Gallery errors - October 31st 2007

[Rick]

The gallery's having a problem co-ordinating itself with its MySQL server at the moment. Not sure why, yet...

Update: The pictures table seems to have become scrambled. I'm working on fixing it from backup...

Incidentally, if anyone can shed any light on what went wrong, especially if you were doing any editing or uploading at about 2pm today, I'd really like to know. A PM is fine if you don't want to tell everyone.

[Rick]

I think I've patched things up successfully. Mostly. As far as I can tell, Fay's latest image has lost most of its description (because it wasn't in the backup and I had to re-invent it ) but everything else survived...

...but I took the opportunity to do a little re-arranging of images out of people's "Previews and Works-in-Progress" albums into the main gallery albums, where it seemed appropriate.

[Rick]

Oops! And Mark's Dumbell Nebula image, too... 

It's also re-instated with random descriptive stuff...

[Fay]

Poor Rick, everyone is posting messages & images etc etc, without a thought that there you are behind the scenes keeping things going!
I bet you are like the mad professor, lots of steam, cogs, screwdrivers etc etc!!!!

Thanks Rick

[Rick]

I wish I could figure out why it fell apart yesterday. At the moment it seems to have been something completely random, and I don't like completely random failures... 

[Mike]

Maybe the cosmic rays from the approaching comet flipped a few binary digits from 1's to 0's and vice versa, hence creating some weird cosmic virus mutation that rampaged through your hard drive?

[Ian]

don't think so Mike, that one's page 213 in the service manual, and we're up to page 276. I think Tsunami is listed in the next couple of pages...