Andrew Rowson

I'm still working on this virtual tour for the tonbridge school website. It's now nearly finished, which is nice.

However, at 6 minutes past midnight, my tour table in the mysql database seemed to jump back about 4 months of its own accord.

I had noticed that there was something wrong by 10 minutes past, but I assumed it was my tour script messing up the field of views (4 months ago, I hadn't put any FOVs in the table). So I spent about 20 minutes testing the script before finally deciding to check the table directly and see what was there.

So I logged in, did a select on that, and all the FOV fields came back NULL. I thought 'This is odd, my FOV column has disappeared...', spent another 5 minutes looking over the whole of the tonbschl development site scripts for something which I might have done which may have caused this. But again, I couldn't find anything wrong. Then I thought 'Hmm, I wonder if it's as if it stepped back 4 months...', I checked, and two new entries I added about 2 months ago were not there.

It was as if the table had decided to empty itself and load in a copy of the table which I didn't have any more (I write the tour stuff into CSV files first, it's easier to edit).

So I asked Gaima at Notnet (my hosting company) if he could have a look at the logs and see if anything had happened. He sent it to me, and there it was... the table emptied, filled up with the 4-month old data, emptied again, filled up again... it was as if someone had run the loading script on the 4-month old csv file. Twice.

And then I remembered something.

Well, to be exact, I remembered four things. I remembered how about 4 months ago, I was loading stuff into the table using a script which I was storing in the images directory. I also remembered that about 2 months ago, I updated the script and moved it into a directory which was out of reach of the web server. My brain also reminded me that at about 11.30 I had told Andrew Rowson about the flash map which I'd spent a long time working on, and gave him the URL. Add that to some of my fondest memories of Andrew ...), and I had worked out what had happened. Such as him rebooting the linux machine at school by trying to log on - he hit CTRL+ALT+DEL - while I was shelled in and editing files from the other side of the room... I heard a beep, my session hung and beeped, I turned round and there was Andrew saying 'I didn't do anything, it rebooted itself!'... don't get me wrong, he's a nice guy, but...

Andrew had been snooping around the development site, and had stumbled across the four month old loading script which had been left forgotten in the images directory. And, being the curious type, he clicked on it. It ran, emptied the table, filled it with the old data, gave his browser a 500 server error (it was not designed to run from apache, so didnt give any headers), so he hit F5, it ran again, yada yada yada.

All in all, I spent over an hour trying to work out, and fix, what went wrong, and poor Gaima spent about 15 minutes looking through logs and stuff for me. So, why am I telling you this? Apart from, obviously, pointing out that Andrew is a menace to the internet, hell, the world of computers, and shouldn't be let near them, and especially not development websites with old unused and forgotten scripts lying around in... Well, I dunno. I thought I'd just make a news post for today.

Had a haircut by the way. If you want to see a photo of it, email me :p

And I'm thinking of starting up a Rocky Horror club, for those of you who have enjoyed one of them at a Harvesters. Then we can all meet up at a Harvesters one day in a few years time, eat Rocky Horrors, sing camp songs and recollect the good ol days when the men were men and the women wore skirts. Or perhaps it would just be better to forget that idea...

And if you didn't follow the link above to Gaima's shiny new website, shame on you. Go there now: www.gaima.co.uk...

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