lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

"You can see that our real problem is another thing entirely. The machines only do figuring for us in a few minutes that eventually we could do for our own selves. They’re our servants, tools. Not some sort of gods in a temple which we go and pray to. Not oracles who can see into the future for us. They don’t see into the future. They only make statistical predictions—not prophecies. There’s a big difference there, but Reinhart doesn’t understand it. Reinhart and his kind have made such things as the SRB machines into gods. But I have no gods. At least, not any I can see."

— The Variable Man, by Philip K. Dick

If you are not able to start the mysql daemon repeatedly using your linux distribution init scripts and you are ready to pull out your hair in frustration, here is a tip that might help you in finding the problem.

Try running the mysqld_safe from the command line (without using the init scripts). Try running /usr/bin/mysqld_safe -v, which should spit out some debugging information.

If that fails, try calling the mysqld daemon directly from the command line, with the "-v" option . mysqld is usually present under /usr/sbin/mysqld. mysqld can be called with --print-defaults to get the command line options it would be run with.

/usr/sbin/mysqld would have been started with the following arguments: --user=mysql --pid-file=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid ..... --max_binlog_size=100M

Try adding the -v option to these options to get more verbose details. When run from command line, mysqld will not detach from console and will print debugging info that might be useful in finding the cause of the error.

I suggest using 3 terminals to figure out what is going on

• one terminal with tail -f /var/log/mysql/mysqld.err
• one terminal with tail -f /var/log/messages
• one terminal where I ran the mysqld_safe / mysqld command

The init scripts are usually good for day to day work. However, sometimes the init scripts can impede a innodb crash recovery process on a large database. Some init scripts have timeout built into them and they can kill mysql while the innodb is still trying to recover its tables.

When George Lucas and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan decided to make the ancient Jedi at the heart of Luke's spiritual journey into a two-foot tall, pointy-eared alien, it wasn't clear how the character could actually be realized on screen using 1980 technology. At the time, animatronic technology wasn't thought to be advanced enough to pull off Yoda. .... they decided to try putting a trained monkey in a Yoda costume, including a full Yoda face mask. Rinzler showed a picture of the monkey on set, but he explained this idea was quickly abandoned when one of the people who worked on the primate scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey pointed out "Look, the monkey's just going to pull off the mask over and over again. It's never going to work."

In the picture, a monkey is outfitted with a cane and a mask and measured. The simian was also briefly considered for walking shots of Minch-Yoda that would have been impossible to execute with a puppet.

Pic taken from Vanity Fair

When doing an apt-get upgrade on my Debian (Lenny) box yesterday I received this message

Since release 150, udev requires that support for the CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED feature is disabled in the running kernel. Please upgrade your kernel before or while upgrading udev.

This was holding back the upgrade of all the packages. Looked around a bit and it seems that the solution for this problem is to let apt know that we do not want to upgrade the udev package. The way to do this is echo "udev hold"|dpkg --set-selections and then run apt-get upgrade

I wore a pair of torn jeans to office today. I was trying to look fashionable, but I later saw that I was wearing a torn jacket as well. I hope I did not project an image of someone-who-does-not-get-paid-enough.

I watched the pilot of the X-Files tonight. Memorable quote

What I find fantastic is any notion that there are answers beyond the realm of science. The answers are there. You just have to know where to look.

I am in love with the book Higher-Order Perl, especially the technique in the Chapter 2: Dispatch Tables.