So I find that my MySQL database is running high on CPU all of a sudden. I optimize the tables etc and no difference. I hunt around the internet to find that there seems to be a problem with this years leap second adjustment which sends MySQL into orbit.
The solution reset the date
date -s "`date`"
and it dropped back to normal.
Credit goes to this lady here http://www.sheeri.com/content/mysql-and-leap-second-high-cpu-and-fix
So since upgrading Perl I am presented with qw warnings coming out of the cron job checking that BackupPC is running.
Use of qw(...) as parentheses is deprecated at /usr/share/BackupPC/lib/BackupPC/Storage/Text.pm line 301.
Use of qw(...) as parentheses is deprecated at /usr/share/BackupPC/lib/BackupPC/Lib.pm line 1412.
The way to get rid of these warnings is to enclose qw in parentheses and Perl processes the foreach parameters without warnings.
Like so
Text.pm (Line 301)
#
# Promote BackupFilesOnly and BackupFilesExclude to hashes
#
foreach my $param (qw(BackupFilesOnly BackupFilesExclude)) {
next if ( !defined($conf->{$param}) || ref($conf->{$param}) eq "HASH" );
$conf->{$param} = [ $conf->{$param} ]
if ( ref($conf->{$param}) ne "ARRAY" );
$conf->{$param} = { "*" => $conf->{$param} };
}
Lib.pm (Line 1412)
foreach my $param (qw(BackupFilesOnly BackupFilesExclude)) {
next if ( !defined($conf->{$param}) );
if ( ref($conf->{$param}) eq "HASH" ) {
After putting a power meter on my home entertainment system realised that my equipment was using a lot of power 350 watts at peak. So thought I would do some investigation into a recent low power mini-itx board from Zotac. I chose this one because it was dual core and it has a pci-express card on it which is good for a cable tuner I am looking at to use in it for when I am in the USA.
Ordered the board from mini-itx.com as they are the only people I could find doing this board. It came and everything looked fine except that the fan isnt fitted and there are no holes for it on the cpu heat sink. After talking with mini-itx they told me to screw it to the heatsink even though it doesnt have any predetermined holes. I also noticed that the manuals that came with it – the quick installation and the main manual werent for this board. Which was a great start.
I had already converted my old system from Vista to Windows 7. I then put the new Atom board into my case and started it up. Immediately I was getting checksum errors and just stalled. I was like oh dear must be memory related so twiddled about a bit with the memory until I found the culprit. From going from 1 board to the other, one stick of my 2Gb DDR2 had decided to die.
Not a real problem as really 2Gb of memory should be ok for what that board needs to do. So once over that everything came up fine. I use this as my media center so mainly playing music and watching tv (SD & HD blu-ray).
Initial reaction was that its great. So lets put it through its paces, watching blu-ray with fast moving action – didnt phase it at all everything was running fine at 17% cpu and wattage was about 270 watts so it was already saving me about 70 watts of power. I then decided to get it to record two tv stations and watch a recorded program at the same time.
It did this as well although cpu was about going from about 50 to 75%. And when navigating through the menu it was a bit sluggish although livable. All in all it is great because it will save me money and the Windows 7 media center is a little better than the old Vista one.
FURTHER UPDATE: having recently bought UP on blu-ray I have noticed something that is important for this board. Some of the later blu-ray’s are recorded in MPEG4 – I have tested UP and The Taking Of Pelham 123, they are both recorded in MPEG4 unlike I Am Legend which is VC1.
MPEG4 is currently running at around 47% cpu usage which is fine on its own but if (like I was at the time of trying to play UP) you are recording tv at the same time its just a bit too much for the little NVIDIA ION board which then runs at 100% and frames and audio drop on the play back of the blu-ray movie. Its a shame because its a great board and just what I want when the machine is on all the time but its a trade off between performance and cost of running the equipment.
Overall I am still impressed even though there are these obvious trade offs.
As I have some time on my hands these days I finally decided to open a Twitter account. Some of my friends do it although not a lot as most of their activity seems to be on Facebook.
Opening the account was fairly easy. And twitter is self explanatory really. I guess the real reason for getting on Twitter is another way of publishing my useless information that I release from time to time via my WordPress blog. So I downloaded the plugin twittertools and set up the Twitter login details which worked a treat – when I now published a post on my blog it pushed it to my Twitter account paulfarr0w. The problem was that it had the big long url in it so hunted about and realised that actually within twittertools it had 3 other plugins, one being the interface to bit.ly which gives you tiny url’s.
Signed up for an account with bit.ly and posted again and bobs your uncle now I have posts going through twitter as well all from one source my blog.
Oh one last thing the hash’s in the titles tell Twitter to group the posts by those keywords which is pretty nifty.
Since upgrading to firefox 3.5, I couldnt login any more to my wordpress (currently 2.7) blog. It was wierd as I couldnt login using firefox 3.5 on my apple running OS-X 10.5 and I couldnt login using firefox 3.5 on Vista. But I could login on my clients machine running firefox 3.5 on Windows XP.
What seemed to be the problem was that in my userid / password cache I had two id’s for the site one with a capatalised first letter and one all lowercase, ie. Admin and admin.
Now prior to firefox 3.5 this wasn’t a problem as it picked the correctly saved one. Now since firefox 3.5 it looks like it always wants to pick the capitalised one and there seems to be no way to pick the non capitalised id’s however much you try to get it to do it.
Well all I needed to do was remove the duplicate unused id’s and it then worked. You can do this from preferences -> security -> stored passwords, look for the ids you want to remove, highlight them and hit remove.
Once the duplicate id’s were tidied I could now login using firefox 3.5. Guess this is a feature of firefox 3.5.
if you go to the barclaysstockbrokers.com url and try to login you get presented with an invalid security certificate error by firefox and ie 8. The certificate is for www.stockbrokers.barclays.com not www.barclaysstockbrokers.com.
I have rang them and emailed them but no one seems that interested in getting fixed they dont see it as a problem. Well in these days of phishing and spoofing I would say its a problem. We will see how long they take to fix it, if at all.
UPDATE: 9 July 2009
Well eventually someone got back to me about it. Looks like they have a problem with the login on the page as its hardcoded to stockbrokers.barclays.co.uk instead of the using the url that you actually come from. I have been told by there technical bods that if you use the login at the top of the page it uses the correct url. And it does work. Come on Barclays sort it out so that all the logins use the correct URL. I cant believe it took so long for you to actually come back to me with a sensible answer but to still see the site broken in this way is really unbelievable. I expect quite a few people are having this problem as your eyes go to the login button within the site not the black bar at the top.
Looking at the stats on my page quite a few people are getting this error as the number of people coming to my site with the search words ‘barclays stockbrokers’ and ‘invalid certificate’ are quite high.
My last upgrade of my media center included a blu-ray media player, it was a cheap LG player although wasn’t as cheap as they are today. This was bought a few years back when they first came out but didn’t install it for some time until now.
Well I thought Vista was bound to support blu-ray and didnt think anything of it until I started to buy loads of new dvd’s and found windows media center and windows media player couldnt play them. So what are the options, well currently they are
Well my experience is this, Roxio forget it wouldnt even register properly and looking on the NET couldnt find one person that had installed it successfully on Vista so got a refund straight away. Arcsofts TotalMedia Theatre was the same installed but didnt play at all. Now the board I have in my media center has the INTEL Graphics G35 chip so could be because of that as its not really that good enough to play Blu-Ray discs.
So I know a lot of people dont like it but the PowerDVD was the only thing that played the blu-ray movies for me on Vista with a motherboard that uses the Intel G35 chip.
And that concludes my findings now to buy a micro ATX motherboard that uses the NVIDIA 9400 chipset.
All of a sudden the places map isnt showing just a grey screen. Everything I tried just didnt get it to show any more. Eventually I found a solution that worked. I went to preferences -> advanced and set the dont look up places automatically to never. Quit Iphoto and restarted it. I then set it back to automatic and the places map shows straight away. Wierd but it now works.
Just got the new Macbook Pro and after transferring from my old Macbook it seemed it couldnt actually set the time correctly was always an hour behind. The problem was actually the timezone as it just said GMT in the closest city. After a little bit of tickering I realised that that the localtime folder should be a symbolic link to /usr/share/timezone/<timezone> and instead a physical folder had been copied over during the transfer and was sitting in /etc.
The way to fix this is to open your finder window and click on go->go to folder and type in /etc then then delete the folder. Then you can set the time zone correctly.
Ok go to your applications folder on your mac within the finder window. Right click the iphoto application icon and click show contents. Browse to the plugins folder and look for a folder named the same as the exporter your looking to remove.
Delete the folder that is the same name as the exporter your trying to delete and bobs your uncle – the exporter will be removed next time you start IPhoto.
