This is a WordPress site, first created in 2003. Why I created a WordPress blog site when I was involved in the CMS Made Simple project back then, I don’t recall.

I maintain a handful of other sites running on WordPress too. It was a lot of work until I discovered the wp command-line tool (thanks Beau!). I was able to lock down permissions of the WordPress directories, and have a nightly script that would update WordPress and all of the plugins to make sure I was up to date and (moderately) secure.

One of these WordPress sites I maintain is for an organization. The site has gone through a lot of evolution. I originally built it with a Perl-based system called “Scribe” that I wrote in 2002 or thereabouts. It used a markup-based templating system, CVS to maintain versions, and published static HTML from CGI scripts. Later, I was working on the CMS Made Simple project as part of the core team, so I ported this site to CMSMS. Eventually, I left the CMSMS project, and in 2017 I decided to migrate the site to WordPress (based on the fantasy that other people would join me and maintain content on the site). I was busy, and paid an overseas development firm to port the site for $300. The language barrier made the project difficult, and I ended up rewriting a substantial portion of the code.

This morning a security update resulted in one of the site’s plugins throwing fatal errors and taking the site completely offline. I eventually had to manually poke around in the database and modify JSON strings to resolve the problem (and disable the broken plugin).

I started reflecting on the overall functionality of the site and how it’s used. Maybe it’s time for me to move away from WordPress and go back to some static generating strategy. I hear good things about Jekyll. Of course, this would also probably involve a site redesign too. Ugh. Well, more to evaluate and think about.

Everyone loves to dump on Javascript because of stupid things like [] == ![]; // -> true. Some languages are much better at this. But PHP is not among them. I found the following not quite what I would have expected:

boolval("1");   // returns true
boolval("0");   // returns false
boolval(1);     // returns true
boolval(0);     // returns false
boolval("00");  // returns true
boolval("0.0"); // returns true
boolval(0.0);   // returns false

I had a database corruption event happen in a Docker container, one result of which was that the container was completely wedged and unusable. I spent a lot of time removing containers and images and recreating them, only to have the same problem. In my case, the symptom was I’d create a new MySQL database, and operation would be fine, until part way through a bulk data import or heavy query, and the database would crash and the container would get into an unusable state again. Docker didn’t yield anything in the log, but MySQL showed corruption:

2024-11-27T22:35:38.182396Z 8 [ERROR] [MY-013183] [InnoDB] Assertion failure: os0file.cc:2899:dir_fd != -1 thread 140305764447808
InnoDB: We intentionally generate a memory trap.
InnoDB: Submit a detailed bug report to http://bugs.mysql.com.
InnoDB: If you get repeated assertion failures or crashes, even
InnoDB: immediately after the mysqld startup, there may be
InnoDB: corruption in the InnoDB tablespace. Please refer to
InnoDB: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/forcing-innodb-recovery.html
InnoDB: about forcing recovery.
2024-11-27T22:35:38Z UTC - mysqld got signal 6 ;
Most likely, you have hit a bug, but this error can also be caused by malfunctioning hardware.
BuildID[sha1]=511ab47ad6d5dfd73d58eea5860b1c9c9a97ce07
Thread pointer: 0x7f9ad4000fc0
Attempting backtrace. You can use the following information to find out
where mysqld died. If you see no messages after this, something went
terribly wrong...
stack_bottom = 7f9b7b3febc0 thread_stack 0x100000
/usr/sbin/mysqld(my_print_stacktrace(unsigned char const*, unsigned long)+0x41) [0x15af021]
/...

Once this problem occurred in a container, the database wouldn’t be start-able, often complaining about being unable to update permissions on /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock.

Eventually, with much futile searching, I found this posting and switched Docker Desktop away from using VirtioFS to using gRPC FUSE for sharing the filesystem between the container and the host machine. This seems to have resolved the issue. I can load big databases again, and heavy transactions work in my development environment again.

There’s gotta be a better way. But after a horrible upgrade process for a horrible commercial open-source product, I need to see which sub-directories from the old installation are missing in the new one. Don’t ask. I’ve literally been having nightmares about this upgrade.

Anyway, given tree1 and tree2 under some common point, I want a list of directories that exist in tree1 and don’t exist in tree2.

Here was my clumsy way of solving the problem.

cd tree1
find . -type d -print | sort > ../dirs_old
cd ../tree2
find . -type d -print | sort > ../dirs_new
cd ..
comm -23 dirs_old dirs_new

So Google requires an Android app be updated to a later API version if it’s to be distributed. No version 33 for the Play Store! That means a few gigabytes of downloads for the updated Android Studio and Android v35 SDKs.

Unfortunately, this Android app is built in Ionic/Angular/Capacitor. So we have to update from Ionic 7 to Ionic 8, Angular 16 to Angular 18, and Capacitor 5 to Capacitor 6. But that means we can’t use Nodejs 16 anymore. Which means that the Docker container we use for building needs to upgraded from Ubuntu 18.04 to at least 20.04.

We haven’t even gotten to the obsoleted Capacitor plugins yet. @capacitor-community/barcode-scanner has been deprecated in favor of @capacitor-mlkit/barcode-scanning, and I’m sure there are others. I’m just hoping the APIs are at least reasonably similar.

Once again, my plaint is: why didn’t I become a plumber?