New Bed

Eventually, we have a new bed! After years of our old creeky bed where I had to place my feet over the footboard we have the ideal beast. We promised ourselves we would buy one as soon as we moved ... so it is only 10 months late! We brought it from Warren Evans and I took the day off so their men could deliver and build it. Marvellous.

Dreamhost

Well, I have finally taken the plunge and signed up to a virtual host. I have signed up with dreamhost, mainly because by using the code 9999 I got about $100 dollar off their yearly price ($120) which means that I get a years hosting for about £10 ... a bargain. After a year though I will probably give it up, hopefully to be replaced buy a server here at home. There seems to be a big disagreement whether dreamhost is any good with many people being anti, but quite a lot being pro (maybe because of the generous referal scheme). Anyway I have got a year to find out.

So I have now got a new domain (yoda230.net) even though I plan to still use brewer.me.uk as my core one, but I will redirect everytyhing to yoda230.net. I have got quite a few plans but we will see how far I get. The priority is to get a personal web site setup, which will be slightly more advanced than my old UCL one! More details as I get somewhere.

I have already started to mirror my mail as last week 1and1 completely cocked up my mail and their imap server was so slow it made me want to die. I tried to move over newspipe but the process continuously got killed so it must be using up too much of the CPU, tried "nicing" it without success. Lastly, I have got gallery up and running and I am slowly transferring all our pictures but this is taking its time, both my broadband and dreamhost seem to be slow today. The only issue I have come across apart from the speed is that I cannot delete images! Oh well onto the forums I go.

mysql copy database over an exisiting one

I face a common situation where I have a number of copies of a database that need to be synced to a master copy every so often. For example a live version, a demonstration version and a sandbox version. The easiest way seems to be the following:

mysqldump -uUsername -pPassword --add-drop-table db_name1 | mysql -uUsername -pPassword db_name2

This avoids having to delete and recreate the destination database. To copy it to another host add the "-h" option. If the destination database does not already exist run:

mysqladmin -uUsername -pPassword create db_name2

Unfortunately, there is still a lot of redundancy in this appoach as it wipes all the data and then replaces it even if there are only a few records different.

Amazing Amiga demo from 1992

Came across this blast from the past from 1992. It is simply amazing what you could produce on an 7.5 Mhz Motorola 68000 Amiga. I remember being blown away with it at the time. It even looks a bit like the iTunes commercials.

Back to work

Well back to work today (boo) and I must say that I was in a tired tired state. The weird thing is that I am not sure if I should have been there or not! There were some people there but firstly no-one was in my office and the rest of the site was very empty. Hmmmm that would be annoying if I was not meant to be there. That saying both IT and the post people were working.

I left my work machine in a state of disrepair before the holidays by destroying the boot loader via shifting partitions around! Instead of fixing it via Knoppix, which I initial tried but realised that 32bit would not work with my 64bit OS, I upgraded to opensuse 10.2. Took a fair amount of time, but I think it is up and running now, but I am sure I will manage to waste a fair amount of time on it in the next few days.

India

Alice and I have been in India for three weeks over the holiday period an I must say that three week holidays are definitely the way forward. We had a great time but it was not the most relaxing time (apart from the week at Av's wedding) due to "walking dollar" syndrome and the vast amount of people in India. India seems to be an interesting mix of rich Indians that are basically Westerners with everything we have, and then the vast majority of others who are scrapping for a living. Interesting country and extremely beautiful in parts (Hampi and Kerala were my favourites) but my advice would be to avoid the cities whenever possible (noisy, dirty and stressful). The worse bit was the harrassment that Alice got now and again but you just have to accept that some Indians have a misguided view of white women (I blame Hollywood!).

I would really like to go back to India to see Rajasthan but it has gone way down my list, just because I found the India experience so much more pressurised than my travels in South-East Asia (maybe its me getting old!). South America seems very tempting.

I have put up photos on picassa web album an my own gallery.

We arrived back On the morning of New Years eve in a completely knackered state, having only 2 hours sleep in the previous two nights (one night on a train and one in an airport/plane). As you can expect we didn't do anything to see in the new year, apart from having a really good sleep! Still knackered but getting back to a more human state.