Monthly Archives: March 2006

Free groom for Maebh!

“Scrubs”, “Naked Camera”, “How Low Can You Go?” and “Podge and Rodge”. 3 out of 4 home grown. That’s great!

If you’ve ever watched Maebh look for a boyfriend or a husband on Naked Camera, you may have wondered where they got the idea for that.. I snapped this poster outside of the men’s clothes shop the first episode featured. (You know the one, where the poor lad was single, but then magically was engaged when Maebh freaked him out! Oh, that would apply to any episode!)


No wonder she was confused with a headline like that!

More WordPress Feeds

I mentioned elsewhere that Matt announced tags feeds this morning but I thought this should get more of a plug because it’s such a great feature!
When you write a post on WordPress.com it’s categorised in the usual way but it’s also added to a site-wide pool of posts and identified by a global category. Matt’s announcement this morning means that I can track what people are talking about photography, photos, gimp and even wordpress all from the comfort of my aggregator!
Now, how best to encourage people to rename that “Uncategorized” category so their posts are picked up?

Ni­ Gaeilgeoir Me

I watched the first two episodes of reality tv show, Ni Gaeilgeoir Me tonight. It’s on every night at 10pm for the rest of the week and I’ll probably tune in.
I do have to admit that I fast-forward through it on the Sky+ because I’m not a reality tv fan, but it’s fun to watch. It does help ma ta cupla focail Gaeilge agat but there are subtitles through the recorded bits to help. The speed dating as Gaeilge was brilliant!

I haven’t a clue what the two teachers are saying. That guy from Ulster is practically incomprehensible to me! The presenter, Aoife Ni Thuairisg, is great and she’s easy to understand however!

I think a special mention has to go out to Jenny Kelly and Jeannette Cronin. The former because I wouldn’t be watching it if the Ray D’Arcy show hadn’t got her on it, and the latter because of her infectious laughter throughout interviews!

Xgl on a live CD

If you want to try Xgl to see what all the fuss is about, then you should download the Kororaa live CD. I downloaded the 441MB iso, burned it on CD and rebooted into Xgl.

Wow. All the eye candy looks great, the cube revolved when I switched desktops or dragged the background with CTRL pressed. Dragging windows from one side of the cube to another desktop was really cool, but not as much fun as watching a sticky window bend and deform as I dragged it!

As someone pointed out on digg, it’s not just eye candy. The openGL powered desktop uses my video card to move pixels around and feels responsive. I’m very tempted to upgrade to Ubuntu Dapper so I can install the Xgl binaries! (via)
Later… I updated my Ubuntu install to the latest Dapper release using apt-get dist-upgrade and after some minor fighting with a customized xorg.conf and following the instructions I have an Xgl powered desktop! Nice.
Slightly Later… I found a showstopper bug. It doesn’t do full screen image viewing. At least as far as gthumb or f-spot is concerned anyway. Gthumb just dies and F-spot displays a thumbnail in the corner of a grey screen.

Some people had the same problem playing movies and the solution was to use openGL as the full screen driver but I don’t think the same can be done with an image viewer, can it?
It’s alpha software so hopefully this will be worked around sooner or later!

InnoDB: Starting shutdown…

Calling all MySQL admins! When you’re working with InnoDB tables you may have noticed that MySQL takes an extraordinary amount of time to shutdown. Don’t panic! It’s normal.
InnoDB has extensive logs that it must run through and if your server is at all busy these logs can be quite big.
After you’ve started the equivalent of “/etc/init.d/mysql stop” it may not return for quite a while. Simply open another terminal and examine the system log. On a Debian or Ubuntu box, look at /var/log/daemon.log and you’ll see the “InnoDB: Starting shutdown…” message.
Now, go off and make a cup of tea because this could take a while. On a fairly large and busy database it might be half an hour or more!
Please, please, please don’t be tempted to killall -9 mysqld because bad things will happen! Even if your boss is looking over your shoulder, and you’ve promised that the company webserver will be online in 2 minutes, don’t do it.
However, cases where it is ok to kill the database with a “kill -9”:

  • International terrorists are planning on robbing the World Bank and you’re the only secret agent who can bring down the database which will stop them.
  • Lassie will be run over by the evil farmer who plagued the local village with his monster cows unless you can corrupt his database in time.
  • Or finally, you like hard work and restoring from backups!