We were cleaning up the house and having a party last night, and today we drove over to the Gulf Coast, and had a sunset dinner on Captiva Island. We just got back. Serious blogging will likely not commence until Tuesday, but as for tomorrow, Go Blue!

I just tried to do an upgrade from 2.661 to 3.333 (or whatever the latest version is), and I got the following error:

Error during upgrade: failed to execute statement create table mt_log ( log_id integer not null primary key auto_increment, log_author_id integer default 0, log_blog_id integer default 0, log_category varchar(255), log_class varchar(255) default ‘system’, log_ip varchar(16), log_level integer default 1, log_message varchar(255), log_metadata varchar(255), log_created_on datetime, log_created_by integer, log_modified_on timestamp not null, log_modified_by integer ): Table ‘mt_log’ already exists at /usr/home/simberg/domains/transterrestrial.com/lib/MT/Upgrade.pm line 1190.

Anyone know what the problem is, and how to fix?

(Good thing I backed up my installation and database…)

I’m (finally) upgrading from MT 2.661 to 3.3. In the manual, it says to be sure that no one is using the software during the upgrade process.

How do I do that? What if someone comments while the upgrade occurs?

Now that I’ve been named Time’s Person of the Year, I expect my readership to go up considerably.

John Kerry is appropriately (and uncharacteristically) humble about it, of course.

Does anyone have any idea why the words “de-vice” and “st0ck” (spelled properly) break the script? It’s hard to even debug a broken script.

We didn’t drive up. The launch was scrubbed.

Maybe Saturday or Sunday. I’ll decide then.

I’ve never seen a night launch of the Shuttle (or any large launch vehicle–the biggest I’ve ever seen was a Delta II out of Vandenberg, from a motel in Lompoc). But there’s only a forty percent chance of flying tonight, due to concerns about low-level clouds with a front moving in. I have to decide by six or so if it’s worth the drive up to the Cape, or risk having to watch from a hundred fifty miles away on the beach down here. If it doesn’t go tonight, the next most likely success would be on Sunday night, due to forecast of high winds on Friday and Saturday. Of course, if it slips long enough (well into next week) the window will have slid backward enough that it’s no longer a night launch.

[Update at 2:30 PM EST]

Weather’s getting worse:

Kennedy Space Center already is overcast and getting worse by the hour. The satellite imagery indicates that the cloud cover that was feared as a potential launch show-stopper is going to intensify.

All three of the Transoceanic Abort Landing sites in Spain and France are experiencing unacceptable weather conditions in case an unprecedented emergency landing were attempted because of some problem during the early stages of flight.

There are low clouds and showers within 20 miles of the landing sites in Zaragosa and Moron in Spain. At the French emergency site in Istris, winds are forecast to be too strong to land.

No probability of launch update, though. I have to think it’s dropping below forty percent. This is the MMT’s bane–having to make a decision to send the crew out to lie on their backs for a couple hours, and hoping for the best against long odds. It’s looking less and less likely that we’ll make the drive up.

[3:15 PM Update]

They’re still saying a sixty percent chance of clouds preventing launch. But what’s the joint probability of having good weather at the Cape, and at all the abort landing sites? I have to think it’s a lot less than forty percent at this point. It’s going to be really hard to motivate myself to make the drive.

Patricia and I are kid sitting this weekend while their parents go to Key West for the weekend, for their first vacation alone since the kids were born. They’re six and eight (almost nine) and a lovable handful. Doesn’t leave much time for blogging.

I do have to say, though, that if USC beats Notre Dame tonight and then loses next week to UCLA, you can’t imagine how hard I’ll laugh…

[Watching game]

I should obligatorily add, that I really, really hate having to root for Notre Dame…

But it’s 21-10 now, favor USC.

Or rather, still. I’ve noticed that my Internet connection has had leaky tubes lately. I tracked the problem down to DNS. I did quick search on “DNS problems Bellsouth,” and found that my old post on the subject was number two, but number one was a post at Tony Spencer’s place from over a year ago with several recent comments.

The weird thing is that the problem is primarily on my Windows box. My Fedora machine seems to be fine (it obviously has a different DNS setup, that I’ll have to dig into, to see what it’s doing right, and Windows is doing wrong. When I check my speed at C/Net, it tells me I’ve got a 1.5 Mbit connection, so it’s very frustating to have slow loads of pages because the machine can’t find the IP.

[Update about 7:30 EST]

In rereading my old post, I found this recent comment to it:

…did anyone notice that the DNS problems began about the same time they got to work for the NSA et al. Since I’m writing this in October 2006 and this thread started in December 2004, I assume they’ve had plenty of time and complaints to have long ago solved this issue if they had any intention of doing so.

Just so everyone knows, the DNS problem is still there. I live in southeast GA, and there is a minimum five full second (5.0s) responses to DNS queries. Contrast that with my Comcast DNS response times of (0.05s). So my 256KB/256KB Comcast connection is 100x faster at responding to DNS queries than my 6MB/384KB Bellsouth connection.

This thread is two years old, and this problem persists. Maybe everything is actually working but the NSA has to approve your DNS request first 🙂 There is no valid technical reason for this level of a problem for this length of time. And it doesn’t matter what time of day it is, so the DNS workload defense doesn’t hold up.

PS: Bellsouth did eventually deny participation, but as far as I know for certain, there were only two companies that actually refused the unconstitutional demands and bellsouth wasn’t one of them, but Google was !! Too bad google won’t just give us all free DNS, imagine the statistics they could derive from that. Oh well, PEACE netizens.

I don’t tend to be the paranoid type, but I’m wondering if there is indeed something to this.

[Update about 8:30 PM EST]

OK, Bellsouth DNS is officially fscked. I noted that my Linux machine was hardwired to use 4.2.2.2 as primary DNS, with the Bellsouth servers as secondary. I changed the Windows machines from “get DNS servers from the service” to primary 4.2.2.2 with a Bellsouth backup, and all is well. But I probably should set up my Linux box as a DNS server, to obviate these problems in the future, since I seem to have a good general Internet connection. For that matter, I need to get a better mail server than Bellsouth, which won’t allow me to access the SMTP server when I’m not on their network. Anyone have any suggestions?

I’m busy with a final push to finish the house remodeling for a visit from my brother and his family for Thanksgiving. They came down from Michigan to do the Orlando thing, and will be coming down midweek. Meanwhile, lots of other good blogs, most better than this one, over on the left there.

Back to painting…