Jeff Luszcz’s Web Log

I’ve been working with some theme design for Word Press and came across an difference between Safari and Firefox and IE. I had a bit of css code that looked like this:

#sidebar
{
padding: 20px 0 10px 0;
margin-right: 0px;
width: 160px;
border: medium solid black;
background-color: #FFFF99
}

In Safari the sidebar area rendered as I expected it to, with a yellowish background, in Firefox and IE, the background color didn’t appear. Notice the missing semicolon! Safari, it turns out, is more lax in letting that pass, Firefox and IE don’t render the background. Putting in the correct semicolon makes everything right in the world.

I think one of Linux’s blessings can also be a curse.

You can have a machine that doesn’t get rebooted for weeks if not months and when it needs to be rebooted (usually to get moved or have the hardware reconfigured) things that have been working suddenly stop.

I had this happen today and this story might help someone who finds themselves in the same boat.

I have a machine running Bugzilla on Fedora FC2. Bugzilla requires mysql, I have 3.23 installed. Everything was fine, Bugzilla has been churning away for months, until today. I had to shutdown the machine in order to move it.

Bugzilla soon started to complain it couldn’t get into the database. No problem I think as I go an attempt to restart mysqld, instead of the restart message I get:

“mysqld dead but subsys locked”.

I do all the magic I usually do if mysql gets hosed, but to no avail.

Checking the log file in

/var/log/mysqld.log

I see the following at the top:

050503 11:54:14 mysqld started
/usr/libexec/mysqld: unrecognized option `–ft_min_word_len=2′
/usr/libexec/mysqld Ver 3.23.54 for redhat-linux-gnu on i386
Copyright (C) 2000 MySQL AB, by Monty and others
This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software,
and you are welcome to modify and redistribute it under the GPL license
Starts the MySQL server

Usage: /usr/libexec/mysqld [OPTIONS]

It appears that somehow the `–ft_min_word_len=2′ option got added to my /etc/my.cnf file, and that option was preventing mysql from restarting. By removing that line everything was back to normal.

It appears that Bugzilla is the application that made this change to the /etc/my.cnf file

Looking at the bug reports at Bugzilla it doesn’t appear that there is any problem removing this configuration line.

I took the leap, a little earlier than I usually do, picked up Tiger on Friday night after going out with some people from work. I tried to install that night but both Tiger and Panther couldn’t fix a problem with my iBook’s hard drive. I read a good comment on http://www.macfixit.com about using Tiger’s new “Migration Assistent” to handle the exact problem I had.

Here’s what I ended up doing:

Bookup up my iBook with my enternal Firewire hard drive connected
Installed Tiger onto my external Firewire hard drive
Used the mgiration assistent to migrate my entire iBook hard drive over to the external FireWire drive
!!! Make sure you check the checkbox that migrates/copies your other files over as well!!!!
Tiger will install and reboot
Check that everything did in fact get moved over. You should make 2nd backup as well someplace

Reformatted my iBooks drive, checked it with Disk Utility to make sure it was okay

Installed Tiger on my iBook, and used the migration assistent to move my files back over to my iBook

Rebooted and all was well!!!! (knock knock)

I played around with Dashboard, Hula Girl widget was fun for a couple minutes, check out the preferences and play with Hula Homer.

I haven’t noticed and real speed ups or slowdowns on my old weakish iBook 600Mhz (384M ram).

Spotlight seems really cool and fast. I stalked myself on my own machine and the results come up almost instantly.

I had to update Fire, my chat client since it crashed on logging into MSN. I noticed a couple UI bugs w/ Quicktime 7.0 (I loaded a midi file last night and the progress bar didn’t draw correctly, until I zoomed and resized)