Documentation of some form or another combined with general ranting and quarreling.

Blogs

A simple tale of SQL Injection .....

Today, I was giving a one-on-one PHP training course covering databases (we were trying to get mssql to work with PHP on Windows, but various factors seemed to conspire against us - possibly permissions related, as it seemed to refuse to allow us to select from a table that fricking well did exist.). Anyway, the amusing story was.....

LRF Bromsgrove 10k race - I came 26th :-) (Run Dof Run! 2)

This year, again I entered the Bromsgrove LRF charity fun run, and despite the horrible temperature, managed to finish 26th with a time of 44 minutes and a few seconds.

Last year, I did it in nearly the same time - although it was somewhat cooler and I hadn't been off-colour for the preceeding week.

Howies Dyfi Enduro 2008

On Sunday, I did my 5th Dyfi Enduro (at least, I think it's my 5th). As always, I had a great time, and pretty much knackered myself - which is to be expected. Oddly I reached the half way point and felt quite perky, so decided I'd better push myself harder in the second half. Thankfully I completed it, and now have one more mug to add to my collection :-)

Customers are like Busses

Not wanting to complain, but I don't understand customers. Back in December, they seemed quite scarce - almost endangered. Now, they're everywhere. Perhaps January was "breeding season" or something.

I keep expecting everything to go really quiet, what with this "credit crunch" lark, but seemingly not. I'm not complaining.

How to Image a Linux box

Introduction

Reinstalling many machines with essentially the same content, is a time consuming process... here's how you can clone Linux machines...

This page details how to take an image of/clone a Linux system to use for restorating or wide scale rapid deployment, simplar to how utilities like Ghost work.

This document outlines how to use 'dd' or 'tar' to take a sytem image.

I seem to be becoming a "lactivist"

"Lactivist" is a popular term for an advocate (generally quite a militant one) of breastfeeding. When I got pregnant I presumed I would breastfeed but didn't think it would be the end of the world if we went on formula, although I knew it would be annoying to do all the faff with bottles.

MySQL - MyISAM tables and large index (.myi) files

This is just a quick note, incase it helps someone else in the future.

It seems that MySQL server, when using MyISAM tables doesn't truncate the index file when you run "ALTER TABLE x DISABLE KEYS", so when running "ALTER TABLE x ENABLE KEYS" you end up with an MyISAM index file (xxxx.myi) which keeps growing. In my case this hit 90gb on a customer's server.

Ways to fix this :

  1. Upgrade to MySQL 5.0.52 (apparently ... see
    http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=4692
    )
  2. Run "optimize table xxxx"

Neuros OSD - great service

Some time ago, I bought a Neuros OSD which we're really happy with.

What surprised me today, is that due to Neuros migrating the user interface over to QT, they're providing a free CF flash card to all owners of the device.

Most other companies would tell you to go out and buy your own, or release a Neuros OSD v2 with the CF card built in and expect users to buy a new device. It seems as if Neuros truely do care about customer satisfaction and loyalty. Thank you!

ZygoHubs - the next Twitter/Jaiku/etc?

Nigel made me aware of ZygoHubs today; basically it provides a 'group wide' number to which you text. This text is then relayed to all other people in your group. So, presumably it would provide a great way for people to stay in touch as a group - and have the ability to notify everyone else by only sending one single text message.

Naturally, users of the service can belong to multiple groups.

Dear LazyWeb - help me find somewhere to stay!

For the last several years we've gone camping in Aberystwyth / Machynlleth for the weekend of the Dyfi Enduro. I really want to go again this year, especially as it coincides with the bank holiday weekend, and we might get a chance to visit some friends in Aber and have a mini holiday.

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