Build Automator Blog

We had planned to release a new build today, Monday. But sometimes things just don't go as planned! The past 24 hours have been a demonstration to me that sometimes the only predictable thing is the unpredictability of things

I have been meaning to take some time to customize the skin that I'm using for this blog and at least add the Build Automator logo at the top and put a link back to the website. It doesn't seem to be possible to add the link without modifying the skin. So last night I decided to install b2evolution on my local server, which I use for all web development testing before I upload it to our webserver. Installing was a breeze and then I was going to transfer the mySQL data from our webserver to our local server. I have been using SQL Front (formerly MySQL Front) for years for MySQL work. I didn't have it installed on the server machine so I downloaded the latest and installed it. While I was doing the transfer I got some SQL errors on couple of tables and it didn't finish the transfer. I had run into this with the forum database as well so I decided to use the same method and drop the local database and try again.

So I drop the database. About half a second later I realized to my horror that I had dropped the database on the webserver, not the local server! And now I had one non-existing database on the webserver and one partial database at home - not a good situation at 11:30 at night. After several minutes of sheer panic I realized that I did have the table with the postings on my local machine, it had made it over before the transfer failed, so I realized that I could rebuild the blog. I sent my hosting company an email and asked them if they had a backup. This morning I had an email from my friend Benjamin Krajmalnik, one of the owners of the Illumen Group which hosts our sites, with a zip of the database. I uploaded it and the blog was back up and running. Thanks to Benjamin, I had my blog up again

This morning I spent time getting the blog back up and since I was messing with it I figured that I should take the time and try to change the skin. After almost two hours I realized that there was something very, very strange going on. Half the skin is in a style sheet and the other half in php. The problem was that no matter what I did with that .css file, nothing changed in the layout! When I realized that I could delete the file and nothing changed, I decided to post on the b2evolution forum and ask for help After taking a break for this all and doing something else it dawned on me that the path to the css was probably being fixed somewhere because I was using the data from the webserver! So I went back to the computer, renamed the .css file on the webserver and lo and behold, my local server was indeed pulling the file from the webserver, not local!

When I had finally figured that out it was kind of a relief to me as I realized that the darn .css hadn't taken over and posessed my computer! I settled down to do some final testing of the new build when I ran into something unpredictable and unexpected again that I had to fix. What I found was that our new "Compile multiple Clarion apps" action would not advance from one app to the next one unless I clicked on the Build Automator icon to activate it. Since I had also added the same method to the "Compile Clarion" action, it would not terminate the compile process either. Very strange behaviour indeed that demanded investigating and fixing right away. To add to my misery I realized at one point that I had been compiling the wrong DLL for about 30 mintues - definitely not my day In the end I found the culprit, a timer that was expected to fire hadn't been initialized, so it never fired and that timer was responsible for breaking up the compile process. Simple thing that was overlooked and broke the code completely. Once that was fixed, everything started working as expected. I hadn't noticed it before because I was switching between Clarion and Build Automator to make sure everything worked ok when switching and I never realized that the compile process required a manual intervention between apps! Everything looks very good now and the build is scheduled for tomorrow, Tuesday May 13

-- Arnor Baldvinsson