Blog seems functional again

 Posted by (Visited 11375 times)  Misc, Open thread  Tagged with: ,
Mar 242008
 

You may have noticed the blog being partially inoperative this weekend. Well, it seems to be back. We’ll see how it goes during the day.

The background: on Friday or Saturday I attempted to log into the admin dashboard only to be told that I had to upgrade my database. I assumed it was because my host was forcing me to go from the old 2.1.x version to the newer 2.3.3 version which has a lot of security fixes. Well, I clicked the “upgrade” link, it didn’t work, and then the dashboard became inaccessible. I got stuck in the endless upgrade loop described here.

I then spent two days trying forced and manual upgrades to 2.3.3, 2.2, and every number in between. Looked like it was always timing out when trying to update things. While I wasat it, though, I also uploaded the images for the new theme that I have been messing with — so at least there was a new look. 🙂

Morgan suggested forcing a database upgrade, which I didn’t see the point of, given that said upgrade is exactly what was failing each time. But it did make me go look at the value of the db_version field in the wp_options table. Which was “1” instead of what it should be. I changed it manually to 4773, and the upgrade link succeeded, and now it’s at 5183 (which is correct since we are currently running 2.2.3). So thanks, Morgan!

Tonight perhaps, I will try finishing the job and going all the way to 2.3.3. In the meantime, you may notice that some blog functionality is missing — translation, for example. Most of it is just commented out, and I will have to dig into the PHP for the sidebars to bring it back. The new theme is supposed to have a bunch of stuff rearranged, but I suspect it makes no sense to do that until I get to the latest version.

Post here if you see any obviously broken stuff, please!

2008 Hugo Nomination List

 Posted by (Visited 26431 times)  Reading  Tagged with:
Mar 222008
 

2008 Hugo Nomination List

I’ve read 3 of the 5, have a fourth but haven’t opened it the cover yet, and better get cracking on the ones I haven’t, I suppose! Particularly glad to see Halting State on the list, for the relevance to this blog — way to go, Charlie! And Scalzi will feel left out if I don’t congratulate him personally too. 🙂

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Go buy shirts at Target!

 Posted by (Visited 8350 times)  Game talk  Tagged with:
Mar 222008
 

No, I haven’t succumbed to putting ads inline in the RSS feed. 🙂 Rather, it caught my eye that the Experimental Gameplay Project now has a clothing line, where the shirts come with the games. And they’re available right now at Target stores.

Among the games are things like Tower of Goo and Gish. So it’s a chance to support indie creators, get some great games, and also show off your gamer cred.

I sure hope the game developers are getting a good cut on this…!

Eve Online’s great experiment

 Posted by (Visited 7452 times)  Game talk  Tagged with:
Mar 212008
 

For those who don’t know, the  player council in Eve continues to move forward. In the past, I have commented that it seemed less like an actual player government than like an advisory council of sorts. But based on this article, it seems to have developed into more:

Giving players the control stick in EVE Online – Massively

I think it’s a question worth exploring as to why exactly this sort of thing is happening more aggressively in some game worlds than in social worlds, despite the fact that game worlds are more restrictive to the scope of user behavior in so many ways.

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