Dispatches

Oh Noes! My Table Is Gone!

# mysqlcheck -p -A --auto-repair --optimize
wp_1_options
info     : Found block with too small length at 17732; Skipped
info     : Wrong block with wrong total length starting at 17776
info     : Found block with too small length at 28776; Skipped
warning  : Number of rows changed from 444 to 441
status   : OK

Cleaning up the mess after a hardware failure can suck. This mysqlcheck output is from the wp_options table for this blog. Unfortunately, if the options table is unreadable, all of WordPress panics and fails to load.

Everybody’s Underwear

I was using the dirty laundry metaphor in a previous post and wanted to extend it a bit by saying something like:

For the generation of children who’s parents have already posted their silliest and most embarrassing baby pictures to Facebook and elsewhere, being caught in your underwear is both expected and forgivable. Being evil, on the other hand…

Except I couldn’t find a link to support my claim. They’re out there, I’m sure, but I had to slog through stuff like this:

Some Predictions Come True

Way back in 2002 Dave Winer made a bet:

In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times’ Web site.

It’s important to remember that in 2002 people still wrote “weblogs” in quotes, as though they weren’t sure how to use the word. Winer won his bet in 2007. Anybody want to make a bet about 2014?

You Didn’t Know They Were Fighting: The Karen National Liberation Army in Myanmar

This news story from 2006 alerted me to a war I didn’t know anybody was fighting: the liberation of Karen State from Myanmar. The KNLA (Karen National Liberation Army) and KNU (Karen National Union) have been fighting for independence since the British left Burma (Myanmar) in 1948. What do you get a 51-year old rebel movement for its birthday? Here are their demands:

  • For us, surrender is out of the question.
  • We shall retain our arms.
  • The recognition of the Karen State must be complete.
  • We shall decide our own political destiny.

New Year’s Hangover Remedies

I find a few sausage, egg, and cheese breakfast sandwiches and chocolate milk do the trick, but I’d eat those every day if I could. I’m always dubious of claims to national consensus, but this is especially ridiculous. Is our national hangover cure really tomato juice and eggs? I thought it was hair of the […] » about 100 words

Lensbaby Baby

I have an old Lensbaby 2.0 (looks like this) that does a great job of making casual snapshots look like real portraits. But I also find it really difficult to get focus on my subject. Blame my bad eyes, my insistence on using it wide open with it’s shallowest depth of field, and simply sloppiness, […] » about 200 words

YouTomb Tracks Takedowns On YouTube

YouTomb continually monitors the most popular videos on YouTube for copyright-related takedowns. Any information available in the metadata is retained, including who issued the complaint and how long the video was up before takedown. The goal of the project is to identify how YouTube recognizes potential copyright violations as well as to aggregate mistakes made by the algorithm.

MySQL 5.1 Released, Community Takes Stock

MySQL 5.1 is out as a GA release, but with crashing bugs that should give likely users pause. Perhaps worse, the problems are blamed on essential breakdowns in the project management: “We have changed the release model so that instead of focusing on quality and features our release is now defined by timeliness and features. Quality is not regarded to be that important.”

Still, people are finding inspiration in OurDelta and Drizzle. Competition from those braches/forks and criticism from the community are sure to help re-align the MySQL core, or provide a reasonable alternative if Sun/MySQL can’t deliver. In the meanwhile, the High Availability MySQL blog is worth following.

Longwell RDF Browser

Longwell mixes the flexibility of the RDF data model with the effectiveness of the faceted browsing UI paradigm and enables you to visualize and browse any arbitrarely complex RDF dataset, allowing you to build a user-friendly web site out of your data within minutes and without requiring any code at all.

Demos