Umbral Echoes Blog

This is a post for the MySQL geeks out there, and also for anyone who had a similar problem and might be searching for a solution.

I was trying to copy our testing server’s database to my local machine, so I can do some local development (I’ve set up a web server and database on my personal computer, so that I can test things out before moving them to the development server). I’m using WAMP for that, which is a very simple way to set up a local webserver on Windows.

Well, when I tried to import the database I got the following error:

Error Code: 1005 - Can't create table 'whatever' (errno: 121)

So I edited my.ini, and increased max_allowed_packet, like so:

[mysqld]
max_allowed_packet=32M

I’ve heard that some other people have also had to increase wait_timeout to something like 45 seconds to fix this error.

Today I am proud to call this neighborhood my home.

Image from Hal Bergman Photography

This morning I had to take Kayla to the veterinary surgeon for a follow-up.  On my way home, Lauren calls me telling me someone knocked on the door, that she didn’t answer because she was still in bed, and then she heard some weird sounds. I was about 15 minutes from home at this point, so I told her I’d be right there. Thought maybe it was just some kids fucking around.

I pull into my subdivision to see 3 cop cars near my house, and some neighbors out in the cul de sac gathered with baseball bats.  Apparently someone had tried to break into my house while I was gone. Two someones, in fact. But mine wasn’t the first house they went to. They had gone to my neighbor on the left before that, knocked on the door, and he said that when he answered they seemed surprised, then asked if he needed his lawn mowed. They obviously had no lawn mower, so he was suspicious. Then they came to my house, knocked on the door, and when no one answered, they went to the door attached to the garage and proceeded to attempt to kick it in.

I say “attempt” because they didn’t manage to get it open — it broke part of the frame but caught on the door jamb, since the frame was solid wood (as opposed to compressed wood, which most more recent houses use). Meanwhile, my neighbor Devon is calling the cops, and then coming out to ask the guys what the hell they’re doing, along with another neighbor from the other side of my house, who is wielding a baseball bat. The would-be thieves, predictably, get the hell out of dodge. Or try to.

Apparently, my neighborhood doesn’t take well to thieves, because my neighbors gave chase. Before long, several people in the neighborhood were attempting to corral these jerks, and within a couple of minutes the cops were there. Living within 2 miles of a police station has some benefits. The neighbors and cops coordinated, and the cops took the thieves into custody.

Yes, you read correctly. The police were called and actually caught the criminals. That never happens.

These fuckers are now behind bars. I will have to replace the door, but I was considering doing that anyway (it’s in a bad spot that gets a lot of moisture and was in crappy condition). Nothing was stolen, no one was hurt. I will be following up with the police to make sure that these bastards get what’s coming to them. You do not scare my girl, or fuck with my house. You certainly do not do both.

So, fair warning to all would-be thieves: choose another neighborhood. The only thing you will find here is epic fail.

In late April (edit: Yes, April — I originally said August, but it is April), my boss is going to Europe to talk to some European publishers. I will be coming with him to answer tech questions.

The plan is to fly into London, take a train to Paris, train to Toulouse, train to Madrid, then fly back home. The trip will last about 10 days total, and with nearly 5 days of that being taken up with flying/trains, that doesn’t leave much time to spare for fun stuff and sightseeing. But, we will do our best to squeeze some in, and I will post pictures as I can.

I found this somewhere, but I cannot remember where, and since Google is unable to find it now, I cannot attribute it. If you know who wrote it originally, please let me know. Also since Google is unable to find it, I feel the need to put it back on the Interwebz.

This is done in the style of The Very Secret Diaries of the Lord of the Rings characters, except it’s done as Selene from Underworld.

The Very Secret Diary of Selene

August 4, 1648

Woken from scrummy dream about ponies to discover strange man in my room wearing silly dress and covered in blood. Told me my family had been eaten by monsters and I should put on leather pants and go live with him forever. Agreed instantly.

Looking back, was a tad suspicious.

Google Buzz, and before it Google Wave, seemed to have great potential. I played with both when they came out.  But my interest quickly waned, and from what I can tell I’m very much not alone in that.

Part of the reason is that I think Google jumped the gun. In marketing, you have to be careful about when you create a buzz (pun intended). And especially with products like these, they’re only useful if everyone is using them. In both of these cases, I think Google was directing the general tech populace to use products that were incomplete.

With Wave, they should have had permissions from the get-go, so that you could invite people to see, but not edit, a Wave. They have that now, which is nice, but it’s a bit late in the game — comparatively few people regularly use Wave any more. There are a lot of other things they did wrong with Wave, too: it was much buggier than I’d expect from a Google beta, slow as molasses, and too broad in scope. That last one is really what killed it, I think. People generally want a clear path for using a product; they want a sexy sports car, not a bunch of parts that they have to figure out how to best put together to build a sports car that suits their needs.

With Buzz, they went the other way. It’s too damn simple. I have lots of friends. Some I’m closer to than others. Some I want to pay more attention to than others. So maybe I’d like to be able to easily see a Buzz stream from only certain groups, instead of everybody. Maybe once I start or participate in a discussion, I’d like to select whether I get emails specifically for that discussion. (And while I’m at it, hey Facebook! How about being able to turn off receiving emails just because I thumbed-up a post that 50,000 other people feel the need to comment on?) Maybe I would like to have my Twitter posts show up in some decent timeframe, instead of the next day if I’m lucky.

Overall, I love the things Google does. Chrome is amazing, and broke the web browser mold when it came out. Gmail has been my email client of choice for years now. Their search engine revolutionized the web.

Then again, not every hit can be a home run. I like that they’re trying new things! I just think that a lot of these things have great potential, but were executed poorly. And that makes me sad.

Two tools I really didn’t think I’d need for building a system: needle-nosed pliers, and a file. Where the hard drive went in, there was a retaining bracket that was preventing a hard drive screw from passing, so I had to bend it. And when I replaced the case fans with better and quieter ones, the size on the front one was off by a fraction of a millimeter, which required filing off the plastic around where it went in.

However, this time no blood was spilled. I think that might be a first. So, I consider it a success!

I also remembered how annoying it can be to build a system. I got a power source that can handle 2 video cards (“Crossfire capable” they call it, for ATI cards), but the kind I got took both of the power connectors. So I can’t actually use 2 without upgrading my power source. Talking to NewEgg about that, but so far no luck asking for an exchange.

Also, I remembered a little hack for installing Windows clean, using an upgrade disc. You can use an upgrade version as the full version in one of two ways when installing it fresh (i.e. wiping whatever is already on there, if anything: install it fresh and then install it over itself, or (the quicker, easier way) do a simple registry edit.

Something else I realized: I have a Logitech Performance MX wireless mouse (no, I did not just realize this, shut up). It is pretty awesome, but my only complaint has been that it will randomly stick, and for 30 seconds or so it stutters and jumps around the screen when I try to move it. Today I tried something that seems obvious: I moved the damn wireless receiver to a USB port closer to the mouse. Guess what? No issues since then. I know, I’m a frackin’ genius.

Okay, so how does the shiny new system work, you ask?

It’s fast. Very fast. I attribute almost all of that to the SSD. That’s a solid-state drive; a hard drive with no moving parts. They are expensive, for much less space than you will get with a normal hard drive, but they are about twice as fast, 1/4 the size overall, use far less power, make no noise, and emit almost no heat. For laptops, they are about the most awesome thing you can have. For desktops, still quite awesome.

One not-fast bit is logging into Windows. It gets to the login screen, I enter the password, then… it sits there for 20 seconds before continuing. I’m not sure why this is, and I don’t think it initially did it. But it doesn’t happen when I’m waking the computer from sleep or hibernate, and I almost never have cause to do a full power-off or reset, so that’s not really a big deal.

The only other pet peeve I have is that, even though there is a connector for it, the case has no hard drive activity indicator light. And since the SSD is even more silent than a ball-gagged ninja, there’s no way for me to know when lots of hard drive access is going on. I mainly look at this when the system seems to be randomly crunching/slow though, and since that hasn’t yet happened… I can live with it for now.

My work-oriented stuff is very fast as well. We use Subversion, a system that lets multiple people work on the same code at the same time without stepping on each other’s toes, and it also retains a complete history of every change ever made to the code, so that you can roll back if you screw something up. Performing updates and commits with this is very notably faster than it was on my old system (also a quad-core system, with 5 GB of RAM).