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Showing posts from 2007

pink v.smile tv learning system for sale

My wife and I are selling one of Kysa’s barely-used toys. It’s one of Vtech’s multi-awarded preschool consoles and one of the best educational toys around. It’s called the V.Smile TV Learning System (the ones they’re selling now are new models), and it’s in pink! It also comes with the Dora’s Fix-it Adventure game cartridge. We’re selling it for only P4,000, after we’ve taken off 20% from the original retail price. It is practically brand new as it is barely used, and it’s readily available for anyone here in the Philippines. There will be no shipping charges if you’re in Cebu or in Cagayan de Oro; meaning if you’re somewhere else, we’ll have it couriered to you and you just pay COD for shipping. If you’re interested, and would like to buy, please email me privately (jon at doblados dot net)

you're looking good, opensource!

opensource gets another breakthrough today, as canonical launches launchpad personal package archive (PPA), an ubuntu linux developers service intended to extend collaboration in software development and give the community equal opportunity to build and package code for ubuntu on the desktop, server, and for mobile applications. great news for those itching to modify packages and contribute to the furtherance of opensource! users can make changes on packages of their choice, and these will be published in the PPA system, somewhat like a special repository. aptly, users get the updates from the system whenever new versions of the packages become available.

on work and blogging

i haven't been updating for several important, albeit lousy reasons. work has been keeping me up at nights and i feel that if i were to write entries, i wouldn't be making much sense. technobabble is fun, but i've long outgrown this preference for writing. call it a maturing of sorts, and i'm now ready to take things (read: blogging) to higher levels i've almost completely forgotten about deepest sender, a cool firefox extension for blogging, and it's great to be using it again

plesk won't start after tweaking mysql

i've had this happen to me again the other week and as always, felt like kicking myself for not remembering. we do a lot of performance tuning on mysql, and as a result, we almost always manage to get plesk mangled. not its fault, it just can't run without mysql, doh. not of preference, but plesk happens to be there to make handling domains easier, as a single editing point when you want to change something and not worry about missing something out. so there's a custom /etc/my.cnf that we use, and with changes to limits done (both on mysql and via ulimit), you'd think that a reload of mysqld would do. (we use InnoDB btw) normally, that's all you need to have mysqld read off the new settings. if you've grown so dependent on plesk (like i have), you would not notice that mysqld didn't actually start, and you will get an error when you load plesk, thinking that it's a plesk error: ERROR: PleskMainDBException MySQL query failed: Incorrect information in file

Pushing on

I recently got Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Beta running on my HP Pavilion dv2001tu notebook, and I'm very happy with the way it's running. Here's what I've done and have been doing the past month. Nothing out of the ordinary for me, but some of the activities mentioned here could have been keeping you up late at nights, coveting much of the understated successes of running Ubuntu on HP laptops. If this is indeed so, do let me know your woes and I'll see what I can do to help. 1. Started a clan network. Okay, so most of them are really old and have no appreciation whatsoever for the internet, much less understand what emails are, and personalized email addresses at that. So I'll leave this up to the younger ones, who will help me teach the older ones the basics. They are yet to be informed of this new responsibility. LOL. 2. Upgraded desktop computer to Feisty Fawn Beta, and dual-booted Feisty and XP on my Pavilion dv2001tu lappy. So far, I have not had any hair-tearing f

Shelving trigger.cdo.linux.org.ph

I am officially bringing down my old tech blog after Holy Week. It has virtually become a sinkhole for all kinds of spam links and I have barely done anything to keep it up-to-date. Two of the milestones that I've unknowingly and unwittingly accomplished would include (in order, sorry): 1. PR6 (yea, before it went offline for almost a month, and before Google deployed new algorithms sometime in Feb) 2. 20,453 spam comments since I replaced my Wordpress.com API key sometime in Nov, 2006. Beginning today, I will post techie stuff in this blog. It's the same ol' renamed-a-hundred-times Blogger account, but with a different twist, now that it's using a personalized domain. Fear not, for my old Blogger URI will still work. I'm just not sure if you will be redirected or if there will be a rewrite. TODO: find out how Blogger does this.

The rush that's called Graduation

I sometimes wish it were me. But I’d rather have my daughter bask in her moment. It’s just that I clearly remember the feeling. You’re all bubbly and excited, and you can’t stop talking about it. My daughter’s graduating from preschool tomorrow, and my wife and I are as much into the rush as she is. 1st grade, here we come. *groan*

The rush that's called Graduation

I sometimes wish it were me. But I’d rather have my daughter bask in her moment. It’s just that I clearly remember the feeling. You’re all bubbly and excited, and you can’t stop talking about it. My daughter’s graduating from preschool tomorrow, and my wife and I are as much into the rush as she is. 1st grade, here we come. *groan*

Will code for hosting

Honestly, I haven't done any coding in the last 4 months, which is really odd, because I never thought I'd be this detached from programming. But I guess there's more to life than just developing or sustaining passion for singulars. So much for trying not to stay generalist. So I have this personal domain now, and I'm just glad google apps isn't as stiff with the applications anymore. The new interface totally rocks too. I just need to host the domain somewhere, for sites and blogs and stuff. If you're family, and you have a blogger account, I can get you your custom domain working. The default blogspot.com publishing URL will redirect to your custom domain, so I guess you won't be losing any visitors. I'm not that sure about this, but I feel that there will be noticeable changes in how your blog fares with SE's. Some SEO stuff that I've picked up tell me you can't have same content in multiple sites, similar to double-posting. Seems like

Pinoy Big Brother 2

Forget the housemates! Mariel Rodriguez makes this reality TV show "watchable". Half past midnight since the new season launched and the server is already borked! Good thing I got to grab this pic of Mariel before it went down (it seems to be failing intermittently...but what can you expect from an M$ OS anyway?) Here's the error I see: Could not load file or assembly 'BizModules.UltraPhotoGallery' or one of its dependencies. There is not enough space on the disk. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070070) Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code. Exception Details: System.IO.FileLoadException: Could not load file or assembly 'BizModules.UltraPhotoGallery' or one of its dependencies. There is not enough space on the disk. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070070) Source Error: An unhandled excepti

IP-hijacking and then some

Almost a month of downtime. The servers were fine, but our IP addresses were not. Somehow, a system bug from one of the hosting companies caused our plan to include 14 other IP addresses, and we only maintained 6 as far as I am concerned. So the hosting company eventually understood what was happening and started asking the right questions. The bug is that the system allowed network administrators to assign to new clients, the IP addresses that have already been assigned to a current client. We spent crazy hours figuring out what happened. Since the domains were not loading our sites, and instead were redirecting to some domains we don’t own (real bad sites btw), we checked if .htaccess was modified and tested if it was working at all. I also did double checks on virtual host configurations and they all looked clean. I started thinking that it was a routing issue. We were not using the publicly routable IPs for the virtual hosts; instead, we used internal IPs as mapped to the firewall

Using symbolic links for MySQL data files

Over a year ago, we had several servers configured for high traffic websites. A mispartioning resulted in /var becoming obscenely small, and it was only after MySQL crashed that we remembered this. We couldn’t afford more downtime if we dealt with the partition size problem, so I thought of quickly moving the data files into /home/mysql/{dbname} from /var/lib/mysql/{dbname} and create the symlink /var/lib/mysql/{dbname} -> /home/mysql/{dbname}. I was not certain of the performance implications to this. I heard from a fellow Linux junkie here that there may be a slight penalties in terms of access speed, since /home was meant for generic read/write, whereas /var was accessed in a very quick manner. Gotta verify this. But for now, I dwell in the power of symbolic links.