My department Christmas Lunch will this year be at Bon Viveur, a relatively new restaurant in Bristol.

For reasons of ‘equality for lunch non-attendees’ (more like ‘budgetary pressure’, I reckon), The Company will not be subsidising employees’ departmental Christmas lunches this year (last year we received £10 towards the cost). This makes the minimum £21.50 (two courses) or £26.50 (three courses) a little steep, especially considering the ongoing debt situation (when they say that debt ‘cripples’, they’re right) and the fact that, if I’m going to spend £20+ on a meal, I normally do it with people I really like to hang around with. Maybe it’s because I don’t really socialise with my cow-orkers, but I’ve found past Christmas lunches to be a real strain, and not that much fun.

What should I do?

I stayed up until 1am, printing some of our holiday photos for Kathy to take into college on the last day of her course, and proof-reading her last essay. I just happened to be following the early election results progress, m’kay?

I am a little tired.

This hasn’t been the longest period of silence in the history of It Could Be Worse, but I had a valid excuse this time.

While upgrading us to ADSL, Plusnet deleted my blog, photo gallery and database. They restored the sites, but the database was lost.

I got most of the anger out of my system using Plusnet’s tech-support facility and discussion forum (a note if anyone from PN is reading: I’m sorry if I came across as a bit of a prat – I was very annoyed). Once I was told that the database couldn’t be restored, I set about formulating a plan for rescuing the blog. Fortunately, when I had to force the issue last time (after Berkeley DB was found to be incompatible on a new server) I made a plain-text export of the blog entries and comments, which was reasonably up-to-date: it contained all but the last nine or so entries.

So, with a new blog in place, I imported from this dump file, and copied and pasted the other entries back in, setting the dates retrospectively.

I’ve learned a lesson: you can’t rely on people not to do stupid things, like (a) deleting databases and (b) having no backup, so I’m going to implement a backup strategy, using mysqldump and a perl script.

I’ve just upgraded to Movable Type 3.0 Developers’ Edition. The upgrade went without a hitch. Now to see if I can convert from Berkeley DB to MySQL…

UPDATE

I had previously run the mt-db2sql.cgi script, and got an error to do with ‘use of uninitialized variable in numeric comparison’, and ‘comment_blog_id cannot be null’ (a MySQL constraint). I hacked the script, using Data::Dumper to see just what the heck was going on, and discovered that I had an orphaned comment without a blog_id or an entry id. Aha! Berkeley DB, in its file-based, constraint-less way, didn’t care. MySQL, though, did. I added two quick lines to set a value for blog_id and entry_id if they were false, and – Bam! – away we went.

After the débacle of the server upgrade, it’s a relief to have the blog data stored in a more robust format.

I haven’t posted to this blog for over a month. I’m not really sure why, to be honest. It’s not as if I made a conscious decision not to blog; I just couldn’t be bothered.

I do have a bit of history for dropping things as soon as they become popular. I value my perceived individualism, so as soon as I think that something that marked me out as, if not unique, then at least unusual becomes popular, I tend to run a mile.

Anyway – there’s enough navel-gazing about blogging in the world of blogging, so I think I’ll stop there.

I feel like redesigning again, though.

We’re having a little problem with the blog. It can be summarised thus:

• PlusNet, in their infinite wisdom, installed a new CGI web server.
• To be fair to them, the upgrade was much needed.
• But lo! Why did they have to change platforms (Linux to FreeBSD)?
• In the process, different versions of Perl, DB_File.pm and the associated system shared object were installed.
• So, whatever I did, I couldn’t do db_upgrade or db_dump/db_load! (a la MT’s Troubleshooting Guide).
• As far as I know, no warning about the upgrade was given. The first I knew that something was amiss was when my Mother-in-Law couldn’t post a comment on Laura’s blog, also hosted at PlusNet.
• I managed to dump and restore the database files on my local machine (Redhat Linux), then do a plain-text export using a local MT install.
• I really am thinking about ditching PlusNet, though, and hosting this site elsewhere.
• Harrumph.

After some abuse of the comments system, mostly by dirty spammers, I have decided to implement the following set of rules. Any contraventions shall be punished by deletion and IP-address banning.

1. No commercial posts (i.e. spam).
2. No swearing or foul or abusive language.
3. No personal attacks. This isn’t the playground. Attack my ideas by all means, but if you can’t make your point without attacking me, then you need to learn how to better formulate a counter-point.

That is all.