Upgrades

I finally got around to doing some server upgrades that I had been putting off for quite a while. So far I have upgraded the database to the new PostgreSQL 8.1 and finally upgraded this blog to Movable Type 3.2. I also threw away the old Ruby installation and started fresh with Ruby 1.8.3 and Rails 0.14.3.

As usual, I don't do enough system administration work to be careful, organized, or systematic. There are just so many options on the database that I think I probably got the permissions a little off somewhere between the backup, upgrade, and restore of the data.

The Movable Type upgrade went a lot smoother than I thought it would, given all of the hacks I had to make to the previous version to work around bugs in the 3.1 version. Six Apart did a great job of making a seemless upgrade process--once I had spent fifteen minutes or so deeply studying the documentation to figure out how to start the process.

You may notice the snazzy new layout the blog is using. I've made a few tweaks to the main layout to rearrange some of the widgets. There's still a little more work to do to bring back my 43 Places widget, and maybe I'll think about adding a Flickr badge as well. Not that any of you would notice since you are reading this through an RSS reader....

Still on my to-do list is a downgrade of Apache to 1.3 for better FastCGI support (or maybe I should be like the cool kids and switch to Lighttpd instead). The worst thing, however, is figuring out how to configure Postfix to process emails and pass them on to Rails for some project ideas I want to work on.