Mokka mit Schlag

Greater Roadrunner, Geococcyx californianus
Desert Hot Springs, California, 2008-05-17

What’s the difference between an Undead Male and 150 pounds of cow plop?
One’s a disgusting, malodorous pile of disease-ridden filth and the other’s just manure.

Why did the Gnome cross the road?
A mage polymorphed him into a chicken.
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For a change this is about software bugs, not insects. :-) Ever have a reverse mystery bug? This is not one that’s hard to find or understand, but one that’s brutally easy to understand and fix. The mystery is how the code ever worked in the first place. I had one of those this morning.

The AppleScript I use to manage the quotes of the day on Cafe con Leche stopped working mysteriously. Running the script with the result log open made the problem obvious: it couldn’t find the file index.html in my cafeconleche directory. Well, that’s an easy fix. The file isn’t named index.html and hasn’t been for many moons. It’s named index.phtml (because it uses PHP to include some files). I changed the name of the file the script was trying to open to index.phtml, and all was well.

But here’s what I don’t understand: why didn’t this break yesterday? and the day before that? and the day before that? It was working just fine until this morning. was there a symlink from the old index.html name, and if so why did it vanish? Was my script updated previously, and somehow got replaced by an older version? And if so, how and why?
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Green Heron, Butorides virescens
Dana Point, 2008-05-10

Wooly Darkling Beetle, Eleodes osculans
Bolsa Chica, Orange County, CA, 2008-03-30, dusk

Eared Grebe, Podiceps nigricollis
Shoreline Lake, Mountain View, 2008-05-06