Well, I’ve finally posted something new on the blog 
Just a quick update to convert my pmachine blog entries to wordpress… Found a good tutorial online to do it as well, and it wasn’t too painful - LINK HERE
Plenty of things to update.. and I will do so eventually!!
Blearg. Early.
Been spending the last couple of days.. Well actually the last few days… trying to move redandwhiteonline.com onto a new webhost with heaps more transfers and disk space, that costs a hell of a lot less. This is all good and well, but moving the MySQL database was causing me a fair amount of grief.
Downloading the SQL dump using phpMyAdmin or vBulletin’s backup function doesn’t work as PHP times out after a certain amount of time. If you have a large-ish database, the script just gives up before you’ve had a chance to download it all. Apparently you’re best to back it up using a shell command in SSH, but either it wasn’t working for me or I just didn’t know what I was doing.
In the end, I seemed to have some luck backing it up using vBulletin to output the database dump directly to the server hard disk, then downloading using FTP.
IMPORTING it, on the other hand, was.. er… exactly the same level of hassle. Can’t import into phpMyAdmin because it times out, can’t paste in 100 lines of SQL at a time because there were something like 380,000 lines of SQL.. Couldn’t access SSH.
So anyway, to cut a long story short… and for the benefit of search engines…
If you want to import a large MySQL database, and
If you don’t have access to SSH, and
It’s too large to import using the tools in phpMyAdmin,
You could do a lot worse than use BigDump. It is a PHP SQL importer that runs the import in batches to avoid the timeout, restarting itself every few thousand lines. Took 30 minutes to upload the 120MB SQL dump, then less than 10 minutes to run the script and import the whole database. Certainly better than the couple of hours I spent the previous night trying to manually import the SQL via phpMyAdmin, and only getting a few thousand lines into the 380,000.
Yes, finally the old 1992 Holden Barina is being retired back to my parents’ place after years of cranky though more or less faithful service.
After bouncing back and forth between the Mazda3 and the new Ford Focus for a while, we eventually decided on the Focus. Not much between them as they are built pretty much on the same chassis, share a lot of the same engineering etc.
Just like this one, except actually in a nice colour. We are getting an automatic CL Sedan with the safety pack, in Titanium Grey, which is kind of like a dark metallic grey. It was a good thing that the dealer had a Focus in stock with the colour we were considering as it looked way too bright on the car (looked ok on the brochure).
Hence the Titanium Grey.
Very nice little car to drive, and might actually have the guts to get up hills with more than one person in it, or be able to hit 110 km/h without vibrations of doom spreading throughout the steering wheel and cabin. Despite the stubby back end, there’s heaps of boot space (at least 1.5 bodies in garbage bags, maybe even two if they’re chopped up).
Now of course I have to get used to the indicator lever being on the left side of the steering column. We’ll have windscreen wipers going all over the shop for the first few days/weeks/months….
Then there’s the AUX audio input in the glovebox, just perfect for iPods. Small thing, but major selling point for those of us who are sick of fiddling with cassette adapters just to hear something other than the radio…
Which is all well and good, but now the horrible wait begins. The dealer reckons we might have to wait for anything from 4 to 8 weeks for our new car. Brand new model, you see, and barely any stocks in the country.
Bah.
But I want it now….
Full of stupid client quotes. A particular favourite is this one.
Thanks to Senor Pheel.
1.5mbps ADSL r0×0r, as they say in the classics.
My ISP recently released new broadband plans. I looked them over and decided to switch my old account across. $20 cheaper, and 200% faster. A no-brainer, really. The only downside is that the download allowances are only 10GB peak / 10GB off-peak. Not that that really bothers me, I haven’t gone ANYWHERE near downloading that much in the last year or so.
Just a tiny bit quicker for loading regular webpages, but it’s nice to get 150kBps downloads when I’m trying to get large files.
Now, if iiNet will just install their DSLAMs at my phone exchange so I can get onto their 8mbps speeds…
“Darth Tater” - A potato head toy based on a character from Star Wars?
Brilliant!!!!
Well, I’ve just had one of those hella fun computer troubleshooting nights.
I’m slowly upgrading my HTPC, you see.. Just slowly buying bits to bring it up to speed - a new soundcard with an optical audio output, a video card modified with 5 BNC connectors for our CRT projector, a wireless card so it can connect to the home network from the garage etc etc. Eventually just about everything will be replaced, and all the bits of the old PC that were removed can then be reassembled into a nice solid fileserver (as it was in the old days, pre home theatre).
I got a new 200GB hard disk today, one of the later models of the Seagate Barracudda (my favourite HDD, very quiet and super reliable in my experience). Cracked open the PC and added it as a slave drive next to the primary HDD. Started up Windows again and opened up the disk manager. Ah, nice new hard drive waiting to be formatted.
Hang on a second… It’s saying that the drive is only 127GB in size. That ain’t right. Now I know that what the marketeers call a megabyte (1000 kilobytes) and what the programmers call a megabyte (1024 kilobytes) aren’t exactly the same, but that doesn’t account for over 60GB of capacity.
Google, as always, is your friend. It turns out that in order to have a hard drive over 147MB in Windows XP, you need:
a) IDE controller that supports 48-bit LBA
b) at least Win XP Service Pack 1
Well, I was running XP SP2, so no worries there… Could the BIOS on my trusty (by trusty I really mean “temperamental and elderly, but I am familiar with its little foibles”) old Asus A7V motherboard be a bit out of date?
After a bit of searching, I found out that the A7V supports 48-bit LBA from the 1010 BIOS. After quite a bit more searching, I found out that my BIOS version was one higher - 1011. So that couldn’t be the problem.
After about 2 and a half hours of tweaking (to cut a long story short), it suddenly dawned upon me that my hard drives were plugged in the A7V’s onboard Promise ATA/100 controller. What if… the Promise worked off a different set of drivers? How about we plug it into one of the motherboard’s standard IDE ports, in place of one of the DVD drives?
At last, the drive shows 186GB - close enough.
It’s always something bleeding obvious.
Of course, detecting the capacity and using it are two completely different piscine-filled boiling utensils… It’s currently 37% through the formatting, so I guess I’ll have another little tanty if it happens to not work, after all that.
Don’tcha just love it?
Oh, and we had a good bit of “short sharp rain” today. A couple of sessions, one in the arvo, and one not long ago. Very atmospheric, with the lightnight and so on. Makes you want to cavort about in your basement, cackling and crying out “It’s alive!!!!!”. Perhaps I need an assistant with a hump.
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