I'm not sure anybody has mentioned her, so allow me. Everybody, meet Winnie.

Hi Winnie!

Ever since Ben Jones left we've been looking for somebody to take over his job and while nobody permanent has been decided upon, Winnie has agreed to take over for now and help all of bloggers maintain our sanity.

Among Winnie's many responsibilities is making sure all of the technical aspects of blogging are maintained and taken care of. She can change all of our banner pictures, update our biographies, update the spam filter, yadda yadda yadda, and she also cooks! Pretty much without Winnie the bloggers would be wandering around in a confused daze, wondering why spam was destroying our masterpieces and trying to figure out how to work the Internet.

Today we all got an e-mail from Winnie mentioning a brand new feature for the MIT bloggers: Locker Space! We're not talking about your typical high school lockers though, we're talking about fancy, high tech, new-fangled athena lockers. What's an athena locker? Well, every student at MIT is assigned server space so that they can build websites, share files with people online, and do back up their computer's files. This webspace is what the bloggers use to host their pictures, which works fine. The downside is that with all the blog pictures our space tends to fill up, so a solution was devised.

Student groups and organizations on campus can apply for locker space, separate webspace for their organization, and Winnie got us locker space so we can move all of our pictures out of our athena accounts and free up some room for other important things.

I decided to just bite the bullet, move everything over, update all my entries, and be done with it.

Step one, copy the files. Easy.
Step two, change all the internal links on all of my entries. Seemingly difficult, except that I found an awesome feature of MovableType. Turns out, you can do a search/replace of all your entries at the same time, as well as rebuild and re-publish your entries in bulk. Internal links changed, easy.
Step three, delete all of the pictures out of my web space. I CTR+A'd inside my admissions blog folder and then deleted all the files, but realized that I hadn't actually deleted the folder. I navigated up the folder hierarchy and deleted the admissions blog folder. Then I went over to check on the new locker space with all of my pictures.

Empty.

Um. Oh God.

Frantically go back to original web space.

Empty.

Oh God.

I clicked back and forth between the two several times before realizing a) what had happened and b) the gravity of it. Turns out that I CTRL+A'd the new locker space and deleted all of those files, before hitting "BACK" instead of "UP" and then proceeded to delete all of the original pictures. I panicked. Every picture in every entry was officially gone. I have no backups, I have no caches, they were just gone. G-O-N-E. I began thinking of how I would explain this to everybody, but instead I quick e-mailed the SysAdmins here and they kindly directed me to a backup folder that is refreshed every evening. Now, thankfully, all of the files are properly restored and working. All of the entries should be picture-filled and happy now, and sooner or later I will begin blogging again.

This semester is incredibly busy for me, busier than I've seen at MIT. I'm building robots, making videos, learning controls, manipulating thermal fluids, and watching movies during pretty much every hour of every day. I'm currently running on 3 hours of sleep and will probably go to bed early tonight.

Things I'd like to blog about in the future?
- Toy Fair 2009
- Famous People I Accidentally Meet
- Student Cohesion
- Wall Scrawlings

We'll see how many of those I get to, but they'd all make good entries. Until later then, bye all!

Comments (Closed after 30 days to reduce spam)

FIRST FIRST FIRST FIRST FIRST!

Posted by: anon on February 27, 2009

Snively is the one who hates "first"s the most, random anon...

Anyway, I'm glad you got the backup files XD

Posted by: Narce on February 27, 2009

- Famous People I Accidentally Meet!

Famous People I Accidentally Meet!!!

Posted by: Ngozi '13 on February 27, 2009

If you're feeling creative, are there any Accidental People you Famously Met?

Posted by: Cam on February 27, 2009

It's comforting to know that MIT students inadvertently delete the wrong files too. Very glad that you were able to recover them from the backup! Looking forward to those posts

Posted by: tlyon on February 27, 2009

We should meet more often

Posted by: Richard Feynman on February 27, 2009

How about blogging about 2.007 in the future?
that would be sweet!

Posted by: Alejandro '13 on February 28, 2009

Wall scrawlings! :O
Yay!

Posted by: erik on February 28, 2009

LOL richard feynman above

Posted by: Gaurav Ragtah on February 28, 2009

Didn't Richard Feynman die? Like in 1988 or something? By the way, I read an awesome book written by him - its called, "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman!"

Posted by: Banerjee on February 28, 2009

"Surely You're Joking..." is one of my favorite books! If you liked it, you should also check out "What Do You Care What Other People Think", also by him.

I LOVE Feynman
And yes, he did die in the 80's.

Posted by: Kasey on February 28, 2009

Great that you guys have more space now.

Does that mean more photos in each blog entry?

Famous people and Student cohesion sound like cool blogs, can´t wait to read them.

How often is the MIT blogs layout changed?

Posted by: Ivan on February 28, 2009

what ACT and GPA do I have to get in order to get in this university?

Posted by: cyan on February 28, 2009

^ High enough.

Posted by: Oasis '11 on February 28, 2009

do i count as a famous person? :D you should consider backing up everything on your mac, laptop or external hard drive because if you delete/modify something and realize it after more than a day, you probably lose the data say hi to conner 2 for me.

Posted by: Sh1fty on February 28, 2009

How Do I do this?

Posted by: 0 on February 28, 2009

@ Snively
Couldn't you just use a file recovery program if the sysadmin didn't have a backup?

Posted by: 0 on February 28, 2009

Nice, Snively, nice.

@ Kasey: Feynman is da bomb.

@ Snively: What sort of student activities/clubs/groups are you involved with?

Posted by: Steph on February 28, 2009

@ Snively

What's a MovableType??? And How its different from any other webpage??

Posted by: SRV on March 1, 2009

@SRV

it's a CMS -- content management system. instead of mucking around in HTML you can change things ala facebook. it _generates_ webpages from text and images stored in a database. it's really not that different from other CMS like joomla and drupal, except it runs on perl.

Posted by: tim '13 on March 1, 2009

@ banerjee and kasey

try reading The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design.

it was wicked good.

Posted by: '13??? on March 1, 2009

Guys, definitely read "Perfectly Reasonable Deviations - The Letters of Richard P. Feynman".
It's amazin'!

Posted by: Liz on March 2, 2009

I don't think the pictures are back on all of your blogs. "Math = Broken" and "Danger Danger!" are missing pictures =/

Posted by: 0 on March 2, 2009

@Anonymous
The pictures are all in the directory and recovered, but I'm having trouble batch-publishing all of my old blog entries so I'm having to re-publish them in groups of 10ish and I haven't finished yet. Most should be good, but it'll be a little while until I finish all of them.

Posted by: Snively on March 3, 2009

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