSS-file and polish it up a little.

Okay then, time to figure out exactly where the sidebar went nuts. I was going to remove some of the sidebar widgets and see what happened. When I accessed the widget manipulation menu I discovered that they weren’t working! What the !#¤%¤¤%? How long had it been like this? Could something have been misplaced when I updated wordpress last time?

I went to my blogs dashboard and saw that 2 days earlier there was an upgrade to Wordpress. I though that it might be a good idea to upgrade and see if that solved my problem. So I started upgrading my wordpress, from 2.0.5 to 2.0.6. It was pretty straightforward, I had just to delete some catalouges and upload the new inform…. wait a minute. Delete some catalouges? Like the wp-includes? Hmm… I had a nagging suspicion that the culprit could be found here, so I checked the information for installing the Widget plugin, and lo and behold if there wasn’t a catalouge there that could reside in the wp-includes catalouge!

I had to find the Widget plugin source, extract the right catalouge and put it back. Said and done. Now I could manipulate my sidebar widgets again! Success! Now then, for the IE problem.

I removed some of my sidebar widgets and it gave very strange effects. Sometimes the sidebar text appeared in the main text area, and sometimes the sidebar text wasn’t even visible at the bottom of the screen. It was as if it disappeared beneath another CSS element. Weird. I messed around little with HTML-code and CSS-code with no success.

Then I thought that I might aswell see if the HTML-code was valid. It might be that something was broken in it that caused IE to behave as it did. So I went to the W3 Validator and input my blogs URL. The horror! The horror! The errors! The errors! There were so many of them! I was reminded of a quote from the movie 2010: “My God, it’s full of stars!”. In my case it would be “My buddha, it’s full of errors!“.

Bleah. I started fixing the errors, one by one. Seeking out the HTML-code, sometimes in .html-pages and sometimes in the sidebar widgets themselves. An arduous task! Took me 30 minutes to complete, but finally the W3 Validator gave me the green lights.

To my utter astonishment my blog suddenly looked okay in IE! Amazing! I was prepared for more error pruning and search for anomalous code! But no need. There it was, bright and shiny and sticking it’s nose out at me! Jeepers!

I started out trying to fix my blog so IE displayed it as it was supposed to be displayed and in that attempt I managed to polish and clean up my CSS-file, upgrade Wordpress, fix my Widget plugin and clean up a lot of HTML-errors! The work I ended up doing was a lot more than I originally intended.

But all is well that ends well. It’s all in a days work for… Mr System Administrator Man!

20 days ago Wordpress 2.0.5 was announced and today I found some free time and took the time to make the upgrade. Here’s how I did it:

cd $HOME/public_html
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
rm -r wordpress.backup
cp -a wordpress wordpress.backup
mysqldump -u root wordpress > wordpress.backup/wordpress.db

Verified that the wordpress.db looked ok, by taking a quick glance at the file with less.

cd wordpress
rm -r wp-admin
rm -r wp-includes

There’s a new default theme, so only delete this if you wish to insert the new default theme.
rm -r wp-content/themes/default

The instructions said to backup any files that you had modified yourself. And I didn’t have any of those
rm *.php
cp ../wordpress.backup/wp-config.php .
cd ..
tar zxvf latest.tar.gz

I went to my admin-panel in my blog and there was a link there waiting to be clicked that said it was going to upgrade the database. So I clicked it. The page following it had yet another link for the actual upgrade. I clicked that one too. And then it said I was done. Simple as that. Doesn’t seem like there is anything missing.

As you can see, I've added a new sidebar widget that shows what plugins I'm currently using. Thought it could be helpful for people who want to adopt some of the functionality I've included in my blog :) I'll put the list here too, if I decide it's not suited to be in the sidebar, so I can easily see all my plugins myself, instead of going into the admin interface.