MacJournals

We know we’ve had a lot of radio silence lately, but it doesn’t mean we haven’t been as busy as ever. It just means we’ve been busy doing stuff that, if all done perfectly, means that absolutely nothing will look different. Such is life on sysadmin day.

We had several days of building repairs that made it all but impossible to work, and then we had the heat wave that made it too hot to work as much as we wanted. Then, surprisingly, some things we expected to do in October when equipment and software became available instead happened now: we massively upgraded our subscriptions database with an eye on allowing customers to access their own records in the future (before this past week, that wasn’t even an option).

We had to rearchitect several key parts to make it work in a network environment, as opposed to letting other machines enter data but only one machine processing it, an entirely different kettle of fish. That wasn’t as easy as expected, but I’m told they’ll have more on that in upcoming issues of MDJ.

We also got a lot of the static Web site updated today for the first time in years – believe it or not, we’d never been able to get Adobe GoLive CS2 to open our site. It crashed every time, even when trying to rebuild it from scratch. We finally found the troublesome old files today in a “.settings” folder, eliminated them, and got a good portion of the visible pages of the site validating and presenting correctly with HTML 4.01 Transitional. (Yeah, I know, welcome to 2001 – but it means that we can now update and add new pages without having to write all the HTML from scratch or just copy/paste from existing files, and that’s a big win for us.)

We actually got about three weeks’ worth of infrastructure changes done in the past six days, but we though the three weeks would be spread in September and October. There was no question about going for it now, though, because it will make remotes from WWDC 2006 easier and more supportable. More on that in print next week. Starting tomorrow, us sysadmin types vacate the studio for the editorial staff until called upon in an emergency. We could use the rest, though.

We upgraded database hardware and software today in a long-anticipated (at least around here) move. To our surprise, that broke our new RSS feature – the code that exports the authentication information to the server had some pathname dependencies that we didn’t realize.

We’ve restored the RSS access, but we’re not sure we’ve fixed the systemic problem. We know how to fix it by hand, though, so you may see intermittent RSS access problems for the next day or so. They shouldn’t last more than a few minutes when they pop up, and we should have it fixed by the end of the week.

Update: Fixed for good now. For future reference, don’t store characters like linefeeds as literal strings – construct them from constants so that when you cut and paste things, helpful applications don’t convert them to returns for you.

Also, just because this ought to be easier to find on the Web than it is: You can’t use AppleScript’s “read” and “write” commands in Standard Additions inside an AppleScript in a FileMaker Pro script step. It’s because “read” and “write” conflict with FileMaker’s own terminology, so trying to use them gives you a syntax error and FileMaker won’t compile the script.

The workaround? Use the raw event codes. Instead of “read”, use <<event rdwrread>>, and instead of “write” use <<event readwrit>>, where << and >> are chevrons (option- and option-| on US keyboards). Note, however, that if you try this in Script Editor or Script Debugger, it will tokenize and decompile it to the terms “read” and “write” again, so pasting it back into FileMaker will break the script again. We keep the event codes in a nearby comment so we can paste them back into the right place when updating FileMaker’s version of the script. Now you know.

Update 2: Although no one outside the office should have seen it, the system to export subscription charges into our bookkeeping program didn’t survive the upgrade – it relied on several global fields in FileMaker Pro, and as we found out the hard way, clients can change global fields but their changes are never ever saved to disk. FileMaker’s own documentation tries really hard to say this but never quite manages to make it understandable. We had to rewrite some 10-year-old logic for keeping track of authorization batches, but with just a tiny bit of help, we got it done in a few hours.

(Note #1: I only ate two of the five. They don’t taste very good, but they work.)

(Note #2: Today is apparently SysAdmin Appreciation Day. As the SysAdmin, I appreciate that most of this is now done.)

(Note #3: We’re going to get a couple of really good articles out of all this, I’m told, but not about most of these details.)

If we’re a bit slow to respond to E-mail or anything else this week, please accept our advance apologies. The picture on the right shows the current (as of this posting) appearance of the Yahoo! Weather widget for GCSF World Headquarters. It had reached 100°F before noon, and it’s not expected to get anywhere below 75°F through the end of the week.

Of course, GCSF World Headquarters is air-conditioned, but our production studio has separate heating and cooling. That works out great in winter, but in the summer, it really can’t keep the temperature in the studio much more than 20°F below the outside temperature – particularly if the humidity is as high as it is right now. When it starts to get above 95°F outside, we start to sweat. Right now, our internal studio temperature is registering a balmy 84°F, and it’s quite close in here. You can think of many adjectives to describe your ideal production environment, but “moist” is rarely among them.

The upshot is that it’s quite difficult to work in the studio for a good 8-hour stretch each day, and it’s the 8-hour stretch that you’d expect we’d want to be in here working. We’re managing the best we can – we don’t quite expect Yahoo’s predictions to come true – it’s predicted 107°F and 108°F for days earlier this summer, and on those days it barely got above 104, ha!). The second picture shows Apple’s weather widget for the same location at the same time, and it thinks things are a little bit cooler. We’re still sweating. And wondering why those digits aren’t kerned more closely in either widget. Gads.

(Until 1999, the production studio was a much smaller room that now hosts the library and servers, and with body heat and more machines in there, it could easily get above 95°F at this time of day. With just a couple of servers and no people in there, the building’s A/C keeps everything in line there now.)

Send us some cool thoughts – with Apple’s Q2 results coming this week and a lot of stuff already in progress, it’s going to be a hot one!

We spend so much time getting MDJ and MWJ out the door each month that we rarely update our own Web site. It’s a bit odd, in this day of ad-driven blogs, for a subscription-only journal to have been successfully publishing, ad-free, for nearly a decade, but here we are!

This little blog isn’t much, but it makes it easier for us to post small updates about what’s new with our publications, or to pass along little bits of information that everyone might like to know. There should be an RSS feed and everything. Enjoy!