In order to rule out a crap power infrastructure as the cause for some naughty server behaviour on a client site, it was suggested I should stick a UPS on said server, to make sure that at least the input power would be clean.
In a confusion of Andys I found a recommendation for the APC BackUPS CS 500, so that is what I got and installed.
With apcupsd installed on Debian Etch, the UPS is immediately detected and it "just works".
A while ago Arjen Lentz blogged about transient MySQL errors that can occur when using a transactional storage engine, like say InnoDB.
Since I'm a fan of the reliability and automated recovery that InnoDB provides, I use it for all the Drupals that I host. However, on a very busy site, this may lead to deadlocks. These in turn lead to users seeing errors, which is something I'd like to avoid. Especially if the error could be prevented.
As is our wont, from time to time we have a bit of a chocolate pig-out, with varying brands and types of chocolate.
The latest one was extremely unsatisfying. The hazelnut Cadbury just didn't feel or taste right, so we had a look at the ingredients list on the new packaging and found that the composition had been altered.
Old ingredients list
When I flashed the Mini 2140 yesterday I used a Windows laptop to create a bootable flash drive with the BIOS utility and update on it.
I didn't really need to use a non-free operating system, as HP provide a tiny bootable ISO image with FreeDOS, but using that means wasting a CD-R. It's not that those are expensive, but they do end up in landfill.
Instead, I'd like to be able to simply use a USB key. I found some help on the FreeDOS wiki and I thought I'd document the steps I followed on Ubuntu.
When working on a Drupal site for a client earlier today I had an odd problem.
The client wanted a page that lists downloadable files and has a little blurb about the downloads at the top, so I duly created a view that lists all published nodes of type 'Download' and sticks some HTML at the top.
Kattekrab has been lusting after a netbook for ages. Her old laptop, a G4 iBook, just isn't cutting the mustard anymore and Ubuntu even dropped PPC support some time ago. It runs Debian just fine, but even then because it's PPC there are issues with Java and there is no Flash or Acrobat*.
Last weekend we decided to put our free** Rudd money into the economy and went shopping.
Ever since my Dell disintegrated in the early naughties I've had HP laptops and loved them. During 2008 I used a small HP laptop that was donated for linux.conf.au (the 2009 team used and loved it last year). Thank you HP!
Ever since the explosion on the boat full of Afghani refugees, the news has been full of scaremongering again. They're faithfully reporting how we'll be overrun with asylum seekers because the new goverment has changed policies. I'm calling it scaremongering because they never report on the actual total number of asylum seekers Australia gets or, for that matter, the relative amount compared to other countries.
James Purser from Collaborynth mentioned earlier today that it would be great if the twitter module for Drupal could magically add hash tags (I assume based on node taxonomy terms).
I've also been wanting it to be able to include the node type, so that book reviews on the LUV website don't get announced as 'New post'. With thanks to lyricnz on freenode for the right api call and Josh Hesketh for a non-ugly taxonomy fix.
Kattekrab has been fiddling around with recordmydesktop for a while, working on screencasts.
She was told about the key-status-monitor utility by heathenx, who already does Inkscape screencasts. This utility monitors and displays mouse button and key press status by reading /dev/input/eventX files and displays key presses and mouse clicks in a little window, which can be part of the screencast.
Many community websites run Drupal and use the event module to maintain a calendar of events that they organise or that are of relevance to their members. I help maintain the website for two such organisations, Linux Australia and LUV.
The event module has one slight drawback, it displays the number of hours, days, weeks or months remaining until an event.