Blog outage again

Paul December 10, 2006 11:28 pm 2 Comments

Exactly the same as before, bear spotted that my blog either displayed blank pages or timed out. So I decided to trace it a bit further than before. I knew there was a problem somewhere in my WordPress database but I also knew that trying to look at it via phpMyAdmin was a waste of time since it locked up.

So I knocked up some php to list all the tables in that database along with their status and contents. And it turns out it’s wp_comments that’s causing the problem (accessing the table causes nothing to appear). Unfortunately by the time I’d worked that out and was deciding how to investigate further, it magically fixed itself. Bugger.

I’ve been pondering various causes and the only two that come to mind are that SiteGround are performing some form of maintenance that locks it up (kinda figures since it was 10am here, which is between 3am to 5am in the US) or that’s it’s related to blog spam. Perhaps something gets posted that MySQL doesn’t take too kindly too. I don’t know. Makes me think I should tighten up comment input, but I don’t really want to do that. Oh well.

The little outage reminds me though that I need to sort out a proper backup. I know I mentioned a plugin for WordPress (wp-cron) but for some reason it craps out. SiteGround appears to be blocking the emails it sends, so I’ll have to brew up something myself.

The secret of Drunk Vondur revealed

Paul December 8, 2006 11:56 pm 3 Comments

The Vondur we all know and love is actually teetotal and doesn’t go near the vodka. In fact if he goes within 10 foot of a store selling the stuff he starts to come out in hives. The side affect of that is navigating his way through Moscow is a bit of nightmare since, obviously, there’s a vodka store on every corner.

Which means that when we see Vondur on IRC “drunk”, it’s not Vondur. Nope. It’s his cat. He sneaks on the interweb late at night whilst Vondur sleeps. And look, here’s the proof:

By pretending he’s just good old drunk Vondur, Vondur Cat’s typos are ignored. I was beginning to suspect something was up though, since on one occasion drunk Vondur was rabbiting on about he relaxed by having a good belly rub and that he really liked being scratched behind his ears. Then came the real giveaway that he preferred Whiskers to Felix. Meatier chunks or something. Then to top it off the above photo mysteriously appeared in my Inbox.

So there you have it, Drunk Vondur = Vondur Cat.

Far too cute for his own good, he even has his own gallery.

Remove a review from MPQ Archive?

Paul December 7, 2006 11:21 pm 4 Comments

This is an interesting one and it’s also a first. I received this email earlier today:

The request was pretty simple, a Google on the chaps name threw up an old MPQ Archive review in the first few results and given that he does web design work, he didn’t want potential customers seeing it. I wasn’t entirely sure people would put 2 and 2 together, but thought it was a polite and reasonable request.

However, two things stopped me from removing it completely. The first is that I’d gone to trouble of writing the review and also that I’d put a lot of effort into getting MPQ Archive up and running so didn’t want to start removing content. Secondly, as far as I’m aware, this is the only Quake map to feature Pamela Anderson. Not just that, it’s a Quake / Duke Nukem 3D / Barb Wire cross-over! It just had to be kept!

So I came up with a compromise. Simply change the authors name on the review and accompanying readme. I asked if that was ok, it was, so I changed it at the author’s request to “Bernd Maus” (German musician?). Means nowt to me, but I’ve done it.

Anyhoo, I can kind of see why he wanted it removing since it’s a low scoring map and it’s a bit chaffy, but on the plus side it shows that from an early age he showed sufficient motivation to go about creating a map, publishing it and then getting muggins here to review it. But there you go. Just don’t tell him that his name is still in the full map download ;)

A month with an Inspiron 640m

Paul December 5, 2006 11:39 pm 0 Comments

So how has the little beastie faired over the last month or so? Remarkably well and I’m very impressed by it. Pretty much everything I’ve thrown at it (other than Vista and Windows XP x64) it has handled with ease.

I’m unfortunately relegated to using bog standard XP Professional but it does the job. If I was thinking, I should have installed XP Media Center but it’s bit late now and I don’t really want the hassle of installing it. Next time I do a reinstall it will hopefully be for Vista x64 with proper drivers!

I also found out fairly quickly that it’s not a games machine. Whilst the processor is up to the task, the weedy Intel GMA 950 isn’t. So I’ve been doing tasks that give the processor a kicking. One of the first things I did was create a DVD from the miniDV tapes of our wedding.

I was able to hook up my Sony Handycam via the 640m’s built in Firewire port (didn’t realise it had one until it arrived). Using Pinnacle Studio I pulled down the various bits of footage and used it’s editing tools to create something half decent. From there it made up a DVD image and burnt it off. The actual process of getting the video from miniDV isn’t a particularly quick process since Pinnacle pulls it down in real time, which means if the tapes an hour long, it’ll take an hour (I know that Ulead VideoStudio has an option to pull video down really quick, but it’s awful software).

What amazed me though was how stable the machine was when creating and burning the DVD image. It hardly stressed it and I was able to do a bit of web surfing without any problems. It seems that way with pretty much everything I’ve done.

I’ve also had it running VMWare (more on this in another post :D). I hooked up to a external USB hard drive to run the virtual machine images off (thanks Coding Horror) and was surprised by the performance! I created a machine with Windows 2003 Server and installed Delphi 5. I then did a full compile of our software at work and it was 50% faster than the Inspiron 8200 I use (admittedly it’s hardly a fair test since the 8200 has a 1.6Ghz Pentium M with just 512MB running XP. That said the VM has just 400MB!).

I’m also taken by how portable it is compared to previous laptops I’ve used. Oh and quiet! To not have a constant whirring of fans (hello Inspiron 9100!) is nice. When it’s under a really heavy load for an extended amount of time the fan does kick in, but it’s not that noticeable and I’d say the DVD drive, when burning a disc, is much noisier. I also initially thought the 14 inch screen would be too small but the “UltraSharp Wide Screen” option I added bumps the res up to 1440×900 which is more than enough.

Getting the 9 cell battery turned out to be good idea too since battery life on the whole is excellent. I can run it for an entire evening for about 5 to 6 hours before it goes flat. There are a couple of things that seem to devour the battery which is heavy use of the DVD drive and a wireless USB mouse I have (the bluetooth (I think) dongle for the mouse seems to communicate a lot with it which drains the battery pretty quickly), but that’s not much of an issue.

The machine as originally specced only had 512MB memory but when the order went through I bought another 1GB from Crucial (excellent service as always). However I found that with running VMWare 1.5 GB just wasn’t enough to run two virtual machines comfortably, so I’ve bought a further 1GB to replace the original 512MB. Plus the fact the 512MB stick ran at 533Mhz whilst the new GB sticks run at 667Mhz means there’s a slight speed boost (not that I can tell). I would really have liked to have had a 1 and 2GB stick (it can take up to 4GB), but 2GB costs an extortionate £500+. Ouch!

Niggles and problems, none at the moment, but there are some that may become a problem later on. Firstly I don’t feel like I’m doing the machine justice running XP. Yes, the VMWare stuff is giving it a hard time but the Core 2 Duo is fully blown 64bit processor and it’s just sat there tootling along running 32bit chaff. Which brings me to my second niggle, the lack of drivers for Vista and XP x64. Vista has now RTM’ed, but the outlook for good drivers in the near term isn’t looking rosy.

Overall, it’s turned out to be a very impressive piece of kit. I can’t see it being replaced anytime soon.

MPQArchive.com back up again…

Paul December 5, 2006 10:37 pm 0 Comments

MPQArchive.com is actually hosted on a server at work and is basically just a redirect to mpqarchive.pauked.com. Unfortunately whilst tweaking some settings on IIS a couple of weeks ago (for MediaWiki) I managed to disable read access to it and therefore blocked it from working (odd since it’s a separate site!). Oops…

Anyhoo, all sorted now!

#tf stats for November

Paul December 3, 2006 11:42 pm 5 Comments

November’s stats have arrived!

<Zwiffle> i remember the horribly bad dialogue, voice acting, monsters , level design, puzzles, ending, cut scenes, and story

Ah, that’ll be Quake 4 then.

• Full List 
• RED_ROBOT
• Mine

Things that annoy me – #439

Paul December 1, 2006 12:17 am 3 Comments

Websites that resize my web browser window, specifically Gears of War. They really bug the shit out of me. Not only does this site resize the window but if I have the nerve to resize it back, it then promptly resizes it down again. So a big thanks to the fuckwit who implemented that.

However, as always, there are ways and means to avoid should fuckwittery. Using the Web Developer Toolbar in Firefox you can simply select Disable / Disable JavaScript.

Tada! No resizing…

…erm, unfortunately disabling JavaScript permanently does break things like Gmail… oops. A greasemonkey script would probably be the best thing to do in this case.