I am going to be doing some work on the gallery this morning, namely updating the software and moving the contents to a new database. This will mean that things might not work on there for a few hours. Usual “I’ll keep you posted” rules apply.

5:20AM
Copying of the database is taking an age, so I thought I’d update. I forgot to clear the history table. which means it has to restore ~100,000 entries of useless information. Whoopsy. This means I’m only 30% through a restore that should have only taken 5 minutes. Gah!

5:33AM
50% Done… Going quicker now that I’ve switched a few things off. About 40,000 rows on the history table to go. It’ll fly through once it’s finished that… I hope.

5:37AM
Still chugging through. Not an update related to the gallery, but I’ve just realised that the distance between sitting at my desk, and going to the kitchen to get a glass of water and back is the longest distance I could possibly walk to get something in this house.

5:39AM
Can someone get me a glass of water? Please?

5:43AM
Balls to you all. I return with afore-mentioned council pop, and half a bottle of beer from last night. I’m not wasting it!

5:44AM
About 10,000 rows to go. Beer flat.

5:47AM
Not long to go now. Beer considered drinkable after second sip.

5:53AM
OK, it’s finished the history, but still taking its time chugging through the other stuff, but this is more important so I don’t mind waiting. Looks as if it’s going to me a misty morning. Whoo. 100,000 queries executed, 8891 to go.

6:00AM
Finally, the database is complete. Whoooo. Now, this is where it starts to get complicated. Time to upload the new version of the gallery software.

6:04AM
My word, this is going dog slow. I will have to find out if there’s a way of uploading a zipped file to the server and unzipping it via the shell. Probably because I’ve also uploaded the different language packs too. Boh. Coming soon: the gallery in Hungarian. Or maybe not.

6:18AM
It’s all going ever-so-slightly Pete Tong. Maybe I should have RFTM.

6:31AM
Two things were faulty. The software didn’t have write permissions to create a folder. Once this was granted, it was created with the wrong user credentials. And then I couldn’t delete it. saying that I didn’t have permission to delete them. Fixed after creating the folders locally, then uploading them to the server. Odd. Only thing left to do is copy the images from the old version of the software to the new. This should take about 5 minutes.

6:39AM
No anomaly detected after application upgrade. Sniff. I’m so happy. Now, Chad, I do realise, that this has been 90 minutes of my life I’ll never get back, but as next door’s boiler has started whistling something chronic, I’d have been awake anyway. Time to do some housekeeping, such as backing up the old databases, but this shouldn’t be a long procedure.

6:43AM
“Well done Pillsbury Dough Boy, keep up the good work.”. Thanks Chad, but I don’t do Americanisms, though I am fully aware of the existence of the character. It was rather spooky, that the last update 4 minutes ago mentioned you, and you shit out another comment.

6:47AM
The backup file is built, and is now downloading. I might as well drop the old database too, but not without a thorough backup. Must also update my automatic backup scripts too.