Things You Shouldn’t Do by Snively '11

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!