In Translation

I seem to have spent a good part of the weekend snagged up in the seedy world of the Internet. No, I have not been knee deep in porn or wading through pixelated orcs in a raid. I have been participating in the honourable pursuit of “working out what the heck makes something tick”.

I now seem to have spent the last month trying to move my old web presence from a hosted package to a virtual server. One of the things this has involved is a learning curve rather like K2. When you have to slog so much, you appreciate a helping hand – so, I tried loading a piece of pre-installed software to run an image gallery. Alas, the accuracy of the automated install seemed to be rather poor. I ended up with something that, at best, didn’t fail completely, but that obviously wasn’t working properly either.

So, I set about working out what needed to happen to get it working. This was akin to someone giving me a paragraph of text in a foreign language and asking me to translate, accurately, merely using reference books. At first, I spent a while going through support forums and searching for likely causes of the error, then I tried resetting permissions and re-install elements of the setup. Finally, I decided to run through the whole configuration and installation procedure from scratch. Each error that arose was cross-referenced and fixed, a painful and gradual process of trial and error.

Finally, at 9.40pm yesterday evening, I completed the re-install and the gallery worked “perfectly” (within acceptable tolerances). My weekend had vanished, but the work had been done.

I ponder, was this weekend lost in translation, or did I gain something from the experience. Perhaps, my knowledge increased just a little along the way, though probably not by much.


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