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Spam and Comic Sans.

Today, I received a spammy email from an unknown golf club. There was no obvious unsubscribe link or instructions, so I blindly replied with :

Hi,
Please remove 'xxxxxx' from your mailing list; we've no interest in golf…
Thanks,
David

 

They replied with :

REMOVED OK

But it was actually :

<FONT color=#0000ff size=4 face=”Comic Sans MS”>REMOVED OK</FONT>

i.e.

comic sans thank you
So I had to reply with :

<div style=”text-align: center;”><u style=”font-size: 144px; color: rgb(245, 236, 0); font-family: ‘Comic Sans MS’; “><b>Thank you!1!!</b></u></div>

Horrible yellow comic sans thing

 

I fear the intricacies of my reply were lost on them.

 

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A few months with a Nexus 4

So, I’ve had a Nexus 4 for a while now … here’s some findings :

  1. The phone is symmetrical (or very close to it) – so I often pick it up the wrong way around – at least with an iPhone there was a button at the bottom which acts as an easy to feel guide so you can pick it up correctly in the dark. Adding a case to it helped.
  2. You need a bumper/case for it… mine cost £3 on Amazon or something … without one it’s too slippery/slides off everything.
  3. The battery life is both good and bad – while not in use, it lasts ages; but it has a big screen – so playing games or watching Netflix on it, will really kill the battery. I’m using Battery Widget Reborn – which does a great job at turning wifi/sound/gps etc all off overnight which helps a bit.
  4. I came to use the Nexus 4 from using an iPhone – my main like is widgets – having something that updates in real time on your desktop (why did the iOS weather app never display today’s symbol?) is great.
  5. I miss having a count of notification numbers next to the launch icons.
  6. I kind of miss iMessage – in so far, as I wish Google had something similar. At the moment there is gtalk, google plus chat (or something) …. which don’t seem to be totally integrated … and I have to supplement this with WhatsApp which not all that many people use (here’s hoping for Google Babble)
  7. I wish the Bluetooth integration was better – not being able to see track names etc on the £30 Sony MW600 thing I bought kind of sucks. I’m fairly sure that if my car was good enough to have a bluetooth capable radio, then I wouldn’t see any track names from it either :-/
  8. I like Navigation – I’ve used this a number of times and it does a good job. If only I could make it’s voice louder though. Perhaps this is why I need a car radio with blue teeth.
  9. I’ve not noticed that I’m missing any apps from iOS which aren’t available on Android – but I suspect I only regularly use ~10 (k9 mail, world war, twitter, whatsapp, bbc news, facebook, gallery, nagios, kashdroid, ZombieRun!).
  10. The screen is a little too big to use it with only one hand.
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Virtualbox 4.2 VM autostart on Debian Squeeze & Wheezy

One new feature of VirtualBox 4.2 is that it has support for auto-starting vm’s on bootup of the host server (via init etc). This means I can remove my hackish ‘su – vbox -c “VBoxHeadless –startvm VMName &”‘ additions in /etc/rc.local, and the VM’s will also hopefully be terminated gracefully on shutdown.

The docs/guides online which I could find were a bit cryptic, or incomplete, so here’s what I ended up doing :

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MySQL update/write query analysis (query profiling)

Do you have a slow MySQL update/insert/delete query?

Obviously, for ‘SELECT’ queries you can prepend the query with “EXPLAIN ” – however that doesn’t work for the other query types (UPDATE/INSERT/DELETE).

So, one solution which may explain why the query is slow is to turn on MySQL’s profiling functionality, like in the following example :
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Migrating an ext3 filesystem to ext4 (Debian Squeeze)

Interestingly (well, perhaps not really) this is very easy.

In my case, I’m hoping that the migration will lead to faster fsck times (currently it’s taking about an hour, which is somewhat excessive, each time the server crashes for whatever reason).

In my case, the filesystem is /dev/md0 and mounted at /home – change the bits below as appropriate.
Continue reading “Migrating an ext3 filesystem to ext4 (Debian Squeeze)”