pink v.smile tv learning system for sale

My wife and I are selling one of Kysa's barely-used toys. It's one of Vtech's multi-awarded preschool consoles and one of the best educational toys around.

It's called the V.Smile TV Learning System (the ones they're selling now are new models), and it's in pink! It also comes with the Dora's Fix-it Adventure game cartridge.

We're selling it for only P4,000, after we've taken off 20% from the original retail price. It is practically brand new as it is barely used, and it's readily available for anyone here in the Philippines.

There will be no shipping charges if you're in Cebu or in Cagayan de Oro; meaning if you're somewhere else, we'll have it couriered to you and you just pay COD for shipping.

If you're interested, and would like to buy, please email me privately (jon at doblados dot net)

my must-have's for firefox

in not so significant order:

1. mm3-proxyswitch
2. regular expressions tester
3. del.icio.us
4. greasemonkey
4. better gmail
5. firegpg
6. downThemAll
7. save as image

you're looking good, opensource!

opensource gets another breakthrough today, as canonical launches launchpad personal package archive (PPA), an ubuntu linux developers service intended to extend collaboration in software development and give the community equal opportunity to build and package code for ubuntu on the desktop, server, and for mobile applications.

great news for those itching to modify packages and contribute to the furtherance of opensource! users can make changes on packages of their choice, and these will be published in the PPA system, somewhat like a special repository.

aptly, users get the updates from the system whenever new versions of the packages become available.

more agua

just how much water can your body take? doing a little experiment while i'm on treatment. one freakin' mug-full an hour. bloated.

on work and blogging

i haven't been updating for several important, albeit lousy reasons.

work has been keeping me up at nights and i feel that if i were to write entries, i wouldn't be making much sense.

technobabble is fun, but i've long outgrown this preference for writing. call it a maturing of sorts, and i'm now ready to take things (read: blogging) to higher levels

i've almost completely forgotten about deepest sender, a cool firefox extension for blogging, and it's great to be using it again

plesk won't start after tweaking mysql

i've had this happen to me again the other week and as always, felt like kicking myself for not remembering.

we do a lot of performance tuning on mysql, and as a result, we almost always manage to get plesk mangled. not its fault, it just can't run without mysql, doh.

not of preference, but plesk happens to be there to make handling domains easier, as a single editing point when you want to change something and not worry about missing something out.

so there's a custom /etc/my.cnf that we use, and with changes to limits done (both on mysql and via ulimit), you'd think that a reload of mysqld would do. (we use InnoDB btw)

normally, that's all you need to have mysqld read off the new settings. if you've grown so dependent on plesk (like i have), you would not notice that mysqld didn't actually start, and you will get an error when you load plesk, thinking that it's a plesk error:


ERROR: PleskMainDBException
MySQL query failed: Incorrect information in file: './psa/misc.frm'

0: /usr/local/psa/admin/plib/common_func.php3:218
db_query(string 'select param, val from misc')
1: /usr/local/psa/admin/plib/common_func.php3:497
get_param(string 'mysql41_compatible')
2: /usr/local/psa/admin/plib/common_func.php3:394
db_set_names()
3: /usr/local/psa/admin/plib/common_func.php3:373
db_connect_real(string 'localhost', string 'admin', string '********', string 'psa')
4: /usr/local/psa/admin/plib/common_func.php3:353
db_connect()
5: /usr/local/psa/admin/auto_prepend/auth.php3:82


even a restart of the plesk service will not work:


[root@jedi]# /etc/init.d/psa restart
Unable to query parameter by query select val from misc where param='mysql41_compatible': Incorrect information in file: './psa/misc.frm'
Unable to query parameter by query select val from misc where param='mysql41_compatible': Incorrect information in file: './psa/misc.frm'
Mysql error: Incorrect information in file: './psa/key_history.frm'
Processing config directory: /usr/local/psa/admin/conf/httpsd.*.include
Syntax OK
/usr/local/psa/admin/bin/httpsdctl restart: httpd restarted
ERROR 1033 (HY000) at line 1: Incorrect information in file: './psa/sessions.frm'


so this is a mysqld failing to start properly problem. to fix this, go to your mysql datadir and see if the sizes of your innodb log files match those in your .cnf. we usually set innodb_log_file_size = 256M and innodb_log_buffer_size = 256M in /etc/my.cnf.

if they don't match, stop mysqld, remove the ib_logfile0 and ib_logfile1 files, and start mysqld. be careful not to delete the ibdata1 or ibdata2 files or you lose your data. avoid using rm -r ib* (yea, wildcards and fast fingers give sysads their most stupefying moments)

innodb will recreate the log files to match your .cnf and mysqld now becomes available for plesk.

apt-get install kicker-kblogger

i don't know with you, but i sometimes get the big push to update, if and when there's something new (relatively, for me) to try.

up for this week is my dabbling with stuff around kicker, and using kblogger to do some much needed updates.

Pushing on

I recently got Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Beta running on my HP Pavilion dv2001tu notebook, and I'm very happy with the way it's running. Here's what I've done and have been doing the past month. Nothing out of the ordinary for me, but some of the activities mentioned here could have been keeping you up late at nights, coveting much of the understated successes of
running Ubuntu on HP laptops. If this is indeed so, do let me know your woes and I'll see what I can do to help.

1. Started a clan network. Okay, so most of them are really old and have no appreciation whatsoever for the internet, much less understand what emails are, and personalized email addresses at that. So I'll leave this up to the younger ones, who will help me teach the older ones the basics. They are yet to be informed of this new responsibility. LOL.

2. Upgraded desktop computer to Feisty Fawn Beta, and dual-booted Feisty and XP on my Pavilion dv2001tu lappy. So far, I have not had any hair-tearing frustrations with Feisty. Devices seem to work off-the-box, and the quick keys also seem to work fine (except of course for HP QuickPlay, which doesn't do anything). Touchpad, wireless, pcm+pcm2 with muting, and built-in mic all work. I've managed to get the built-in webcam to run with Ekiga (more details in a future post).

3. Started on my own list of what works and what doesn't for the HP Pavilion dv2001tu. Will try to make this as authoritative and as non-biased as possible. I love them Acer, Lenovo, and of course, Compaq notebooks too, but since I exclusively use my dv2000, I won't be able to vouch that the hacks I apply are going to work with the others.

4. Worked on more and more domains and hostings. I eat hostings for affiliate sites and stuff, day in and day out. I've optimized apache and mysql for several half-a-million traffic/day sites. Log analyzers are your best friends. I recommend Splunk for those who want to dig through files like search engines. But there's always the basic awk, grep, and myriad of other commands you can script together for the job.

5. Promised myself I'd start updating more often. 'Nuff said. =)

Shelving trigger.cdo.linux.org.ph

I am officially bringing down my old tech blog after Holy Week. It has virtually become a sinkhole for all kinds of spam links and I have barely done anything to keep it up-to-date.

Two of the milestones that I've unknowingly and unwittingly accomplished would include (in order, sorry):

1. PR6 (yea, before it went offline for almost a month, and before Google deployed new algorithms sometime in Feb)

2. 20,453 spam comments since I replaced my Wordpress.com API key sometime in Nov, 2006.

Beginning today, I will post techie stuff in this blog. It's the same ol' renamed-a-hundred-times Blogger account, but with a different twist, now that it's using a personalized domain.

Fear not, for my old Blogger URI will still work. I'm just not sure if you will be redirected or if there will be a rewrite. TODO: find out how Blogger does this.

The rush that's called graduation

I sometimes wish it were me. But I'd rather have my daughter bask in her moment. It's just that I clearly remember the feeling. You're all bubbly and excited, and you can't stop talking about it. My daughter's graduating from preschool tomorrow, and my wife and I are as much into the rush as she is.

1st grade, here we come. *groan*

Will code for hosting

Honestly, I haven't done any coding in the last 4 months, which is really odd, because I never thought I'd be this detached from programming. But I guess there's more to life than just developing or sustaining passion for singulars. So much for trying not to stay generalist.

So I have this personal domain now, and I'm just glad google apps isn't as stiff with the applications anymore. The new interface totally rocks too. I just need to host the domain somewhere, for sites and blogs and stuff.

If you're family, and you have a blogger account, I can get you your custom domain working. The default blogspot.com publishing URL will redirect to your custom domain, so I guess you won't be losing any visitors.

I'm not that sure about this, but I feel that there will be noticeable changes in how your blog fares with SE's. Some SEO stuff that I've picked up tell me you can't have same content in multiple sites, similar to double-posting. Seems like you can get penalized for that. Question is, will the application of this redirecting exercise on blog a (that has already been indexed) be seen as same content with blog b (which is where blog a will redirect to, if and only if you decide on a custom domain), from a search engine's view?

Anyway, I need a host. :) Ironically, I handle dozens of hosts; but I can't get anywhere close to those (all dedicated servers..boohoohoo) without first coughing up lots of cash. Yea I suppose I could just code for it.

Pinoy Big Brother 2

Forget the housemates! Mariel Rodriguez makes this reality TV show "watchable". Half past midnight since the new season launched and the server is already borked! Good thing I got to grab this pic of Mariel before it went down (it seems to be failing intermittently...but what can you expect from an M$ OS anyway?)

Here's the error I see:

Could not load file or assembly 'BizModules.UltraPhotoGallery' or one of its dependencies. There is not enough space on the disk. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070070)

Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.IO.FileLoadException: Could not load file or assembly 'BizModules.UltraPhotoGallery' or one of its dependencies. There is not enough space on the disk. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070070)

Source Error:

An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below.

An assembly load trace and a very long stack trace follows. To cap that is this:

Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:2.0.50727.42; ASP.NET Version:2.0.50727.210

Cheers!

IP-hijacking and then some

Almost a month of downtime. The servers were fine, but our IP addresses were not. Somehow, a system bug from one of the hosting companies caused our plan to include 14 other IP addresses, and we only maintained 6 as far as I am concerned.

So the hosting company eventually understood what was happening and started asking the right questions. The bug is that the system allowed network administrators to assign to new clients, the IP addresses that have already been assigned to a current client.

We spent crazy hours figuring out what happened. Since the domains were not loading our sites, and instead were redirecting to some domains we don’t own (real bad sites btw), we checked if .htaccess was modified and tested if it was working at all. I also did double checks on virtual host configurations and they all looked clean.

I started thinking that it was a routing issue. We were not using the publicly routable IPs for the virtual hosts; instead, we used internal IPs as mapped to the firewall hardware. A lookup on the domain/s that we were being redirected to reported different IP addresses, which didn’t readily confirm my suspicions, but stressed the possibility of IP-hijacking.

It’s not supposed to be taken in the context of BGP (border gateway protocol), as this is beyond me. Instead, think of your assumption over IP addresses that we’re using, to serve your websites. Sounds clear? I hope it does. I got pretty lost myself and it isn’t after deep digging at the hosting company’s end that their errors became apparent.

So in the light of this realization, I’ve already moved the domains to some other hosting. Way too much work and way uncool.

Using symbolic links for MySQL data files

Over a year ago, we had several servers configured for high traffic websites. A mispartioning resulted in /var becoming obscenely small, and it was only after MySQL crashed that we remembered this. We couldn’t afford more downtime if we dealt with the partition size problem, so I thought of quickly moving the data files into /home/mysql/{dbname} from /var/lib/mysql/{dbname} and create the symlink /var/lib/mysql/{dbname} -> /home/mysql/{dbname}.

I was not certain of the performance implications to this. I heard from a fellow Linux junkie here that there may be a slight penalties in terms of access speed, since /home was meant for generic read/write, whereas /var was accessed in a very quick manner. Gotta verify this. But for now, I dwell in the power of symbolic links.