A bit of a reprieve

Head Rambles Posted on by  

It looks like I’m stuck with this.

I thought I had a grand excuse to bury this site for once and for all as it had developed a very mysterious bug.

It transpires it was nothing to do with the weather [the meeja here are going frantic warning us of temperatures of 30, as if we’ll all melt], Warble Gloaming, Brexit, the war in Ukraine or any of the various pandemics. It was down to human error. Even better, I’m not the human involved.

I received a mail last night –

Our technical team discovered today, that a version of the database server [server number] was inadvertently restarted on Tuesday the 9th of August at approximately 11am which had an outdated copy of data on it , and this server subsequently became active for website database connections. 

The outdated server was shutdown upon discovery at 11:30am this morning and the correct server version became active again.  The result of this is, that websites connecting to  databases on this node, may have been writing to the outdated version instead of the live.

So the mystery is solved. The techy bods fucked up royally and nearly gave me a nervous breakdown.

There is still a problem though. Apparently people who subscribed in the past haven’t been getting their notifications. Why anyone would want to subscribe is beyond me, but I suppose it takes all sorts? Anyhows I think I may know what’s wrong there {Google fucking things up as usual]. I’m trying out a new system or two so do let me know if it works.

In the meantime, it looks like you’re stuck with me for the time being.

 

Is this it?

Head Rambles Posted on by 8

Could this be the death of poor old Rambles?

Something is wrong. Yesterday I discovered that two years of posts had disappeared. I fixed that by restoring a backup.

Today I discovered that the last two posts had gone. Once again I had to restore the database.

So there is a problem. I don’t know what it is. Is it the software? Is it the database? Is it the server? I honestly haven’t a clue.

I have run a couple of scans. One scan completed showing no problems. Another scan is a severe one which does a deep scan comparing files with their originals and sniffing out anything suspicious. That came up with one warning that will need a little attention but I’m confident that it’s not a problem.

So… it’s not a virus or any malware. Everything is apparently fine and running normally. The firewall is in place and is successfully blocking nasties. But posts are starting to disappear. Why? How? If I can’t find an answer then there isn’t much point in adding new stuff if it’s only going to disappear again?

I’ll wait for a couple of days to see what happens.

Watch this space.

 

Expecting the unexpected

Head Rambles Posted on by 1

This may come as a shock to some but weird things happen from time to time.

A weird thing happened here yesterday.

I tapped in my usual garbage into this here site and pressed Publish. Grand. Up my brainfart went to enlighten and/or entertain the planet. All went smoothly and there was my wisdom on the site for the whole world to see.

Then I noticed something.

My previous post was apparently back in 2020.

What the fuck? I checked, and sure enough this is 2022 and I am reasonably sure I have scribbled something, or even more than something in the intervening years. Surely I had made some comment on the Virus that swept the globe? What the fuck had happened to all my pearls of wisdom? The site was working perfectly but it has just removed two whole years of hard [very hard] work. I panicked.

As luck would have it, I have a tedious little routine in the morning. I type in a couple of little commands into my trusty laptop and it takes over and downloads backups from my little nest of websites. It’s not a very exciting job and it means I have lots of these little [or not so little] files cluttering up the place. One of those files was a backup of the database for this site. But naturally it wouldn’t know anything about my latest outpourings of genius. So I copied all I had typed in and saved it in another file.

I copied up the backup of the database. It failed. Of course it did. Life can’t be that simple? Time for some drastic action. I deleted the entire database. I then uploaded the backup and it actually worked. It lacked my latest fart however so I copied that in from my little saved file. That worked. Life was back to normal. My vast store of insightful knowledge was there once more to educate the world.

I still haven’t a fucking clue what caused the problem though….

 

That cesspit called Twitter

Head Rambles Posted on by 14

Twitter really is a very sad place.

There is a company in Dublin that rents out bicycles, or leases them or something.

Somebody had the idea of naming the bicycles with Irish female and male names so that the customer could identify which bike they were renting. It’s maybe a little bit on the twee side, but I’ll let that pass.

You can imagine the scene – customer gets the message that “today they will be riding Sinéad” or whatever. Now in typical puerile fashion this gave me cause for a chuckle, or at least a smirk. It is actually a rather ingenious marketing ploy. What Irishman could resist the announcement in the pub that they had been riding Niamh all day and it was the best ride they had had in years?

For as you may have gathered, “riding” is a word with an alternative meaning particularly in the greater Dublin area. You may gather that meaning from my example above. Given that fact the company should have used the innuendo in an advertising campaign – “Would you like a good ride?” or “Who do you fancy riding today?”

Sadly though the Perpetually Offended on Twitter got to hear about this, and of course they were offended. It seems that little gets by these sad twats and they must spend their days trawling through “tweets” looking for something that could remotely offend them. They always overlook the general rule that you cannot give offence, you can only take it. Offence is in the eye or ear of the beholder. I can understand how pejorative expressions might be a bit iffy but I would hardly put “riding” in that category.

So the company, instead of grasping a great opportunity cowed to the humourless Twitter mob and have “renamed” all their bikes with plain dull numbers. Doubtless the Twitter lot will find some reason to complain that somehow the numbers are offensive.

Is there anything that doesn’t cause outrage on Twitter?