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The Bruce Sterling Online Index. A guide to every Bruce Sterling work on the web (or so they claim.)
Julie pointed out the first Alias review
Looks like the end of internet radio.
Great day of work. I'm flying. My new feature is basically done over at the other site. I'm excited about this one. I'm going to write something up and point to it by tomorrow or the next day. Otherwise not much to report. Heading towards a beer....
Our most proficient bug hunter Tom pointed out that the ability for guests to leave comments was completely, well...., let's just say it wasn't working. And this must have been for quite some time. (Well, to clarify, if there were already comments in a thread you could add another, no problem, but if an anonymous commenter tried to add the first comment they would be thwarted.)
This is a big problem. I fixed it fairly easily, that's not the hard part, rather it's finding these things that is so difficult. I swear I tested that, but evidently I did not. It's hard to know when you've tried every single possibility in even a moderately complex system. Probably I tried to comment in threads that had already been started, and then just figured that it worked in every commenting case.
My apologies if anyone ever tried to leave a message here and was unable. I really would like it despite the previous broken nature of the tools. Looks like the new system (which I am currently testing on another site) might already be more stable than this one. Or maybe not. I really need to learn more about rigourous testing procedures. Or I need like 10 more of Tom.
I know I've said it before, but I think this is the mobile communicator for me. I'll have to look into pricing.
Is it just me or is there an incredible amount of air traffic over NYC right now?
Perfectly toned open letter to Jack Valenti and Michael Eisner. Right on the mark.
Bruce Sterling on SXSW and everything else. I'd pull a quote, but you should really read the whole thing. Nobody is safe with him at the keyboard.
I have the new system up and running (on a different site first, for testing.) Everything went pretty smoothly. I grabbed the old site contents with an HTML scraper I built, and loaded it into the new database running locally on my imac. Then I used mysqldump to get a textfile of the local database, sent it back up to the remote server, deleted the old database (gulp,) and loaded in the new one from the mysqldump file. Took down all the old scripts and put up all the new ones. Took about one hour, plus two more to fix a bunch of stuff I hadn't thought of in my planning. Not too bad.
So I'm on schedule. I'm hoping the users on that site will find any obvious bugs this week while I try yet again to write some help files. It will be a triumph if I can finally make myself do this task.
If all goes well I'll have this site changed over by the end of the month. Theoretically I could have it done in two weeks, but let's just say one month. No sense getting carried away.