Category: Metal (Technical)

My copy of Tectonic magazine arrived in the post today. Neil described it as a thing of beauty, and I was pleasantly surprised too (perhaps that shows our predisposition for Ubuntu, from which the cover art is taken?) Many of the articles are taken from the website, and so are old news, but there’s something… Continue reading Tectonic magazine

I’ve just heard (from a friend attempting to apply) that 20Twenty still aren’t accepting applications on anything but Internet Explorer. If they can spend gazillions on shiny new Microsoft licences surely they can afford the 10 minutes it would take a developer to fix their form. Looks like their backend tech is almost as bad… Continue reading 20Twenty still not supporting Open Standards

Finally someone has done what I never got around to doing. Tony Bourke, in a Newsforge article, does some reasonably extensive benchmarking of MySQL on various OS’s. Of course there’ll be the endless analysis of the various setups (read the comments for some IQ-lowering fun), but at a glance Linux 2.6 wins out, with FreeBSD… Continue reading MySQL: Linux versus FreeBSD (and others)

Nominations are now open for the first SA Blog awards. I don’t know much about the organisers, besides an anonymous email there’re no contact details on their site (breaking rule 1 of website transparency), but it’s a good initiative nevertheless. My main interest will be in finding some more active local blogs – the lists… Continue reading SA Blog awards

The details of the soon-to-be vacant IT Manager position are available on the IOL site. It’s a fun environment to work in, under-resourced and challenging, but loads of opportunity to make a mark and get involved in one of the most exciting online environments in the country. So, sales pitch over, start sending those applications… Continue reading IT Manager vacancy

Finally got around to cleaning the spam out my referer logs today. I’ve been impressed by how b2evolution handles spam comments, and how well-maintained the central blacklist is (you can probably count the spam comments I’ve had on one hand). Everyone else seems to be disabling anonymous comments, or disabling comments altogether, but so far… Continue reading Cleaning up spam referers in b2evolution

The move to layeredtech is finally complete, and was relatively painless. One thing IOL problems have taught me is to put downtime in perspective. The world doesn’t really end when there’s a glitch and 1000’s of people can’t read the news for a few minutes! So a few hours of the crowds being unable to… Continue reading Move to layerdtech

I haven’t had a look at the Mail & Guardian blogspot for a while, but from the looks of it traffic is on the up :). It’s Friday night after all, peak blogging time! When attempting to read a post: Warning: mysql_connect(): Too many connections in /var/www/htdocs/drupal1/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 31 Too many connections

As a followup to this post, about my debate with MySQL support, they got back to me saying yes, after all, MySQL processes on 32-bit machines can go beyond 2.5GB. Here’s their response: Hi! Yes, you are right. In HIGHMEM mode, a process can go theoretically to 3 Gb. If you have seen 3 Gb,… Continue reading How much memory can a 2.6 Linux kernel address, part 2

According to research by climateprediction.net, climate sensitivities due to increased greenhouse gases will vary between 2 and 11 degrees C, much greater than the range of 2-6 degrees C previously accepted. There’re still so many vested-interest claims going around claiming that global warming is still a theory, not proven, no need to change our behaviour… Continue reading Climate Change