I just noticed that if you click on iGoogle from that point forward if you go to the normal google page it redirects you to iGoogle. What were they thinking.
Tandem Canada
Some people are mad and some are crazy but there are some people who we are unable to categorise. I know two of these, it’s Jennies parents. If you are wondering why I think they are doo lally have a look at Tandem Canada.
I am insanely jealous. Paul’s a fit bugger and has been cycling longer than I have been alive but it’s has to be Pauline that takes the biscuit. She didn’t start cycling until a couple of years ago.
Is DMOZ dead?
It has been more than three years since I tried to upload UKlug to DMOZ. I submitted UKlug to it again today. I am not expecting much from DMOZ. Is it just me or is DMOZ either dead or dying. I got burned a few times asking people what was going on with my listing but because it is a free service they treat you like the scum of the earth. Not a particularly pleasant experience.
Working at Yahoo! is like drinking from a fire hose
Stick with me I will get to the Yahoo bit in a minute but you need to understand a few things first.
I would say one of my main motivations in life is avoiding boredom. I abhor boredom
From webster: to regard with extreme repugnance
I could not agree more. I loathe it.
There are various reasons for this not least of which is I have absolutely no reason to be bored. There are a million books I haven’t read, a thousand technologies I haven’t investigated a billions trees I haven’t seen, a million paths I haven’t trod and 6 billion people I haven’t met….. you get the point.
So when I am bored I have got to ask myself if I am really bored or am I just being stupid. That brings me to my other motivation. Eradicating my own ignorance, I do this with extreme prejudice. I do not consider myself stupid or ignorant but if there is one thing I do know I don’t know enough.
Now that you understand a bit more about what motivates me you know why I joined Yahoo. As I mentioned in the title working here is like drinking from a fire hose. The amount of stuff going on is staggering and the scale of everything is vast. It’s the perfect place for me.
Delete /dev/md0
If ever you make a mistake with software raid and you want to start from scratch by removing /dev/md0, the following command is a good place to start.
mdadm -S /dev/md0
Then create the array again as normal using something like
mdadm –create /dev/md0 –level=5 –raid-devices=3 /dev/sd[abc]1
Test::Harness Confused test output
If ever you get this error when using Test::Harness check to make sure that you are not printing anything that is interfering with it. See:
Test Anything Protocol
Test/Item/m_find_using_term_ids….ok 2/90Confused test output: test 2 answered after test 2
Test/Item/m_find_using_term_ids….ok 3/90Confused test output: test 3 answered after test 3
Test/Item/m_find_using_term_ids….ok 4/90Confused test output: test 4 answered after test 4
DegradedArray event
If you ever get one of these, count your lucky stars and get the array fixed. In my case I have lost one of the drives.
This is an automatically generated mail message from mdadm
running on debian
A DegradedArray event had been detected on md device /dev/md0.
Faithfully yours, etc.
P.S. The /proc/mdstat file currently contains the following:
Personalities : [linear] [raid1]
md0 : active raid1 hdc1[1]
78148096 blocks [2/1] [_U]
unused devices:
Debian NO_PUBKEY
If you ever get an error like this.
W: GPG error: http://non-us.debian.org stable/non-US Release: The following signatures couldn’t be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY F1D53D8C4F368D5D
W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems
The way I solved it was as follows. As root…
# apt-get install gnupg
# gpg –keyserver wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net –recv-keys F1D53D8C4F368D5D
# gpg –armor –export F1D53D8C4F368D5D | apt-key add –
# gpg –export F1D53D8C4F368D5D >> /etc/apt/trusted.gpg
# gpg –list-keys
Yahoo Slurp
Not sure if anyone else has noticed recently but Slurp has been doing a lot of of Spidering lately. I actually took extreme measures today and added a crawl delay to the site.
WWW::Mechanize Fun
I have been writing a test suite for a website recently and came upon the following error.
Illegal value ‘GBR’ for field ‘country_iso’ at /usr/local/share/perl/5.8.4/WWW/Mechanize.pm line 1232
This seemed strange to me at first but when I thought about it I was using the following code
$mech->select(“country_iso”, ‘GBR’ );
If the value i.e. “GBR” in my case is not a valid select option then obviously WWW::Mechanize or rather HTML::Form will throw an error. It was actually HTML::Form::ListInput that the error came from but this is a package declared in the HTML/Form.pm module.