Rotorglow

Visio 2003 is not nearly as horrible as any other version of Visio I've used.

Even over Terminal Server.

Daring Fireball: The iTunes 5 Announcement From the Perspective of an Anthropomorphized Brushed Metal User Interface Theme

This is really quite brilliant, as usual. More so if you're a Mac Nerd.

So, Tim sent me some mail this morning (in the guise of a Nigerian swindler) saying that all the permalinks off of life.neophi.com/ctw were broken, and throwing database connection errors. Likewise, I couldn't get to the MT admin page to see what was going on. Everything else was fine (including DanielR's blog on this very server.

Daniel did some poking around and it seems the problem was twofold:

A: there were some power problems at the hosting location early this morning, and it seems that not everything came back up cleanly, in particular mysql or something related.

B: Even so, I had Rotorblog misconfigured to use dynamically linked category, monthly and individual archive templates. If I'd been using static archive templates, as I should have been, all the pages would have been there for your enjoyment (or at least RASHIDI MANSUELA's enjoyment), with or without the DB being available.

So there you go. The moral? RTFM. And Cascading failures are bad.

And thanks to Tim for the tip, and Daniel for kicking mysql...

I got this error message on my machine at work the other day. I don't really remember what I was doing at the time, and I know that the interaction between GUIs and underlying operating systems is complex. But I got a huge chuckle out of one interpretation (admittedly the most sarcastic, cynical one I can think of, but none of you should be surprised by this):

"To protect your computer, Windows has shutdown Windows."

My thoughts exactly.

Daring Fireball: Good Journalism

John Gruber's got a pretty nice deconstruction of a recent (and silly) AP article about Mac OS X and its susceptibility to viruses.

It underscores the point that (at least some) bloggers are better "reporters" than (at least some) "reporters."