dave.org.uk

Blog Fixed (Hopefully)

Regular readers will know that this blog has experienced some problems over the last few months. Since I last moved to new hardware this blog has been running really slowly and more often than not any attempt to publish content (whether a blog entry or a comment) has ended with a server error. This has made me less likely to write here and has made you far less likely to comment. Which is sad.

When the problem first arose I prodded at it a bit, but nothing I did made any difference. So I decided to ignore the problem in the hope that a Movable Type upgrade would fix it at some point in the future.

Over the last couple of weeks, that strategy has been causing me large amounts of grief. The problem is that any of the programs that publish content to this site are taking such a long time to complete that the connection times out. So what should take a few seconds is actually taking two or three minutes. Over the last few weeks the amount of comment spam I get has risen to new levels. And even though none of that spam ever gets published, each request runs the MT comment program. For about two or three minutes.

As a result, when I come under a comment spam attack (which is happening several times a day) I get dozens of copies of the comment program running simultaneously (because they aren't finishing quickly enough). The load on the server goes right up and all of the sites on this server stop responding. I've been having to reboot the server on an almost daily basis. Sorry if you've experienced problems with any of my sites being unresponsive.

On a separate front, I decided to move hardware (again). This was prompted by the fact that the people who I rent my colo box from have started to support Centos as well as Fedora (they have Ubuntu too, but I'm far happier in rpm-world). Centos is a far better distribution for servers than Fedora so I'm in the process of moving.

Last night I started to move my blog on the hope that the new hardware and new operating system might somehow fix the performance problems. As part of the process I needed to dump the database that runs the blog on the old server. Some way into the dump process, MySQL told me that it couldn't dump the mt_log table as it was corrupt. I logged in to the database server and ran "fix table mt_log". The dump then ran successfully.

Then it struck me. Any time you publish content on an MT site, you write to the mt_log table.  And the symptom I was seeing was that a process would complete all of its work and then hang. And presumably all of the logging goes on at the end of the process.

So, hopefully fixing the mt_log table has fixed the performance problems. I was able to successfully rebuild the whole site in thirty minutes last night. Previously it would have taken hours and had a good chance of failing somewhere along the line.

We're running on the new hardware and operating system too, Which, all in all, should mean that the performance problems are no more. I'll start blogging a bit more and hopefully you'll start commenting a bit more too.

And here's a good tip for fixing MT performance problems. Use the MySQL "check table" and "fix table" commands regularly. I'll certainly be looking to schedule an automatic job to do that.

Sorry for any inconvenience. Regular service has (hopefully) been restored.

Perl Mongers Contact Details

Yesterday I sent out 353 mail messages to the PM group leaders using the contact details in the PM master XML document.

Almost instantly, I got 58 bounce messages back. That's an error rate approaching 1 in 6. A sixth of the contact addresses that we are publishing on pm.org are invalid. What kind of an impression does that give to people trying to contact a PM group? And that's after I posted messages a fortnight ago (on use.perl and on Perl Monks) asking leaders to check their contact details.

Oh and I got one reply from a challenge-response system. There's a special circle of hell reserved for people who use challenge-response systems. Especially on email addresses that are published as contact addresses.

If there's anyone reading this who should have received a mail but didn't, can you please contact me at census[at]pm.org so we can fix the problem. You might also check your contact details at http://pm.org/groups/ and email any corrections to support[at]pm.org.

Now I remember why it's been three years since the last census. It takes that long for me to forget what a massive headache it all is :-)

p.s. Oh, but before I forget. A big thank you to the over one hundred group leaders who have already responded.

Perl Mongers Census 2008 is GO!

As promised a couple of weeks ago, I've sent a census email to all registered leaders of Perl Mongers groups. If you are the leader of a group and you haven't received the mail, then please contact me at census[at]pm.org.

Results should follow in a few weeks (dependent on how soon the group leaders respond).

Books I Read in April 2008

A lot of books this month. But you might think that there was a bit of cheating going on.

The Bible: The Biography - Karen Armstrong
This is a book I've wanted to read ever since I saw it published in hardback last year. Actually, it wasn't quite what I expected. I was expecting a lot more about the writing of the bible, but that was all covered in the first couple of chapters. Most of the book was about the history of the interpretation of the bible. It was all very interesting stuff. I recommend it.

The Children of Men - P.D. James
Something else that I had wanted to read for some time. In this case, my interest was piqued by seeing the film adaptation last year. This was one of the best films I saw last year so I really wanted to read the book. This is the first PD James book that I have read and I was very pleasantly surprised. The plot has major differences to the film, but it's a great story and well worth reading. I understand that it's not typical of James's work though so I'm not usre that I'll be rushing to read any more of her books.

Linux Networking Cookbook - Carla Schroder
Linux Server Hacks, Volume Two - William Hagen, Brian Jones
The first little bit of cheating. Neither of these books are really meant to be read from cover to cover, but I skimmed over them both over the course of a few days. Both of them do exactly what it says on the tin and if you're interested in Linux systems administration then you'll find one or both of these books to be useful.

The Fifth Child - Doris Lessing
This is this months book club book. I've read a couple of her books in the past and this has left me wanting to read more. I'll probably start by tracking down a copy of the sequel - Ben in the World .

Lyra's Oxford - Philip Pullman
More cheating here. This book is about twenty pages long. And the pages are tiny. I read it because I'm a big fan of the His Dark Materials books. But this is a pretty pointless extension to that series. I bit of a waste of time to be honest. But not much time.

A Spot of Bother (Mark Haddon)
Like pretty much everyone I know, I read and loved The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime a couple of years ago. That was always going to be a really difficult book to follow. This isn't in the same league at all. But that's not saying it's a bad book at all. Far from it. I thoroughly enjoyed it and would recommend it to anyone. It's just a shame that its predecessor gives everyone such high expectations which, realistically, were highly unlikely to be met.

Slam - Nick Hornby
A new Nick Hornby book is always a cause for celebration. This is apparently aimed at young adults, but you barely notice that. The protagonist is younger than you'll find in Hornby's others books, but other than that we're on familiar territory amongst the middle class of Islington. There were a couple of chapters that didn't really work for me. I can't go into too much detail without giving spoilers, so I'll just say that Hornby doesn't seem particularly comfortable writing supernatural events.

Update: Removed one book which I realised I'd read in May, not April.

Blogging Nonsense

One of the joys of MPs having blogs is that you often get to see what they are really like without their utterances going through the filter of the party spin machine. And it's amazing how often so many of them make complete fools of themselves.

Today's example is Nadine Dorries. Of course as a Tory she's very happy about the results of yesterday's council elections. I can't really blame her for that. But does she channel that happiness into a well-researched and interesting article about why people voted the way they did? Did she write something about how the Tory party can build on this success in order to maximise their chances in the next general election?

I think you can guess the answer to those questions.

No, she wrote some childish nonsense[1] comparing Gordon Brown to Andy Pandy.

Oh dear boys and girls, Gordon's not looking very well today.

Lets put him back in the desk shall we and see if he can face coming out tomorrow.

There's obviously a very good reason why she isn't making large sums of money as a comedy writer.

Voters of Mid Bedfordshire, is this really what you want from your MP? She is making you a laughing stock. Please use your vote more wisely next time.

[1] It's possible that this link might not go to exactly where it needs to. Dorries "blog" (it's not really a blog at all) has a ridiculous URL scheme which means it's impossible to link directly to individual items.