Archive for April, 2012

My friend Russ has long maintained the opinion that there is no problem in society that cannot be better understood by watching an appropriate episode of South Park. “There is a South Park for every part of life” he says.

It’s true. Whether you’re addicted to World of Warcraft, worried about the nanny state, campaigning for the decriminalisation of drugs or trying to understand the economy, there is a South Park to explain the issues and put things in perspective.

My friend Raby went one stage further to suggest that South Park could almost be seen as a modern day Bible – it is filled with parables about modern life, not directly telling us how to live right, but giving us a nudge in the right direction. Everything you need to know about life can be learned from the adventures of four boys in a snowy mountain town.

If you’re using MySQL’s MEMORY table storage engine for anything intensive, you may run into the following error.

Table is full

This means what it says – memory tables have a fixed size they are allowed to me, 16mb by default, and once they reach this size, MySQL will prevent you from inserting any more data, to prevent the table from using too much memory.

If you run into this error, you can either increase the size in MySQL’s configuration, or you can switch to a disk based table engine such as Archive or InnoDB.

Last week, the 2012 Grand National took place.

Two horses died – According To Pete and former favourite Synchronised were both put down after taking nasty falls during the race. Despite attempts to reduce the danger, such incidents aren’t a surprise. Indeed, it’s more of a surprise when we get through a Grand National without any horses losing their life.

Take a look at the list on Wikipedia. Two this year, two last year, a total of 11 over the past decade – and this is just from one race! Open it up to wider events and we see the same trend – this year’s Cheltenham Festival saw no less than five horses put down.

No wonder people are starting to question whether there is a future for horse racing.

As you may be aware, the 2012 IPL season recently started.

I haven’t got round to watching any of it this year, but if I was, one of the first tasks I would have to do is to pick a team to support (because obviously, it’s more exciting when you are supporting one side or the other).

The question is though, why would I pick anyone other than Chennai Super Kings? Having demolished their opposition in the final last year, and previously won the tournament in recent years before that, they’re clearly the best team. So it then becomes very difficult to justify supporting someone else.

It seems wrong to support a team just because they are the best team, but given I don’t have any geographic bias to work on as I would with English football clubs, how can it really be justified to pick anyone else given I obviously want to be supporting the winning team?

In February, I went to Paris.

However, despite having paid for reserved seating on my flight out there, we ended up getting moved to a different part of the plane to balance out the weight. It didn’t exactly fill me with confidence that a jet airliner could be so fragility held in the sky that someone sitting in the wrong place could bring it down, but I went with it.

That said, I was rather aggrieved that I had paid for reserved seating and not been given it. So, on my return I wrote a letter of complaint to Jet2 as they don’t seem to have email and I would need to take a personal loan out to fund phoning their premium rate customer service line. So I went old school and wrote a letter.

I’m pleased to say that a month later I have received a letter back from them saying that they will be refunding the money I paid for allocated seating, within the next two weeks.

Last week, Channel 4 broadcast a one off 30 minute comedy by Ricky Gervais entitled “Derek”.

I only heard about the controversy in passing before the show, with some people claiming that it was mocking people with learning difficulties. How you make that decision before you’ve even watched it I’m not sure quite sure, though I suppose you could base it, albeit badly, on the short trailers that Channel 4 had been broadcasting.

In the end, I didn’t find it offensive at all. Or funny really. Karl Pilkington had a few good lines in there but overall, it was reasonably humour free. It was however, incredibly moving. Well worth a watch.

We recently headed to the bowling alley to celebrate Fonze’s birthday.

It was a rather confusing start because the alley used to be owned by AMF Bowling, but it is now owned by 1st Bowl. However, AMF have now bought Hollywood Bowl, so if you search for AMF Leeds you get what was the Hollywood Bowl out at Cardigan Fields rather than the one you are looking for. Never the less, we sorted it in the end.

They have a pretty cool offer called Big Work Party, which is where you can take your office (as long as your office is at least six people) and bowl for £2.25 a game! Being a Yorkshireman, I decided to take all the saving I could get and booked three games. I then bowled the worst games I’ve ever played, but a steak as ‘Spoons afterwards made it all better.

That’s right, I have a photo of Elettra – with a drink!

Need to locate a specific file somewhere on your system? Luckily, there is an appropriated named search tool which you can use to do that. It’s called locate and it’s very similar to file search in Windows file manager.

Not all Linux installs come with locate, so you may need to install it.

yum install locate

Also, the first time you run it, it will need to build the database, so that will take a little longer. But once it is up and running, it is pretty fast. Simply use the command followed by a file name, or even just part of a file name, to get a list of all the files on your system that match.

locate httpd.conf

As some of you know, I write some of my blog posts in advance and publish them a few days or weeks later, depending on how many I’ve written recently. So sometimes I will write something and it won’t actually be published on my blog until a few days later.

This Saturday is the Grand National, the most valuable race in the racing calendar and one of the most prestigious after the Gold Cup. It’s also synonymous with real outsiders taking the crown. Whether this is a justified reputation or not I’m not entirely sure, but in 2009 it was won by Mon Mone – a 100 to 1 shot (which makes for a far more exciting headline than last year’s winner, Ballabriggs, 14 to 1 price).

Anyway, this year I’m tipping Neptune Collonges. Lets see how my prediction does in the race on Saturday – which totally coincidentally is about when this blog post would be published…