[Mom, you can stop reading today’s entry here. It’s all gonna be acronyms….]

I tried a little experiment with my Radio website today — I tried to convert it to publish on my intranet instead of into the cloud.

First, I tried using the “upstream by FTP” option. That didn’t work, but not through any fault of Radio; we’re having some sort of bizarre FTP problem on the server I’d be using.

So then I decided to be clever and use the new “FileSystem” upstreaming driver. I added a second <upstream> element to my #upstream.xml file, pointing to a server I’d mounted via Samba, and all hell broke loose.

The first problem was simple; when Radio rendered my pages, it always appeared to use the URL for my intranet; I was hoping it would render with the appropriate URL for each destination, but it didn’t seem to.

And as a second problem, it never seemed to copy files into the local filesystem (whether on a Samba-mounted server drive or my local drive didn’t matter).

So I gave up and restored the original #upstream.xml. But the pages being sent up to the cloud still had the intranet URLs. I did a search-and-replace in Radio for the intranet URL and changed it to my cloud URL; that would have helped, except I got the cloud URL wrong, leaving out an initial zero.

I tried fixing that, but screwed up again. Eventually, I downloaded a new copy of Radio and registered it; that put me in position to fix the problem with even more find-and-replace and also got me a few new Tools which weren’t in the 8.0.7 copy I’d upgraded to 8.0.8.

When all was said and done, I had my old Radio site back, complete with all of my content (for what little that’s worth!). Next time, I’ll back up the Radio directory before I start playing.

But I sure wish I knew what I’d done….

Currently, we’re discussing the situation in Israel; I see that
Dan Gillmor has arrived there to report on the Israel high-tech industry. I am afraid he’ll have no problem getting into nice hotels and restaurants; tourism in Israel is very weak these days.

Better to bore the boss than the whole team

I gave a talk (via teleconference and e-meeting) about the IBM Academy of Technology to my team at work today. I’d planned to use a slightly-edited version of a presentation prepared by the Academy Office, and by happy coincidence, sent it to my boss yesterday along with some slides for him to use in introducing this series of talks.

He liked the slides I’d prepared for him, but had some pointed questions about the Academy presentation — such as asking whether it was suitable for this audience, since the interesting stuff began at about the 20th slide. And after thinking about it for a few seconds, I agreed with him…and not because he signs my appraisal. So I spent some time writing a brand new presentation intended for the team, and I think the people who called in appreciated it. The saddest part of the story is that it took me less time to write a new presentation than I’d spent trying to adapt the other presentation!

Jews in Space

Jerusalem, we have a problem.

As if weightlessness, cramped conditions and the enormity of the galaxy were not worrying enough, a crew member of the next space shuttle mission is facing an additional problem: How do you observe the Sabbath when it occurs once every 10 1/2 hours in orbit?
[via Jenny]

Shortwave Radio Makes Major Media

“Night after night I was in hotels where my modem became useless after the switchboard was closed down for the evening. I might have saved myself the pain of watching too many talk shows on French television had I brought a shortwave radio along.” [New York Times]