Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

MySQL Troubleshooting Tip of the Day

One of our EC2–hos­ted data­base serv­ers had to be rebooted last night, and when it came back up some of our database-driven sites were work­ing, oth­ers weren’t. Upon fur­ther invest­ig­a­tion I found the fol­low­ing mes­sage crop­ping up in mongrel_rails and phpMy­Ad­min logs:

Error No. 1033 Incorrect inform­a­tion in file: ‘<filename>’

A peek at phpMyAdmin’s data­base list showed that in many of the data­bases, some tables showed up fine while oth­ers were marked as “in use”. Attempting to view those tables pro­duced the above message.

After a bit of pok­ing around I real­ised that the my.cnf con­fig­ur­a­tion file had been over­writ­ten by some star­tup script, and now con­tained the line skip-innodb. This meant that the server couldn’t load any tables that used the InnoDB stor­age engine. Removing this line from my.cnf and restart­ing the mysqld ser­vice fixed the problem.

Incidentally, make sure you’re edit­ing the right my.cnf file — there were a few on our sys­tem and it took a couple of tries to fig­ure out which one MySQL was actu­ally using.

Thought I’d post this in case any other EC2 users run into this issue. I think the star­tup script in ques­tion belonged to WHM/cPanel, so this might be of interest to users of those pack­ages too. Phew.

Notes on the New Design

For the curi­ous few: a smat­ter­ing of detail on what went into this new theme.

For one reason or another I decided that I wanted to cre­ate a theme that emu­lated a news­pa­per lay­out (a small one, gran­ted). That called for a colum­nar lay­out — not the most straight­for­ward thing to achieve in HTML. Support does exist in CSS3, but it’s not per­vas­ive enough for me to be com­pletely com­fort­able using it, and I didn’t feel con­vinced it would give me the con­trol I wanted. I ended up with a cus­tom solu­tion that works well for mul­tiple posts but struggles a bit when dis­trib­ut­ing a single post across mul­tiple columns — I’d like to think it copes in most situ­ations, however.

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Flying Moses, what the devil’s going on?

Ahem, yes. So I got a bit car­ried away on a train the other day and decided to do a com­plete redesign of the good old blog. As always, it’s been ter­ribly neg­lected of late, so I decided to change things up once again in an attempt to zap a bit of life into my blog­ging activ­it­ies as a whole.

There are a quite a few changes, as you’ll no doubt observe, but the main shift is to a format that favours shorter, more punchy posts — hope­fully delivered at more fre­quent inter­vals — presen­ted in such as way as to encour­age bite-size, con­veni­ent con­sump­tion. I’ll be try­ing to post more often while writ­ing less; hope­fully less waffle and more hil­ar­ity. Oh yes.

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ASP.NET Sucks Huge Balls, And I Hate It

Now that I’ve got your attention…

Full dis­clos­ure: I make my liv­ing as a PHP pro­gram­mer. So I can cough to the tri­bal bias right off the bat. I’m also a big fan of Open Source. That aside, I’ve had the mis­for­tune to have worked briefly on ASP.NET pro­jects in the past, and am cur­rently con­tract­ing for a com­pany — a PHP shop — whose own super-fine PHP-based web­site is being redeveloped extern­ally for polit­ical reas­ons, by a sis­ter com­pany versed only in ASP.NET. We’re about to take cus­tody of that site as it if were our own spawn; need­less to say the fire­works have already begun in earn­est. So here’s my take on some of the prob­lems with ASP.NET.

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Why I Won’t Be Trying Thunderbird 3

(or how I learned to stop wor­ry­ing and love Apple Mail)

Yesterday saw the release of Thunderbird 3 (UK-specific link), the first major update to Mozilla’s email applic­a­tion in nearly three years. I’ve been a staunch sup­porter of Firefox, their flag­ship web browser, since it was first released in 2004. Thunderbird and I, by con­trast, have enjoyed only the briefest of rela­tion­ships (a fling some­time dur­ing the sum­mer of 2005), so I thought I’d explore why this is, and why — sadly — I don’t feel at all com­pelled to give its latest ver­sion a try.

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Reuniting SXC.hu Photos With Their Authors

I’ve been using a lot of stock pho­tos in recent pro­jects, and a good deal of them come from the fant­astic SXC.hu. One issue I ran into, how­ever, was that after down­load­ing sev­eral dozen, mak­ing selec­tions, then even­tu­ally using them, I’d usu­ally lost track of where they came from on the site.

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