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Blarchive

Drupal and transient MySQL errors

Posted by cafuego on Wednesday 27 May 2009. In categories &mysql  &drupal

A while ago Arjen Lentz blogged about transient MySQL errors that can occur when using a transactional storage engine, like say InnoDB.

Error: No error occurred.Since I'm a fan of the reliability and automated recovery that InnoDB provides, I use it for all the Drupals that I host.  However, on a very busy site, this may lead to deadlocks. These in turn lead to users seeing errors, which is something I'd like to avoid. Especially if the error could be prevented.

Epic Cadbury Fail

Posted by cafuego on Friday 15 May 2009. In categories &cadbury  &vegetable fat

As is our wont, from time to time we have a bit of a chocolate pig-out, with varying brands and types of chocolate.

The latest one was extremely unsatisfying. The hazelnut Cadbury just didn't feel or taste right, so we had a look at the ingredients list on the new packaging and found that the composition had been altered.

Old ingredients
Old ingredients list

Flashing an HP 2140 with free software

Posted by cafuego on Wednesday 13 May 2009. In categories &mini 2140  &netbook  &bios  &freedos

When I flashed the Mini 2140 yesterday I used a Windows laptop to create a bootable flash drive with the BIOS utility and update on it.

I didn't really need to use a non-free operating system, as HP provide a tiny bootable ISO image with FreeDOS, but using that means wasting a CD-R. It's not that those are expensive, but they do end up in landfill.

Instead, I'd like to be able to simply use a USB key. I found some help on the FreeDOS wiki and I thought I'd document the steps I followed on Ubuntu.

HP 2140 Linux Oops

Posted by cafuego on Friday 1 May 2009. In categories &mini 2140  &hewlett-packard  &netbook

Kattekrab has been lusting after a netbook for ages. Her old laptop, a G4 iBook, just isn't cutting the mustard anymore and Ubuntu even dropped PPC support some time ago. It runs Debian just fine, but even then because it's PPC there are issues with Java and there is no Flash or Acrobat*.

HP 2140Last weekend we decided to put our free** Rudd money into the economy and went shopping.

Ever since my Dell disintegrated in the early naughties I've had HP laptops and loved them.  During 2008 I used a small HP laptop that was donated for linux.conf.au (the 2009 team used and loved it last year). Thank you HP!