Category — computers

Found a new piece of software called Mathcad, now I’ve realised everyone in the world seems to have heard of this but I hadn’t. Anyway it’s awesome.

Heh, check out this error. I upgraded MySQL to version 5 on a server at work then some things (note not everything) decided to stop working when connecting through Perl. After some googling I discovered sweet fa. I decided to check the DBD/mysql.pm files manually and discovered that there were actually two of them! When I installed the new driver it had installed it to a different location than the old one, so it didn’t overwrite it. Some Perl scripts were loading the old one and giving the error below.

table tree connect failed -- install_driver(mysql) failed: DBD::mysql object version 4.004 does not match bootstrap parameter 3.0002 at /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.8.7/i686-linux/DynaLoader.pm line 253.

I removed the old DBD folder and all was well again. No pressure at all considering a large commerce site was down during all of this!

Well after many hours of messing round with various tools to clone a hard disk I went back to basics. I found the easiest way to do it was to wack both HDs in the same machine and boot a knoppix live cd. Then simply enter the following:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=32522 &

Then you can monitor the status of dd using a kill signal as follows:

kill -n USR1 <pid>

Where <pid> is the process id of the dd command.

Takes about an hour to clone an 80 Gig drive. It is important to remember that the hard drives need to be the same size. Anyway, worked a treat for what I needed.

I may not be the biggest subscriber to Microsoft products. In fact I reckon I use Linux 90% of the time. But this is something that has two benefits. Firstly it takes some revenue that Microsoft from those adverts they display to us in Messenger, and secondly it gives that money website to charity. Can’t be all that bad. Just click the link below to join in.

As you may be able to see, I’ve put sheeps on the top banner. I’m thinking I’m going to write something to change the image maybe cookie based, or rotate it on a daily basis. My site is now ranking top for the phrase “Graeme Lawton” on google which is good. Especially as I’ve not got round to putting it in the site title!

Well eventually my Freeview PVR unit did arrive from Dabs, I have to admit for £65 I’m very impressed. I was a little disappointed at first that I couldn’t record from both tuners at the same time, but a quick google search and I discovered that I could simply flash the unit and wahey dual tuner recording. Very impressive. If you want to find out more information on flashing the unit check out this site.

On other news I’ve been playing with Google domain tools for about a week now and again I’m very impressed. I’ve finally decided to take the plunge and change the MX records on alolal.org to point to gmail. So now all my mail is managed by gmail. I’m noticing the google peeps making updates as I’m using it. I wonder what they’ll come up with next?

Just upgraded to WordPress 2.1. Went painlessly. Let me know if anyone spots any problems. Site seems much faster. Looks like some good work had been done in the internals.

Okay, so we have a table with columns A B C D in. A B C D each line in the table is unique and D is an integer. I need to find all the unique permutations of A B C with the minimum value of D. Not too hard you might think, a simple multiple group by and a MIN function. Only problem is that the table is actually 25+ columns, with 25 million rows. The simple multiple group by, now takes days to run….

I want to cry…

Anyone with any ideas please comment!!

Well, yet again my Ipod was playing up. This time it was clicking away, failing to play sometimes and failing to sync. Then it began showing the exclamation mark error. I thought it was probably a dead hard drive. Tried the usual restore and formatting it from Linux to no avail. I noticed a few sites recomending I knock it about and give it a slap. So I placed it in one hand and hit it on the back with my other. Nice and hard, and lone behold it worked! Seems to be working just fine now. Crazy.

Here my raw… I’m aware i’ve commented on this previously, but OpenPBX is not ready for mass consumption. I’ve now been in work 7 days straight thanks to the delightful phone system, and it’s still at my house! As far I can tell it’s massively unstable. It’s crashed a number of times doing nothing more complicated than making a call! Transfering calls seems to be totally impossible over SIP.