blog@maumae.net

Within the frame of high altitude work (Gemini is at 4200m atop Mauna Kea -14000feet-), I had a full physical exam today. This included pulmonary and a 10mn treadmill test. That's basically an EKG under physical effort. They make you walk faster and faster, for 7mn and then jog for another 3mn, while monitoring you heart & blood pressure. It turns out I passed. I'm good to go for work at the summit of MK. I was a bit afraid this would not be the case, given my diabetes condition; I am much more prone to tiredness I was before, but that did not prevent me to pass the test. My pulmonary condition seems better than last time, probably a happy consequence of quitting smoking. Now if I could only get that sugar level down to normal.

Posted by francois at 05:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I bought "A brief history of the human race", from Michael Cook, a week ago in the compass bookstore at the SFO airport. Quite good, especially the early and late parts (I'm 2/3 into it). I was particularly impressed by the treatment of "could history have turned out differently?". The author actually gives a convincing answer to it: No. This answer is supported by evidence; nature has concocted several experiments for us: notably, it separated several groups of humans before the start of history (the author defines history at the appearance of farming, so about 10000 years ago), and kept them isolated since then, up to the 15 century (for the America) or the 19th century (for Australia). Beside a different calendar (farming did not appear in the America before the fourth Millenium BC, and did not appear at all in Australia), which can readily be explained by the different geography/faune of the said continent, how things unfolded in America is not fundamentally different of how they happened in the rest of the world, with civilizations based on similar principles, writing, farming, markets, rulers, etc. Interesting question and answer. The book is full of similar smart insight, although sometimes it lacks of a conducting wire/idea.

Posted by francois at 05:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Around the end of January, that is, about a month ago, I decided to re-install Tiger on my -relatively new- laptop. It took my an evening to backup everything (even more thoroughly that my daily backups), including /usr/local and other niceties (/Library/WebServer and /sw). I re-install, and my main goal was successful: spotlight was operational again. I then one by one re-instated capabilities, and everything went fine (note that amd did not break spotlight, so was not the culprit). I have not yet re-installed Salling Clicker (although I have the dmg on my desktop). One thing that did not get along fine is Movable Type. I spent countless hours to try to make it work; re-installed MT3.2, mysql (several versions), DBI and DBD::mysql perl modules. I eventually cornered the problem to the DBI perl module. First, those were the ones that made my backed up MT failed at the re-install: the perl installer put things in odd places, like /System/Library/Perl or /Library/Perl, that I did not back up of course. So I had to re-install DBI and DBD::mysql, and that was what created the issue. Somehow, the DBI I installed from the web had some incompatibility with the mysql I use (I tried both 4.0 -from fink- and 5.0 -from mysql.com-) and was creating problem in decoding crypted passwords. The net result is that I could not log in the MT admin page, which is of course very annoying. As I say, this is fixed now, and my blog is operational again! This episode has made me realized how I had became dependent of this tool.

Btw, here is how I fixed it:

1. I'm using mysql-max-5.0.18-osx10.4-powerpc from mysql.com
2. I'm using MT3.2 from sixapart.com (free license)
3. I located the DBI and DBD perl modules
4. I re-installed DBI from fink (and not from CPAN, that's the key)
5. I re-installed DBD::mysql from CPAN

Of course, you have to be careful each time to make sure there is a user/password and a empty database for your blog. These have to be entered in mt-config.cgi.

I'm really glad to have solved this problem. I lost so many hours on it, trying to debug the perl code (which turn out mood when I realized the thing was working with the Berkely DB, hence the issue was not in the MT perl code but in the MT/mysql interaction).

Btw, you might noticed that there are blog entries within the dates MT was off. It's because I continued blogging with ecto, caching but not publishing the entries. I published them yesterday once MT was fixed.

Posted by francois at 08:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)