moonbug.org

Don’t let that title fool you: I’ve been so busy at work recently, I hardly ever get to update that other site of mine anymore — let alone this one. Did manage to squeeze in a little design job though, with the executive help of Gabriela. No money involved, just helping out a good friend. Hope he likes it!

Click to enlarge:

Poster for a barber-shop singing camp aimed at (American!) teenagers. Gaby was in charge of the hairdo’s and the typography whilst I spent a Saturday afternoon drawing open mouths of various persuasions. Fun!

My favourite is the blue-scalped Goth, though it must be said the dorky “Will Someone Release Me From These Dumbass Glasses” kid has a certain je ne sais quoi as well.

My proverbial Significant Other Half just finished designing a small bunch of Valentine themed e-cards for Bag Magazine, an Argentine ‘zine (you guessed right!) aimed at and produced by, ya know, those people who are of the Greek Persuasion — not that there’s anything wrong with that!

I simply love the way she plunders my catalogue of minuscule doodles and dresses them up into something actually worthwhile publishing! Have a look:

… and my personal favourite:

Warning: techie post ahead, mainly for my own future reference…

Back in 2005 I set up Zappa Wiki Jawaka, a wiki (you guessed it) dedicated to (you guessed it) Frank Zappa. Grabbed the latest MediaWiki package and patiently went through all the loops of setting up a database, configuring php files, customizing, etc.

No more than one month later, Dreamhost made MediaWiki a one-click install. Instead of having to fiddle around for hours, you now had your own wiki at the push of one button — and were able to upgrade it at the push of that same button. Alas, there I was, stuck with my own homegrown 1.4.2 install which didn’t allow for one-click upgrading.

Adding insult to injury, along came the spam- and vandalbots. My poor outdated wiki was taking a constant beating, and there was nothing I could do about it, because every single extension I tracked down required a more recent version. There was only one solution: bite the bullet and upgrade.

Here’s what I did:

1. Make a back-up of all the wiki’s current files
2. Make a copy of the database for testing purposes
3. Set up a new subdomain running PHP5.2 for testing purposes
4. Did a one-click install of Mediawiki 1.11.0 on the testing domain from within Dreamhost’s admin panel
5. Pointed the install to the outdated database, hoping it too would be upgraded in the process.

No dice. The installer ran okay for about half a second, then choked, complaining that it couldn’t find a certain table within the database.

MediaWiki’s online manual to the rescue: a huge forest of words and links where you tend to get lost within a minute or so. A couple of hours and liters of cafeine later, I came across a page that looked like it had the answer. It said: go to your maintenance folder, look for two files (upgrade1_5.php and update.php) and run them.

Hurrah! I quickly pointed my browser to upgrade1_5.php and was greeted with the following message: “this script must be run from the command line”.

Uh oh. Command line. Wargames, anyone?

We’re now a couple of hours later, I’ve got some basic shell commands under my belt from various tutorials and I’m staring at the Terminal. Time for the real magic:


ssh me@mydomain.com
me@mydomain.com password: mypassword
$[server] ls
$[server] cd wiki.killuglyradio.com/maintenance/
$[server] php upgrade1_5.php
$[server] php update.php


… upon which I re-ran the installer, and was greeted with a shiny “Installation complete!” message.

Hello, one-click upgrade!