Category: Metal (Technical)

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

Busy having a debate with MySQL support about the memory limit for processes under Linux 2.6. We have a shiny new database with 6GB RAM, and the question is how useful is this with a 32-bit processor. As far as I know, processes on a 2.6 kernel can address 4GB. (there’s a reference on kerneltrap).… Continue reading How much memory can a 2.6 Linux kernel address

Jeremy Zawodny has picked up another brilliant innovation from Google – user-specified ads. Don’t like the Google ads you’re seeing? (for example the ad for premium elk meat next to my post about vegetarianism). Simple – change them! You can read more at Inside Google and see an example at Consumer Affairs. The best ad… Continue reading Google user-specified ads