Tag Archives: Web

I listened to one podcast

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I listened to one podcast, no, maybe two podcasts in their entirety. One promised a keyword for a competition to win a camera or some prize, and the other was Mark and Ciaran’s Nightsight, a videocast which I enjoyed despite not mentioning Web 2.0 anywhere! Maybe that was a good thing, considering the objective of the movie..

In a similar vein, all the videos on blogs thanks to youtube are great! Even though Pomme and Kelly were among the most popular bloggers on WordPress.com for the past few weeks I only saw their version of Respect this morning. They are the very first Google Idols apparently. They’re a little mad aren’t they? :)

InnoDB: Starting shutdown…

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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!

Site registration – why make it hard?

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I used to work at a company providing financial data nd services online. When a potential customer wanted to register they had to go through about 6 pages before they were a member of the site. Unfortunately we were constrained by outside forces but having to go through Terms and Conditions, personal details forms, choosing a product, choosing exchanges, agreeing to exchange agreements and more to register was always going to be a major obstacle!
That’s why I smiled when I read today’s OK/Cancel. :)
Thankfully at the new job, signing up is a lot easier!

Irish Blog Awards – You can start voting now!

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Damien announced this evening that voting is now open for the Irish Blog Awards. I’m nominated in 3 sections:

  • Best Personal Blog (this blog)
  • Best Contribution to the Irish Bloggersphere (for WordPress)
  • Best Photo Blog (for In Photos)

If you’re familiar with the Irish B(l)oggersphere you’ll know a lot of the names, but if you’re not, follow the links to at least a few of the blogs and have a good read. Then decide who’ll get your vote. Vote for me if you think I deserve it!

Thank you to those who nominated me, I’m going to have a peek at the other entries now!

Irish Blog Awards – Who's your favourite?

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Ryan alerted me to the fact that Damien Mulley has opened the flood gates for nominations for the Irish Blog Awards!

This blog hasn’t been updated as much as it used to since wordpress.com took off, but take a look at the categories and email Damien if you think I should be nominated!

Guess I have my hands stuck in several of the categories with this blog and my photoblog, In Photos, so please don’t let me stop you nominating me in whatever category you like! :)

painful self-promotion ends!

WordPress.com Goodies

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Yesterday it was announced that Yahoo will bundle WordPress right alongside Movable Type on their website! Matt and the rest of us were keeping mum on everything until yesterday, but now it’s out I can blog this. Matt has links to online coverage of the event.

Me? I think it’s great, the best blogging platform just got a huge boost from a very major player on the Internet! Maybe when I talk to people about blogs in the future they’ll know what I’m talking about!

The new Automattic website launched yesterday too. There’s a little blurb about me on the About page, although I do not drink Murphys except for that time years ago when I drank a pint with a shot of Baileys to help it go down.. that was interesting.

In other news, Performancing for Firefox came out. It’s a blog editor extension for Firefox that looks pretty cool. Unfortunately I’m not using Firefox 1.5 yet so I can’t try it out.

Gizmo – A free phone for your computer

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I tried Gizmo a few nights ago and it works really well! The conference feature could be invaluable for global groups who need to keep in touch.

I’m probably one of the few people in the world who hasn’t used Skype so I can’t compare yet. Skype does offer almost-worldwide calls at 2c/minute I think but for calling the US, Gizmo is better at 1c/minute!

Even better, just like Skype, Gizmo also runs on Linux!
(Edit: the url for this entry has been updated because when I copy/pasted the title I brought over a strange “-” character that the post slug didn’t like! You should be able to click this entry now!)