I know some of you have been looking forward to the Nottingham pt. 2 post. It’s on its way, but I’m fighting a few issues with the sites’ databases at the moment. Comments were broken for a while but it looks like they’re up and running. Now I just have to find out how to fix “Cannot proceed because system tables used by Event Scheduler were found damaged at server start”…

That sounds healthy. If the site disappears off the face of the interweb, you’ll know why.

Looks like the site is having database issues at the moment. Might have to restore from the last backup, which was yesterday. I’ll investiage shortly when I’ve got the tools for the job. It might just need a repair, it might need more.

Or I might just stick it on the “Can’t be arsed” pile.

Edit: From what I can gather, the server restarted about 6 hours ago and the stats table was goosed since then. The repair on the database took longer than expected, mainly due to the size of this stats table, but it appears to have survived with only a tiny amount of data being written off, certainly not enough to warrant restoring from a backup.

The site lives to fight another day! I bet you can’t wait for my next installation of shit music and lamp posts.

Well, in the past weeks, I’ve not been without computer problems, most of them I’ve fixed. I’ll talk about these first because I might as well get the boring shite out of the way first, and then we’ll get talking about… poo, or something. Or maybe not.

Anyway, yes, the past week since the wasp attack has been spent with me doing computery stuff, as I try to get rid of the few niggling bugs I’ve had with the machines I own. I’m happy to say that these fixes have been mostly successful

Firstly, I managed to get the mysql server running on scribcam.co.uk. I was getting a message that some of the system tables were corrupt, every time I tried to change any of the parameters, or create a database. This was likely because I’d upgraded the mysql software, but copied all of the data files from a (very) old version, including the system tables. It really didn’t like it. I’d forgotten that the majority of the mysql settings are actually stored in one of those data files. Whoops.

I left it chugging for a few weeks, as a few apps on the server relied on it. It got to a point though, where it was useless to me, as I couldn’t use it as a backup server. I had the idea of dumping the tables, reinstalling mysql, recreating the users and then reimporting them. It was all bound to go horribly wrong.

It didn’t, and within about 5 minutes, I was wondering why it had all gone so very, very smoothly. There is no answer. It just did. That was a bonus. I was expecting to fight with cryptic error messages and stuff I didn’t really understand. Didn’t happen.

Last night came the greatest challenge yet. You may, or may not know, that thanks to an absolute disaster with Windows XP, and my inability to perform a clean install of it on Beastbits, I have been using ubuntu as a substitute until I get a new machine, and I’m liking it.

Now, thanks to the many hardware problems Beastbits has, I decided it was not a good idea to keep all of my data and the OS itself on one drive, and decided to separate the two. Since I installed Ubuntu, there’s been a 250Gb drive used as the system drive, and data, and a 500Gb drive doing nothing, except holding inaccessible data. Last night, I made the decision that Windows was never going back on here, so I thought it would be nice to have my 500Gb drive as the data partition, and the 250Gb as the OS drive.

Sounds complicated enough, and sure it would kill an hour or 6.

Again, this went oddly well, and I’ll explain in a very quick, shit, and probably incorrect way of doing this…

Mount drive and partition, in my case, this was /dev/sdb1 and mounted to /media/New olume
Check all data is backed up
Unmount drive (sudo umount /dev/sdb1)
Load gparted (sudo gparted)
FInd out gparted isn’t installed by default
“sudo apt-get install gparted”
load gparted again
Delete partitons
Create ext3 partition, and name it “Home”, just to complicate matters
Have beer and/or wank whilst drive builds itself
Wonder what happens, when drive doesn’t appear
Reboot
Watch with glee, as newly formatted drive is mounted to /media/Home
Cry in horror, as your normal user doesn’t have write permissions to the drive
Out comes Google.
“sudo chown -R username /dev/sdb1″
Watch with glee as drive becomes writable
“cp -a /home/* /media/Home” (I think)
Construct a small fort from CD cases. Learn to play the recorder. Sort your blood cells into alphabetical order. Basically, I had 133Gb of data to copy across. I’m trying to get across that this took an age.
With the help of spike1 from #speccy (which has now moved home, it used to be on Astrolink, it’s now on irc.coldfront.net ), run a check on the copied data by comparing file sizes
Burst into tears when you realise that there’s a 1Gb discrepancy between the original data and the copied data.
Breathe a sigh of release when you mounted /home/www during the copy procedure so you could move mirc across.
Confirm this with… er, a command I’ll enter later, as I don’t have it to hand, which creates the two directory listings, then compares them.
Edit /etc/fstab
Insert line “/dev/sda1 /home ext3 defaults 0 2″
Bonus step: login as root, remove the old /home directory. This isn’t necessary, as linux will automatically mount the new mountpoint over the top of the previous one. I did it for completeness, and because I’m a rebel, and also wanted to see how much space the OS itself used.
Reboot. Hope for the best. Actually, I don’t think you have to reboot, but I did.
Scream with joy when “df” reads something like the following:-

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1             227G  3.9G  212G   2% /
/dev/sdb1             459G  127G  309G  30% /home

Feel a bit guilty when you realise there’s 212Gb free which you’ll probably never be able to use.

Well, that went on a bit longer than I expected it to. I forgot there were so many steps. Let’s move on quickly. Sooo, er… I happened to be walking around the confusing, brightly lit aisles of my local Tesco the other day, and noticed something new. Yes, there is now a rival of the humble Pot Noodle, in the form of something called “The Nation’s Best”, which are manufactured under the “Golden Wonder” brand.

Now, the first thing that struck me as odd is the use of the Golden Wonder brand, was for many years, they used to manufacture the original Pot Noodles.

As a self confessed slob, and a shit cook, Pot Noodles are a staple part of my diet. Well, at least when I’m at work they are. I was interested how these new noodles fared up to the old veteran of the lazy man’s cupboard.

No “convenience food” would be worth its salt (and most of them have plenty of that!) without a curry variety, and I’m pleased to say these also have one, in the form of “Chip Shop Curry”. Awesome. Noodles in a curry sauce, with raisins and apple.

The pots are slightly smaller than your average Pot Noodle. One bonus is that the lid of the pots is plastic, which means that it’s less likely to get punctured. If there’s one annoyance I have about the original Pot Noodles is the ability to burst the foil top, and the powder going everywhere, meaning that everything sharing the same bag also stinks of Pot Noodle, for weeks afterwards.. No problems like that with these!

So, I’ve talked enough about the packaging. What about the actual stuff itself? Well, to be honest, it seems a little devoid of ingredients. There’s the noodles, but where’s the dried out veg? Nowhere to be seen! At least when you eat the veg in a pot noodle, you can actually pretend that it’s doing you some good.

There are little bits of “apple”, and even though raisins were promised, upon initital inspection, these are few and far between. This is probably a bonus, as rehydrated raising tend to be one of the nastiest things that can ever be consumed. Except for sushi. (True fact: I only mentioned sushi there because I’m listening to the extended version of the 1992 hit “SuperMarioLand” which features the line “I’ve eaten sushi in Japan, but there ain’t no place like SuperMarioLand. Oh, and the thought of eating raw fish turns my stomach)

In conclusion, bring back Pot Rice.