Welcome to the home of Noah Brier. I'm the co-founder of Variance and general internet tinkerer. Most of my writing these days is happening over at Why is this interesting?, a daily email full of interesting stuff. This site has been around since 2004. Feel free to get in touch. Good places to get started are my Framework of the Day posts or my favorite books and podcasts. Get in touch.

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Blog Stress

This site has brought me a fair amount of stress over the last 24 hours. Following the advice of Six Apart, I installed Movable Type 3.14. The upgrade was not a very big deal, it was really just a matter of overwriting a few files on my server and running an upgrade script. Of course, the transition wasn’t as smooth as I would have liked. When I tried to sign back in, I was greeted with a long error that included lots of words I didn’t understand (well, I guess I understood the words, just not the context). So, after punching a few things I posted a question on the Movable Type forum with my error and began my wait. After about 24 hours no one had gotten back to me and I was starting to get worried. While I had backed up all my entries, I still had very little desire to have to reinstall the entire piece of software. Anyway, after I got tired of waiting I decided to start searching around Google for similar errors (there was nothing exactly matching mine). On one webpage someone mentioned that a file might be corrupt. So, as a shot in the dark, I re-downloaded MT 3.14 and overwrote the CMS.pm file.

And that was all it took.

One stupid file had to be uploaded again.

As I wrote on the Movable Type forum, it just proved that in the end, I am dumb.

It’s sometimes amazing how the simplest answer is often the last we think of.

December 22, 2004