magicbeans. nothing if not awkward.

went to the library early to watch videos. didn't really have any idea what i was after. didn't have time for anything feature length. ended up with an interview with john cage and peter greenaway's 26 bathrooms.

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moved mushroom.net and all it's subsites off of carrot and onto plum this afternoon. most of it went without a hitch. except magicbeans, of course.

i chose to ignore the larger issues for a while (such as the fact that my server-side includes weren't working and my front page was nothing but a "there was an error processing this directive" message) in order to deal with the more basic issues, like the fact that gd had never been installed on plum.

this had the potential of being a particularly large problem though. for a number of years the gd library has not created gifs due to a patent issue with the lzw compression algorithm. i'm not ready to give up gif support however, and am willing to tempt the patent-infringement gods if need be. and so rather than doing a new install, i hunted down the various binaries and library files and perl modules on carrot and moved them by hand to plum.

everything seemed to be working well, except for the fact that my calendar (when called directly, the front page was still an error message) only displayed a small number of the daily pix. eventually it occurred to me that it was only displaying pix for days that had two or more images. my old friend the perl file glob bug that ignores the first item in any list of files. at some point i had installed a newer version of perl on carrot, it must have been prior to my writing of the calendar code, and so this problem had never cropped up in this respect.

so, a new version of perl. but i couldn't take the easy route and update the perl package, because newer rpm packages will only install with newer versions of rpm, which itself can't be installed because other bits of our system are old. so i had to build a new perl binary from the source. which isn't as hard as it sounds anymore. makefiles have gotten pretty smart over the years.

but then gd was broken again. i tried moving files around to find the locations that the new perl install was looking in, but didn't have any luck. it was looking like i was going to have to install gd from scratch. so i went in search of an old version of the library. someone has to have it archived for gif creation, patents be damned. i actually found one better, someone in australia who has patched versions of the newest libraries and modules. the patent had never been applied for in australia.

but of course nothing is that easy. the new version also creates jpgs and pngs, and so you need to download and install separate dedicated libraries for all of those things. and of course the server on which some of those libraries were found was down. but i did manage to hunt up some mirrors.

installed the various libraries. the patched, new version of gd. things were looking good, except for the fact that my front page was still a big error message. another forty-five minutes poking around various message boards on the web and the apache docs eventually fixed that too. and once i got everything working, and had a chance to relax and check things out, i noticed that the colours of the future boxes in the calendar and of the colourbar backgrounds had changed. i guess the new version of perl has a different seeding routine for the random number generator.

and i'm sure i'm forgetting things. like searching out and fixing all the references to outdated paths in my scripts. but leave it to me to have the most difficult site to move.

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stef and i went out to eat at the union station brewery this evening. i don't entirely consider it going out if it's to her place of employment, but it was nice enough. i ate the one vegan (or vegan if various bits are left out) thing on the menu. it was good though. probably bored stef with my whole story of moving magicbeans.

and afterwards we walked over to the mall to see if there were any movies playing that we might want to see. when we got there the movie theatre was closed. no signs explaining why. no people milling about. it was a little eerie. so we went for a beer at ri-ra (the irish pub that everyone from the brewery goes to after work).