Early today, perhaps around 10 AM, I decided to upgrade my Drupal install to version 6.2. As it turns out, this was a mistake. Luckily I made backups before I attempted this feat, or I probably would have given up blogging for a second time.

Drupal makes huge databases, so the backup files are large. In addition, my host has fairly slow upload speeds, and these two things together meant I couldn't just directly 'import' a file into the database to repopulate the tables after the upgrade crashed and burned (and taking the database with it). I ended up opening the SQL file and copying a few hundred lines at a time into phpMyAdmin. Several lines in particular were troublesome and even doing them one at a time didn't work. So, I wrote a php script to do the work for me, which took ~0 seconds to run after I got it all set up. Even though 'data.txt' was about 5 megs. If anything, proof that running code is several orders of magnitude (orders of magnitude? order of magnitudes? Which?) faster then a network. The code is below. It's boring, but it shows how desperate I was:

mysql_connect(/* secrets */);
mysql_select_db('drupal');
$file = fopen("data.txt",'r');
while($data = fgets($file)){
mysql_query($data);
}
echo "Done";


Anyway, what a bloody lame-ass way to waste a lot of hours in a day. Other then that it has been fairly productive. Alex (my roommate) and I drove around Waterloo for a while and I decided tomorrow night I'm going to go fishing when I get off work. On our mini-tour, we got into an accident (minor), which is slightly humorous as we were headed to pay his speeding ticket. Well, I thought it was kind of funny. He owes the state a lot of money now.

TL,DR: Don't upgrade Drupal to 6.2 unless you are ballsy or have spare time.