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.