Christopher Spring

I recently noticed that the database backups of an app. that i maintain were the same size for a couple of days.

Now, all the backups are done from a MySQL slave database, so it didn’t take too long for me to work out that my slave had died; running “show slave status\G” yielded something like this:

    ....
    Slave_IO_Running: Yes
    Slave_SQL_Running: No
    ....
    Seconds_Behind_Master: NULL

The trick here ended up being the following short little routine (after ascertaining that the error was not that serious - check syslog etc).

While in the mysql prompt, issue the following

    STOP SLAVE;
    SET GLOBAL SQL_SLAVE_SKIP_COUNTER = 1;
    START SLAVE;
    SHOW SLAVE STATUS\G

And if everything went according to plan, running “show slave status\G” should now yield:

    ....
    Slave_IO_Running: Yes
    Slave_SQL_Running: Yes
    ....
    Seconds_Behind_Master: [a few seconds]

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Looks like a great Ruby app server package. I will definitely be giving it a swirl!

I was a little surprised recently when i priced buying a new 17” Macbook Pro from local South African Mac suppliers. I discovered that it was cheaper to buy a return ticket to NY and buy the machine there, than it currently is to buy it here in South Africa.

Here are the numbers for flying to New York:

• R8,909.00 -> Return flight from Johannesburg to JFK in New York
• R23,791.50 -> Apple.com price for 17” Macbook Pro: $2,799.00 x R8.50/$
• R32,700.50 -> Total

You can have a look at a screenshot of the flight details i “booked” with SAA here.

The numbers for a local purchase:

• R32,999.00 -> 17” Macbook Pro through digicape.co.za
• R32,999.00 -> 17” Macbook Pro through zastore.co.za

At the time of writing this post the Rand Dollar exchange rate as reported by XE.com was R8.16 per US Dollar, but you’ll notice that i modified that to R8.50 above for the calculations.

So, am i the only who feels that maybe, just maybe, the South African population is being royally ripped off?

Every couple of months I play around with shoes to try and solve some basic prototyping needs that arise at work.

This time round i stumbled onto a nice O’Reilly tutorial that shows you how to setup a basic merb web service and interact with it using shoes. Well worth checking out.

I ran into a bit of an issue trying to get BuddyPress setup on my Mac (Tiger, if you must know) - clicking on Blog, Members or Groups would yield a 404.

To fix the problem you need to add the following (in addition to what is explained in the various readme files) directive to your httpd.conf:

<Directory "/path/to/apache/root">
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride FileInfo Options
    Allow from all
</Directory>

If you don’t have that in, it looks as if apache ignores the htaccess file in your Wordpress MU root.

Check out this forum thread for more: http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic/1187