After a recent upgrade of a server from CentOS 4.4 to 5.1 using yum, I ran into a bit of a problem with rpm.
Pretty much any rpm command would result in the following error:
rpmdb: Program version 4.3 doesn’t match environment version
error: db4 error(-30974) from dbenv->open: DB_VERSION_MISMATCH: Database environment version mismatch
error: cannot open Packages index using db3 – (-30974)
error: cannot open Packages database in /var/lib/rpm
SMF and the case of the missing pound signs
I’ve been helping a friend setup a new forum using Simple Machines Forum (SMF) and even though it worked fine on a previous installation I’d done, the pound signs (UK currency, not a #) just wouldn’t show up as anything but a ? once they were posted.
Recently read: Peter James – Not dead enough
I’ve just finished reading “Not dead enough” by Peter James. It’s a crime thriller set in Brighton and Hove in the UK, and has plenty of twists although a few of the events were obviously going to happen. It was a very good read though.
Firefox and some useful add-ons
Although I use Safari for much of my browsing, I still use Firefox for a number of things. I find that playing Shartak with anything other than Firefox is painful because the Greasemonkey scripts for Shartak make it so much easier to find out where my character is. I also use Firefox whenever I need to dig into some HTML/CSS problems – the Web Developer add-on makes it easy to find out which styles are being applied to an element.
Here is a list of some of the Firefox add-ons that I’ve come across and would recommend.
Leopard + Firewall + Skype = broken
It seems that when the firewall option is enabled (apparently it’s disabled by default) you can only run Skype once without reinstalling it. The second time you try, it bounces a couple of times and stops.
A Skype forum thread about it can be found at http://forum.skype.com/index.php?showtopic=100329
synergy2 on Leopard
Having upgraded to Leopard, I found that synergy2 wasn’t working. It’s an application that lets you control multiple machines from a single keyboard and mouse and I use it quite a lot at work.
More information about Synergy2 can be found at http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/
After the upgrade to Leopard (and even after a fresh reinstall) it would start up and then a crash would be logged in /var/log/system.log; searching in Google resulted in a hit that mentions using launchd to start it up and having set it up like that I found that it actually works fine!
The forum post is at http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=1848423&forum_id=199580
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Leopard (Mac OSX 10.5)
Like most Apple users we pre-ordered a copy of Leopard and took delivery of it on the 26th October. I upgraded Tiger to Leopard that evening and despite the initial horror of having some fairly big changes to the UI, I’ve decided it’s not so bad.
Something I didn’t like was the new style dock – it has a shiny effect on it (see image below) which makes it harder to see what’s running. I figured that it wasn’t too much of a problem since I have the dock set to auto-hide and if I need to see what’s running, I can always use Cmd-Tab.
yum reports bad marshal data
I’ve been trying to check for updates on one of my CentOS machines using yum and got the following error.
root:~# yum upgrade
Loading “installonlyn” plugin
Options Error: bad marshal data
MacLive Expo, London 2007
We just got back from the MacLive Expo in London – it seemed smaller than last year although I could be mistaken. Here are some pictures of various parts of the expo.
Talk Like A Pirate Day
It’s nearly that time of year again – Talk Like A Pirate Day is this Wednesday, September 19th.
To learn more, please use one of these links:
International site
UK site