For some as-yet-unknown reason, anonymous comments don’t seem to be working on my installation of Drupal 6. Which is a bit of a pain in the arse.

I’ll try to figure it out, but for now, if you want to comment on a post, you’ll have to register (which is quite safe - I don’t use the email addresses or do anything else nasty with your data).

Update

I’ve worked out what was going on - somehow my anonymous user had got removed during my upgrade and server migration.

These Drupal threads helped:

• http://drupal.org/node/243423
• http://drupal.org/node/501286

The solution was just hack the users table manually and add back a user with uid = 0. Scary!

Right, hopefully I’ve finished with upgrading my server and this website is back in the proper place.

If you notice any broken links, please let me know…

If you’re noticing that some content on www.elegantchaos.com keeps appearing and disappearing mysteriously, it’s because I’m switching back and forth between the original version and the new Drupal 6 version which is running on an old (and slow) server.

Apologies if this confuses your rss news reader! Eventually I’ll finalise the update and switch over permanently to Drupal 6, at which point it will go onto my proper server and things will stop changing!

As an experiment, I’ve ported this site across to Drupal 6.

The new version of the site is running on a test server at the moment, so you might notice a bit of a drop in performance, and one or two old links may be missing since I’ve not bothered to copy the old static content over yet.

Hopefully though, the basic stuff will work. I’m also hoping that moving to Drupal 6 will allow me to re-enable comments, and to add various other bits of functionality.

If you notice anything that seems to have gone badly astray, give me a yell!

When I was working at Sony, I got into the habit of keeping a ‘daily status’ log on the wiki - a kind of rough work diary listing what I’d been doing each day.

Initially this was prompted by some sort of project management initiative that asked us to report what we’d been doing each week, but I found it to be a really handy discipline, and carried it on long after the pressure from above died away.

When I moved back to Sports Interactive I started to do the same thing again (setting up the SI wiki in the process). I tried to get everyone else to do the same thing, but it only stuck with a couple of people.

Pragmatically, one of the advantages for me was being able to answer the “what have you been doing” type questions, especially when they were really just a thinly veiled “why is this late?”. My job, especially at SI, often lead me off on detours that were entirely necessary, yet completely ignored by the schedule. These were usually things that I’d always just quietly done, or that blatantly needed doing, but that had never been acknowledged - writing them down felt like a good step towards presenting a case for them to actually be part of someone’s schedule.

Beyond that, though, I also found it helpful as a way of focussing my thoughts on what had been done, what still needed doing, and specifically what to do next. For that reason, I think I’ll try to continue the same thing now, even though I’m my own boss and essentially will just be talking to myself!

I’d be half tempted to make the diary public, but it might get a bit tricky if I have to refer to top secret new projects by code names (though on the other hand having fancy code names for everything would make me feel all grown-up and professional!). Of course there’s also a more relevant point - who in their right mind would want to read them :)