Was pointed to a strange site called Where’s George earlier. You enter the serial number off various denomination dollar bills and see who else has had that note and where. Having wondered if there was a UK version, a quick google found Dosh Trader.
It’s rather cold out there
Woke up on Wednesday morning to this…
Not a huge amount of snow, but certainly enough to turn everything white. There was also a fair bit of ice around – saw several cars and a van slide around the road a bit whilst on my way to drop Harry at school.
Happy Birthday Lori
Happy Birthday to my wife Lori who, as I write this, is currently on her way back from a talk at the Tate Modern in London and should be arriving back in Nottingham in about 10 minutes.
A new server
I’ve got a new server to replace this one, the primary reason being that with all the sites and services on here there’s less disk space available than would be nice. There’s also the fact that the server is a little slow at times, and is running a really ancient version of RedHat. I’ve tried upgrading it (in place, without a reboot) to Fedora Core 2 and although it works, it’s got a lot of stuff left lying around that shouldn’t be there.
Another disk failure
Well, once again I’ve got a failed disk in my Linux software RAID array. That’s got to be the third one that’s been flagged as failed within the last 6 months – they’re Maxtor 160GB drives. The last one that failed had a comprehensive PowerMAX test run on it and it passed everything. PowerMAX is the DOS utility that you have to run in order to get a special diagnostic code so that you can RMA the drive if it’s still under warranty.
Comment spam again
After having seen at least 12 spam comments added in the last couple of days I finally decided to do something about it. As it’s a fairly widespread problem, there are plenty of pages explaining what to do about it. Some of them are easy to implement but easy for spammers to get around them if they put their minds to it. Others are similarly easy to implement (because someone else has done all the hard work) but would provide a bit more protection.
MySQL Replication problem
Had some problems with MySQL replication yesterday. I setup a new slave to join a bunch of existing ones and found that although ‘LOAD DATA FROM MASTER’ worked fine, once it had got an up-to-date copy of the data that was all it ever had. None of the new transactions from the master were processed on the new slave server.
Solution: server-id on the new slave was set to 1 and conflicted with one of the other servers. Doh!
Firewire drive enclosures again
Went back to Maplin Electronics yesterday and got an Mapower enclosure. It’s new so isn’t in the catalogue yet but it has an Oxford 911 chipset for the firewire side of things. It works with the mac just fine and even lets you boot from it using Alt to select a boot disk.
Fedora PPC
Well, I’ve had my powerbook for almost a year now and although OSX is nice enough, at times I try to compile applications (as in download source, ./configure, make, make install) and it just will not compile.
Figured I’d try Fedora PPC (core 3) and although it’s not fully ready guessed I could live with a few minor bugs here and there… well, I was wrong.
Firewire drive enclosure issues
It seems not all firewire drive enclosures are equal. Those with an Oxford 911 chipset apparently work properly with OSX and you can boot off them. The one I got today from Maplin was unfortunately not an Oxford chipset but a Prolific PL3507. It works ok in so far as it mounts the disk in OSX but trying to boot from it doesn’t work – it just hangs and doesn’t find it. Time to find a different one.