My MythTV store lives on an LVM volume that is spread over 2 disks, one of them is an external USB disk. So the cleaninglady seems to have touched a cable and after coming back from holiday I had a read-only filesystem that afer a remount had about 350Gb in lost+found with irrelevant filenames.

total 337407844
drwx------   2 tv   tv         4096 Dec 17 22:47 .
drwxrwxrwx  15 tv   tv         4096 Dec 17 22:44 ..
-rw-r--r--   1 root root  423343556 Dec 14 07:10 I303109.RCN
-rw-r--r--   1 root root 2990538924 Dec 13 19:05 I303107.RCN
-rw-r--r--   1 root root 1023691768 Dec 13 08:10 I319494.RCN
-rw-r--r--   1 root root 1023622348 Dec 13 07:45 I327684.RCN
-rw-r--r--   1 root root  423735892 Dec 13 07:10 I327682.RCN
-rw-r--r--   1 root root  466749476 Dec 12 15:43 I135169.RCN
-rw-r--r--   1 root root

One of the best ways to keep up with your field and network at the same time is to attend conferences. It’s one of the things I look forward to every year. After learning that O’Reilly has decided to commit blasphemy and *not* hold OSCON in Portland, Oregon the same week as the Oregon Brewers Festival, I was inspired to look around at what other conferences I might attend in 2009. Turns out, this is a huge pain in the ass, because I can’t find a single, central place that lists all of the conferences I’m likely to be interested in.

So… I created a public Google Calendar. It’s called “US Technical Conferences”. It needs more conferences, but I’ve listed the interesting ones I found. In order to keep the calendar from getting overwhelmingly crowded, I’ve decided that conferences on the list

Note that I’m talking about using these tools in some kind of professional way, and more specifically, I’m talking about using Excel as a database, and using VPS hosting to host “professional” web sites. By “professional”, I mean something other than your personal blog, picture gallery, or other relatively inconsequential site.

Excel is not a database

Here’s the thing: Excel isn’t a database. Most people who don’t work in IT don’t seem to understand this, and they’re deathly afraid to actually communicate with anyone in IT, so they take matters into their own hands, and create problems so big that IT is forced to get involved, because at some point this spreadsheet becomes “critical” to some business function. Then IT gets even more

I’ve been doing a little reporting project, and I’ve been searching around for quite some time for a good graphing and charting solution for general-purpose use. I had come across ReportLab before, but it just looked so huge and convoluted to me, given the simplicity of what I wanted at the time, that I moved on. This time was different.

This time I needed a lot of the capabilities of ReportLab. I needed to generate PDFs (this is not a web-based project), I needed to generate charts, and I wanted the reports I was generating to contain various types of text objects in addition to the charts and such.

I took the cliff-dive into the depths of the ReportLab documentation. I discovered three things:

So, I recently ran into one of those situations where a customer complains that his MySQL database is slow, and “it worked great until about two weeks ago”. The first thing I look at in these situations is not the queries or any code, but the indexes. Once I determined that the indexes were almost nonsensical, I had a look at the queries themselves, which proved that the indexes were, in fact, nonsensical. Running the queries as written in the code, from a mysql shell, with EXPLAIN, I was able to further confirm that the indexes (most of them, anyway) were never used.

Easy right? Just reindex the table!

NOTE: I’m going to skip the talk about all of the database design issues on this gig and just go straight to solving the immediate problem at hand. Just know that I had nothing to do with the design.

Large databases, long mysqldump times, long waits for globally locked tables. These problems basically never go away when you rely on mysqldump with –all-databases or a list of databases, as it dumps schemas serially. I’m not going to explain serial vs parallel processing here since that’s a larger topic. Suffice to say that in these days of multi-core / multi-cpu servers we only make use of one processor’s core when we serially export databases using mysqldump. So, I have a new script that attempts to alleviate those issues and now I need testers to provide feedback/improvements.

In order to keep some sanity when dealing with hundreds of database servers, the script takes care of the following:

First, AddThis.com (where I was the director of IT) and Clearspring have merged! A side effect of that is that I’m now (happily, on purpose, by choice) a full-time consultant! I’ll have a web site up soonish. Until then, check back here for updates. If you’re a tech firm who needs help, and don’t mind remote workers, send mail to bkjones at Google’s mail service (.com).

Some folks thought I’d passed away due to the uncharacteristic lull in posting frequency on this blog. I’m very much alive — but working for a startup and maintaining a consulting business simultaneously is hard, especially when two large projects fall into your lap at the same time. So what have I been up to?

Well, as

This is a basic heads up post, perhaps even blatant self marketing. So, please continue reading.

If anyone recalls the website http://mysql-dba.com they would know that it’s based on the planet.py codebase that is written in python. I originally wrote a simple php script that utilized the lastRSS.php class for parsing feeds on the backend for archival purposes to be used at a later date. I say archival and later date because the site itself did not utilize any of the relational data storage to run the site. The site’s python code and cache was updated by cron scripts every 15 minutes and new data was scp’d from my dev server to my webhost’s servers.  This process eventually was quite randomly run since my development server rack in the garage at home gets really hot during the summer months

Hi all,

The schedule for PyWorks has been posted! I’m really excited about three things:

1) there are some really cool talks that I’m looking forward to attending. There are a couple of sysadmin-related talks, AppEngine, TurboGears, Django, and an area I’ve been especially slow to move into: testing (I know, shame on me). There’s lots more so be sure to check it out.

2) the conference scheduling process is over

3) I get to meet a lot of people face-to-face that I’ve worked with in the past on Python Magazine developing articles, or interacted with on IRC, etc. One thing I like about conferences surrounding open source technologies is you get to thank people face-to-face for the

I got to actually speak to Brian Aker for maybe a total of 5 minutes after his micro-presentation about Drizzle, which took place at the Sun booth at OSCON 2008. I was a bit nervous to ask what questions I had out loud, because the things I had wondered about were things I really didn’t see too much discussion about out in the intarweb. I’m happy to report that, if Brian Aker is to be considered any kind of authority (hint: he is), my ideas are not completely ridiculous, so maybe I’ll start talking a bit more about them.

UPDATE: lest anyone get the wrong idea, Brian Aker did, in fact, state that views are not on the short list of priority items for Drizzle, but he did say that views are one of the features he finds most useful, and that they’d probably

Launching a Startup in 3 Hours was a great talk given by Andrew Hyde (of techstars.org) and Gavin Doughtie (of Google). Both of the speakers are heavily involved in the recent trend of doing “Startup Weekends”, and techstars.org is an organization that hosts startup weekends all around the US (and I think internationally as well - Andrew mentioned one in Germany if I heard correctly).

The first half of the talk was about the general concept of a startup weekend, the problems it avoids (”we’ve been working for 9 months and haven’t launched anything”), the problems it brings up (”If you’re not using Java, you’re an idiot, so count me out!!”), and lots of details about how to organize, how to assign roles, and some common tools they use (like Basecamp and whatever your IM of choice is). There was also

The evening plans didn’t wait for talks to be done. The IRC channel (#oscon on irc.freenode.net) was alive with talk of prospects for dinner and drinks after the conference. I myself was torn between a group going out for Lebanese and another going to Henry’s, but opted to go with my buddies from home to Henry’s.

It was worth it. If you haven’t been, Henry’s Tavern boasts 100 beers and hard ciders on tap (oddly, the beer list is the only menu *not* online - guess it changes too frequently). There are a ton of local beers that you can’t even get on the east coast just waiting for you to try, but there are also some rare treats, like the Belgian Lambic beers, which you don’t often see on tap. The food is a little pricey, but is really good, and the staff is very

I think I have pictures of most of the basic parts of the conference at my OSCON Flickr set, and I thoroughly enjoyed day 1 of the conference. Of course, while *day* 1 is over, *night* 1 has yet to even begin. There are lots of BoF sessions, and maybe even more smaller meetups going on, as smaller groups take to discussing things over dinner and a beer or three.

I have to say, that I occasionally pop into irc channels for conferences I’m not even at and follow up on that because I’m involved a bit in conference planning as part of my work with Python Magazine (I’m helping to organize the PyWorks conference in November). This conference seems to have a pretty happy audience, if IRC chatter is any indication (and it usually is). Sure, there are a couple of weak spots in the wireless

I got an early start. Too early. But I’m from the west coast, so my body thinks I slept in. I wandered around a bit, took a few pics which you can see at my Flickr OSCON set, and I discovered a couple of things that might be of interest:

• The starbucks in the conference center charges over $2 for a small cup of joe. There’s a starbucks right across the street (you can see it from the breakfast area - seriously, it’s 5 seconds away), and they charge less than $2 for a medium (grande). That’s less than I pay at home.
• The ATM outside the starbucks charges $3 for cash. I’ll report back when I find a cheaper one, but most places seem to take plastic here.
• Every computer involved in this conference, from registration to the

Having a Google account is sometimes useful in ways you hadn’t planned for. For example, at a few different employers I’ve been at, I’ve had to prepare for reviews by providing a list of accomplishments to my supervisor. One decent tool for generating this list is email, though it can take some time. Another useful tool is the Web History feature of your Google account.

Though this isn’t necessarily indicative of everything I’ve accomplished in the first half of 2008 per se, it’s definitely indicative of the types of things I’ve generally been into so far this year, and it’s interesting to look back. What does your Web History say?

• Gearman - this is used by some rather large web sites, notably Digg. It reminds me a little of having Torque and Maui, but geared toward

I’ve been working with what I used to call “utility computing” tools for about 6-9 months. However, for about the past 2 months, I’ve been seeing the term “cloud computing” all over the place, and there is so much buzz surrounding it that it’s reaching that magical point best described using Alan Greenspan’s words: “Irrational Exuberance”.

When Alan Greenspan used those words to describe the attitudes of investors toward the markets, what he was basically saying was that there were people who didn’t really know what they were doing, putting more money than they ought, into things they knew relatively little about. Further, he was saying that the decisions people were making with regards to where to put their money were a) bad, or at least b) not based on sound reasoning, or the ‘facts on the

If there’s one thing that bothers me about using a ready-made solution like wordpress for my blog, it’s plug-ins. I hate software plug-ins. The first question every support engineer for any software product that supports plugins asks in response to a trouble report is “are you using any plugins?” And when you say “yep, I’m using plugins!” the reply from support is to disable them immediately and see if the trouble goes away. That’s a problem.

What’s worse, if the plugins are maintained by a third party (often the case), there’s no telling whether or not they’ll exist when the next version of the base software is released, or whether they’ll be

I was writing a utility in Python (using boto) to test/play with Amazon’s SQS service. As boto isn’t particularly well documented where SQS specifically is concerned, I also plan to post some examples (either here or on Linuxlaboratory.org, or both). When I had some trouble getting a message that was sent to a queue, I went to the Amazon documentation, and found this little gem in the Amazon Web Services FAQ

I am sure that my queue has messages, but a call to ReceiveMessage returned none. What could be the problem?

Due to the distributed nature of the queue, a weighted random set of machines is sampled on a ReceiveMessage call. That means only the messages on the sampled machines are

UPDATE: if anyone knows of a non-broken syntax highlighting plugin for wordpress that supports bash or some other shell syntax, let me know :-/

Apache logs, database backups, etc., on busy web sites, can get large. If you rotate logs or perform backups regularly, they can get large and numerous, and as we all know, large * numerous = expensive, or rapidly filling disk partitions, or both.

Amazon’s S3 service, along with a simple downloadable suite of tools, and a shell script or two can ease your life considerably. Here’s one way to do it:

Once you have

Startups are pretty fascinating. I work for a startup, and one of my good friends works for another startup. I’ve also worked for 2 other startups, one during the first “bubble”, and another one a few years later. Oh my, how the world of web startups has changed in that time!

1999: You must have funding

The first startup I was ever involved in was a web startup. It was an online retailer. They were starting from nothing. My friend (a former coworker from an earlier job) had saved for years to get this idea off the ground. He was able to get a few servers, some PCs for the developers he hired, and he got the cheapest office space in all of NYC (but it still managed to be a really cool space, in a way that only NYC can pull off), and he hosted every single service required to run the web site in-house. If

Since the recovery from my recent outage, I’ve noticed that none of the normal feed sites where my posts normally show up caught the last post, so this is a test post to see what’s going on, if it was a temporary glitch, or what.

If you didn’t see the post linked above, please read it if you’re happy with your web host. I’m looking for a new one :-/

Ok, this blog is currently hosted by 1and1.com, and I think that needs to change, which is sad, because up until recently, I’ve been pretty happy with the performance. However, I recently had an issue, and some things came to light about my package that I wasn’t aware of.

First of all, the maximum time a process can run is about 6 seconds. Second of all, the maximum number of processes you can have running at once is 12. When I asked if this was a limitation of my *package*, the answer I got was that it was a limitation of all shared hosting accounts.

This blog started throwing 500 errors some time yesterday. I called support late last night and some lady said that she was running a tool that should fix my issue, and to call back in 30 minutes if the problem persists. Well, I’m sick as a dog, and it was late, so I went to bed. This morning, the problem was

Just recently I seem to have noticed an increased number of mysterious crashes and terminations of applications. This is generally on brand new systems that I’m setting up, or on existing systems where I’m setting up a new or duplicate account.

Initially everything is fine, but then all of a sudden as I start syncing over my files, shell profile and so on applications will stop working. I’ve experienced it in MySQL, and more recently when starting up Gnome on Solaris 10 9/07.

Sometimes the problem is obvious, other times it takes me a while to realize what is happening and causing the problem. But in all cases it’s the same problem - my TMPDIR environment variable points to a directory that doesn't exist. That's because for historical reasons (mostly related to HP-UX, bad permissions and global tmp