Being DBAs and system engineers doesn’t make us immune to the needs of proper design and content display. That said, I was just looking at the Pythian site (http://www.pythian.com) and noticed that they have a new theme for their website. It’s quite a change in style and usability. The color choices, the clean lines, and the no-nonsense layout focuses on content instead of fluff and silly design items (like their previous music sheet logo and conflicting color pallet). So, congratulations to Pythian! I can now read their news and articles with the comfort of quality design surrounding their quality content.
Archive for October, 2009
Congrats to Pythian
Oct 31
Google has failed
Oct 31
Wow. Two days in a row now. I never thought I’d see the day when all of the following just plain don’t work. At first it was once every four page loads, the two, now nothing works at all. Tried from several computers at home and have also confirmed from several others on the internet. Some users have noticed that mobile devices work but not their usual computers. This is very odd. It also reminds me that I don’t like using Yahoo or other provider’s search engines.
Bust apps
- Gmail webmail
- Google search
- Google Adwords
- Gmail IMAP and POP services
- Basically anything else Google related
Failure of cloud services
Oct 30
This is a minor event in the larger scheme of things but frustrating none the less. I keep a spreadsheet of when monthly bills are due on Google Docs. Every pay period I grab that doc and make my payments all online through billpay or other websites. Today I have experienced for the first time the flaw that will never go away from cloud computing services / cloud applications: Google Docs is not accessable and will not load. I can pay my bills tomorrow or the next day so I’m sure it will load eventually but it begs the question of ‘just how much faith do we have in online apps’… if I didn’t have a copy of the document and a word processor installed on my physical computer and only had cloud based services I would be very angry right now.
So buyer / user beware as always – keep local backups and don’t trust that you will always have an internet connection around to get work done.
Some notes from my recent installation of MySQL 5.4.2-beta on a PPC G5 box running OSX 10.5.8. Hopefully these notes will save someone a bit of time when they begin the “I want to make my mac a development box” process. I’m not going to cover installing/configuring Apache and PHP since the web is full of those articles already. So, first things first, I downloaded the pkg file – not the tarball – from the MySQL downloads site and installed the following files in the following order:
- mysql-5.4.2-beta-osx10.5-powerpc-64bit.pkg
- MySQLStartupItem.pkg
- MySQL.prefPane
CNF File Settings
Here are some interesting settings that you may want to be aware of with 5.4 and OSX
- Do not set innodb_flush_method=fdatasync – it’s not a valid option, and the default after install is actually blank.
- Do not set “nice = value” in the [mysqld_safe] section as this is not recognized and give the error ‘nice: illegal option — -‘
- Set the variable lower_case_table_names=2 because the HFS+ file system is case insensitive – isn’t that special.
- The variable ‘log_slow_queries’ will work but you should use ‘slow_query_log’ or ‘slow_query_log_file’ instead since it’s getting removed in *gasp* MySQL 7.0 so we do have a bit of time before that becomes something to be concerned about but you will see it in the error log if you don’t correct it now.
Preference Pane service controller
In order to get the Preference Pane controller to work (if you are getting the following error in /var/log/system.log – “Could not setup Mach task special port 9: (os/kern) no access”) you need to correct the permissions for the installation directory as such
(root@g5)-(/usr/local)-
shell> chown -R _mysql:wheel /usr/local/mysql*
This will still generate the ‘(os/kern) no access‘ message in the system.log but the server will be started/stopped by the pane controller and that’s what we really care about. There may be some more notes along the way as I’m going to be testing 5.4 quite a bit for various application related matters.
