mehblog

This morning I did an upgrade on my plesk server to 8.2.1. This mostly went ok, but the main problem afterwards was that webmail was no longer working for domains.

Instead webmail.domain was redirecting to the default domain on that box. The solution is to rebuild the web server config files with the following command:

/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/websrvmng -a -v

Credit for this solution goes to poster on plesk forums…

So the hottest topic in the rails community is seems is Derek Sivers’ blog post on why he switched from trying to reimplement his site in rails to php.

As someone who writes both rails and php for a living I feel that I have a good perspective on the rails vs php thing.

I’m sure the arguments will continue for some time, but all I know is that I write much better php since working with rails.

Right tool for the job and all that.

I have upgraded my blog to Typo version 4 and it went mostly seamlessly.

The box that hosts this blog is running plesk which wasn’t a problem.

I tried just installing the new version of typo over the old 2.6 version and while this appeared to work it caused some problems, notably with the migrations.

In the end I deleted my old typo install and ran these commands:

This box is running Centos 4 . I had sqlite installed but not the header files. These are required to get the sqlite gem files to install which are required by typo.

yum install sqlite-devel

Install the typo gem:

gem install typo

Install typo in my webroot:

 typo install /var/www/PATH/httpdocs

The next command should have changed the configuration from mongrel and sqlite to apache and mysql but it didn’t work for me for some reason:

typo config /var/www/PATH/httpdocs web-server=external database=mysql

I had to manually change the settings in database.yml and I also had to create a .htaccess file in the public folder to get fastcgi working.

Then

rake migrate

to update the database tables.

I have moved the blog a few times over the last year or so and along the way various things got broken, so it is nice to have everything working again.

For a while now my blog has been going down due to a strange problem with apache. The error log always contains the same error message,

*** glibc detected *** double free or corruption (fasttop)

Now I haven’t been able to determine what was causing this problem, so I decided to start using Mongrel instead thinking that the problem was down to fastcgi. So I set up a proxypass directive in my apache conf to proxy to mongrel. Works well but apache is still crashing.

From there I decided “what the heck” and set up a cron job to restart apache every hour. And that seemed just fine also until this morning when I noticed that the blog was down again. To cut a long and tedious story short it was the old ‘apache leaving semaphores around when it restarts’ chestnut. I have seen this problem before on a redhat 9 box running plesk. I had always assumed it was due to the version of apache that was being used on that box. Not so it would seem. Anyway, the simple fix can be found here, among others.

I’ve also changed my cron job to only restart every six hours now.

So my apache really isn’t too well.

So we are making the big move this weekend. For a long time now I’ve vowed to pay someone to help us move when we finally get around to it. And I got my way.

This morning two guys and a van from Man with a Van showed up first thing and man were they fast! In two hours they loaded up their Luton truck thingy with nearly everything we have. It got to the point were I had to decide to get them to leave most of the stuff in the bedroom as we have loads of friends and family turning up tomorrow to help us move. If I had let these guys there wouldn’t have been anything left for them!

So, top marks to the men with a van. Awesome service.

My good pal Busta has recently posted his latest mix.

Check it out for some dark jungle mix lovin.

I was working on some data that I needed to import into mysql for a new rails project I’ve started.

Some of the fields are currency strings, eg £4,000.00. Now initially I was tempted to just bung them into the table as varchars but there is a good chance that at some point down the line I’m going to want to ‘do maths’ with these numbers so I really had to convert them to floats.

In the end I used this little bit of code which worked a treat:

return amount.gsub(/[£,]/,’‘)

So what this does is matches the characters £ and , and substitutes them with blank. Works a treat.

The week before christmas I grabbed a ryanair flight home for a long weekend with the family. In the thirteen years I’ve been in the UK I’ve usually managed to be at home for christmas. This year however myself and N are buying a house and there was a slim chance that we would be in our new lovenest by christmas. ‘Twas not to be.

As first time buyers we are in a stong position. One of the primary advantages being that we are not in a chain. Pfft. We are in a chain, just at the ass end of it. We’ve found a place we like, had our offer accepted, had the mortgage approved, surveys are done etc. We could move in tomorrow! However the sellers have found a place and are now waiting for their seller to find a place. Oh well, such is life. Hopfully we’ll get moved this month.

Anyway, the weekend in Ireland was great. It was good to see everyone at this time of year. Then back to brighton and a short sprint in the office to the christmas break.

I had great intentions of getting lots of work done but on christmas eve I was laid low by a stonker of a cold. What shitty timing. I never get colds!

So christmas day was a bit muted, but thankfully there was plenty to watch on the telly from bed.

Mr IP arrived down for new year’s eve and I quaffed as best as I could considering I only had one working air hole. New years itself was spent in the usual place despite our best intentions. On the way home we were witness to some hooligan bus vandalism first hand which was (I’d say memorable but things are a bit hazy) interesting.

Poor bus driver getting partially throttled by a little shit with too many chemicals in his bloodstream. Apparently at this point I did my happy drunk act and went to the drivers aid appealing for calm, only to be berated by IP. Something along the lines of ‘there are 8 of them and they are between us and the exit of the bus’. Got away with it anyway.

Back to work today with lingering coldness. Bonkers workload.

HNY!

Well, I’ve had my 360 since Friday. I haven’t played on it a vast amount, but here are my initial thoughts.

The console itself looks fine. Certainly more styled than its predecessor. No gripes there.

The power supply is enormous! No really, its huge. Got to be the biggest one I’ve every seen. There have been reports of overheating but I’ve not had any issues on that front.

Games; I got Project Gotham Racing 3 and Perfect Dark: Zero. The former is great. Really like. Fantastic gfx. Great gameplay. I haven’t ventured onto xbox live as yet, but as I have a gold account, my offline scores get recorded online and I can see how I’m doing against everyone else. Which is nice.

Perfect Dark: Zero however wasn’t really my bag. I’m not a huge fan of shooters on consoles generally. With this game, I wasn’t ‘feeling it’. The game looks pretty, but I really couldn’t get into it. I’ve exchanged it for Call of Duty 2. COD2 looks great also and I’m having fun playing it.

So, all good really.

I got a call from HMV on wednesday to let me know that they had a 360 core system with my name on it if I wanted it. I had to think about that (for about 2 seconds) and went ahead and reserved it.

The surprising thing for me was that I had been allocated one at all as I only reserved it about a month ago. At that time there were reports all over the web that most places had stopped taking preorders early September.

So, I’ll be dropping a few quid this afternoon on the core system, a headset and a memory card. I’ll think about the harddrive, wireless controller and all that in the new year I think.

Games wise, PGR3 and Perfect Dark are my top choices. King Kong has been getting some very good reviews too …

Update this evening on first impressions (assuming it doesnt get given away to someone else before I pick it up of course).