Category: tech

SVN Deployment and a New Site
04 February 2008

I recently got an email from a BarCamp friend, Mark Sailes, telling me about his new site http://www.svn-checkout.co.uk. I am a big fan of subversion and always looking for more tips and tricks for using it better so I popped over to have a look. Its …
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Logrotate Error on Ubuntu

10 January 2008

For a few weeks now, I've been seeing this error in my logs every night:

/etc/cron.daily/logrotate:
error: error running shared postrotate script for /var/log/mysql.log /var/log/mysql/mysql.log /var/log/mysql/mysql-slow.log
run-parts: /etc/cron.daily/logrotate exited with return code 1 …

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Filtering Tables in Joins in MySQL
03 December 2007
I had a situation recently where I was outer joining one table onto another. I needed all rows from the first table, plus any matching rows from the second table. So:
```
SELECT *
FROM table1 t1
LEFT JOIN table2 t2 ON (t1.col_a = t2.col_a)
```
So far, so good, right? In …
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BarCampLeeds Recap
18 November 2007

I did it! I went and spoke at BarCampLeeds, there's flickr evidence to prove it as well :)

My talk was "Source Control Saves Lives", a primer on what source control and why you should use it, with a definite subversion twist because that's what I know the most about and …
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Thinking of BarCamp Leeds
15 November 2007

Recently I found out about a phenomenon called BarCamp, where a bunch of people, mostly geeks, turn up and run their own un-conference. Every attendee speaks, at least that's the theory, and there are a lot of concurrent sessions - so you just attend what you want to. It looks interesting …
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Mysql show processlist
22 October 2007

A very quick entry today, life seems to be so busy at the moment but I have to write this down before I forget. Today I had a weird situation where mysql was consuming a lot of resources but didn't seem to be actually getting anywhere, as if something was …
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A Very Narrow Howto of Podcasting
30 September 2007

I recently featured in an episode of Zend's PHP Abstract. A few people have asked how I went about preparing and recording the piece so here's a quick overview.

Choosing a Topic

This actually wasn't hard because I wanted to pick something that I have particular knowledge of. As a …
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Simple Rsnapshot Setup
22 September 2007

Rsnapshot is a perl-based backup script manager. It is a journalised backup system – meaning that it copies all your files across to the backup media once – and then the only data it transfers after that is the changes. The backups appear on disk as complete copies – but where two generations …
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Top top Tips
20 September 2007

That is to say, some top tips for the command-line program top. Top is a program to show you the top processes consuming resources on the system. You can then press other keys and the program will respond. For example:

q to quit

z to get a colour output

x …
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Reliably Avoid Subversion Collision - Commit First!
07 September 2007

Subversion is a source control system – an excellent accompaniment to software development especially in a team setting. When working with a number of people, it is likely that at one time or another there will be collisions – for example at the moment a project I am working on has a …
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Setting up MySQL to listen to external ports
05 September 2007

I had some difficulty setting up mysql to listen to external ports on a server – the development web server uses databases on another box. The important setting was in /etc/mysql/my.cnf where I removed the line:

bind-address = 127.0.0.1

You should then be able to connect …
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Twitter, meet Facebook. Facebook, Twitter
21 August 2007

Having recently embraced the social networking revolution, or not, I have recently been getting exasperated by how out-of-date my status gets when I can’t be bothered to update it. And how annoying that there are statuses on both Facebook and Twitter which are both out of date.

I stumbled …
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