The Wren’s Nest

So I take my poor little Mac down to the Apple store to get its keyboard replaced. The Apple dude gives me a rundown of expected and possible costs and the conversation goes like this:

Dude: “What’s your username and password?”

Me: “I don’t bloody think so!”

He then proceeds to tell me that under Apple’s strict warranty standards they have to return everything in absolute working condition and in order to do that they have to have access to my account. I remind him that my machine is no longer under warranty and this seems to stump him momentarily.

I ask him if I can purchase an identical disk-drive to the one in the machine (about 80GB) and he says that Apple doesn’t sale disk-drives and they can’t put a larger one in. I tell him I don’t want a larger one, I want one the same size and just mirror the contents. Obviously we’re having a disconnect in communications I think.

We go round-and-round and finally I agree to give him access to the ‘admin’ account; a fake account I setup for going through TSA, U.S. Customs etc. My main personal account is protected by Apple’s FileVault encryption so I’m not worried about them accessing it per-se. What I *am* worried about is them deciding that they need to format the damn thing. Remember, this is me we’re talking about, not a normal person. The strange things happen to my stuff even when all they allegedly need to do is to replace a keyboard.

So Dude tells me they have a plan where for $50.00 they will mirror the entire contents of my drive to their server. I won’t get charged the $50 unless they actually feel compelled to do the copy. I ask if I get get DVD’s burned and of course the answer is no.

The damn ironic thing is that just last week I was talking with Nina about the need for me to either:

1. Purchase an identical disk-drive to do disk mirroring via FireWare
2. Purchase Apple’s TimeMachine wireless backup unit.

I’m somewhat of a zealot when it comes to backup but that doesn’t mean I want to have to do restores if I don’t have to. There’s always something that you forget, some registration number you can’t find, etc.,

My Mac is in the hospital for the next week and I feel like an anxious dad. I’ll keep you posted!

One of the most embarassing/humbling/demeaning things about being sick is that often one doesn’t have great control of their bodily functions. I proved this to myself again last night by spewing vomitus that the “Animal House” crew would be proud of - mostly hitting my MacBook Pro. Needless to say the keyboard is mostly non-functional. Apple says it will take most likely a week to repair. Bloody hell. I don’t have the heart to tell them what “liquid” I spilled there.

This book arrived on my doorstep the other day just in time to witness a prime misuse and lack-of-understanding of how ID works. Nina and I were at the local Shaw’s market and she picked-up a bottle of wine. The clerk asked to see her ID. Now, while this may indeed be flattering to her the whole thing is farcical as Nina and I, while both feeling young-at-heart are no spring chickens and not to be taken seriously as under the legal drinking age.  She produced her New York driver’s license and the clerk had to take it to her supervisor since it was “out-of-state”. Well, see, the problem is not that she was trying to cash a check, but rather to assert age, a concept somewhat missing at Shaw’s as I’m sure a lot of other establishments.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” - Charles Dickens

It’s been an interesting week for me. Nina is here so on that front all is well. Her kidz are safely packed-up and off with their dad which gives us much time to do as we please. On the other side of things, I seem to have developed a “death-thumb” for software and hardware simultaneously. I can’t get photos off my digital camera without the software crashing. Visual Studio and Firefox are in a spiraling death-match. And to top everything off it seems that every electronic gizmo I own has decided to suicide its batteries all at the same time. I just spent a small fortune at Shaws the other day on AA batteries for my camera’s motor drive. Now it seems I need AAA and a host of small lithium CR2x watch batteries. My barcode scanner for my resurrected ‘Grocerybits’ project is dead. Its a frustrating scenario I can tell you!

“Corporal Hitler was loosely educated.” - Winston Churchill

If I can steal a line from my good friend Mr. Churchill, I would say that Visual Studio 2008 is “loosely engineered”. This damn thing has gone down on me more times than a $3.00 hooker.  It also appears to be in Mortal Combat with Firefox, both of them dueling for some kind of Windows supremacy, never quite sure who the winner will ultimately be. So far the “headlines” feature of VS2008 doesn’t work (”check your internet connection” the helpful advice says), I’m getting VC++ stack dumps out of C# programs which I have really no clue why is happening and the whole experience has been well, let us say, rather less than satisfying.

As W.C. Fields said, “On the whole, I’d rather be in Philadelphia“.

Go feck yourself Microsoft!

Bloody hell. In recent weeks I’ve received notices from two CAs (Certificate Authorities), to wit: StartCom and Thawte, both of whom I hold digital certificates from. In each case all of their emails to me has been not digitally-signed.

“WTF?”

These guys make their money by selling bits of zeroes and ones. Why then do they not want to use nor advertise the use of their own products?

Somewhat bizarrely, Thawte’s motto is: “It’s a trust thing“. Well, if that were true, why aren’t they signing their  email? How am I supposed to trust that its really from Thawte!?!?!?!?

[sigh] I give up.

This is a bad, bad, bad, bad movie. It started out great enough - a serial killer (Kevin Costner), talking to his subconscious or alter ego (William Hurt), but soon had enough superfluous subplots involving Demi Moore that I felt like I was watching an octopus going through a revolving door. Nina and I give this one a 1 out of 5 stars (she only gave it 1/2 but I rounded-up). Don’t waste your time watching.

“What fresh hell is this?” - Gertrude Stein

It seems like just a few short days ago that I installed VS 2005. But yes, three years have transpired and now I’m slowly trying to get caught up for 2008. To that end I took the risk of breaking my entire (Windows) development environment and installed VS 2008 to see what fresh hell and horrors Microsoft can deliver to me. Should prove to be interesting!

Normally I’m quite conscientious about keeping up-to-date with upgrades, especially security-related ones. But in recent months my mind seemed to have been elsewhere and I let everything lapse. Oh I still read the security bulletins that went out - I just didn’t act on them. But this weekend I decided enough was enough and sat down and started updating all of my machines. All of them. I have a Mac running OS/X, a (cough) Windows XP machine and an Ubuntu machine. They all needed my attention and I made sure I gave it to them. There were innumerable software packages that had new updates/upgrades that I felt compelled to install, not counting the myriad patches from the likes of Microsoft’s “Patch Tuesday”. Backups to be done, scripts to be re-visited, drives to be analyzed and de-fragged, and yada-yada.

I sat back and thought about why some of my cron jobs weren’t executing, why Postfix was starting and a host of other imponderables and finally got everything working to my satisfaction. I don’t recommend waiting months to do this stuff; better to do it as it occurs - a lesson learned if I’ll keep to it.

After having to do several Wordpress upgrades in the space of a single week I finally decided to sit down and write a little script to help automate this mess. Why Wordpress doesn’t provide such a script is rather beyond me. This is admittedly a rather brain-damaged script but it does work. Tailor to your own needs:

#!/bin/bash
#
# Script to upgrade Wordpress.
#
# J. Wren Hunt
# July 11, 2008

# Ensure that we have full MySQL root privs before we start
clear
echo "Change the username/password in wp-config.php to root, re-edit and re-run."
exit

# 1st, go to wordpress site and get the latest version:
echo "Retrieiving latest Wordpress upgrade."
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz

# If wordpress dir exists, blow it away
echo "Nuking any prior Wordpress directory."
sudo rm -rf wordpress

# Unpack it:
echo "Unpacking the update."
sudo tar xvfz latest.tar.gz

# Backup blog sites
echo "Backing-up blog directories."
sudo tar cfz wrenhunt.tar.gz wrenhunt

# Backup the MySQL databases too - do a tar of the dir and a dump of the db.
cd /var/lib/mysql
#
echo "Backing up the MySQL dirs."
sudo tar cfz wrenz-wordpress.tar.gz wrenz-wordpress

echo "Performing MySQL dumps."
mysqldump -uroot -pXXXXXXXXX --add-drop-database --add-drop-table --databases --compatible=mysql40 wrenz-wordpress >  wrenz-wordpress_dump.sql
gzip wrenz-wordpress_dump.sql

# Now start the upgrade

echo "Nuking Wordpress wp-includes, wp-admin dirs."
sudo rm -rf /var/www/html/wrenhunt/wp-includes
sudo rm -rf /var/www/html/wrenhunt/wp-admin

cd /var/www/html/wordpress
sudo cp -rv . ../wrenhunt

echo "Now point your browser to http://wrenhunt.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php"