Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

It’s not often that I get kicked out of a restaurant.

But when you’re taking advantage of the early bird special and you then proceed to sit there for several hours, eventually they start moaning about having other bookings. You could blame me for turning up 7 minutes late, but I could tell from the waiter’s eyes that they were really saying “your mother is getting a little too lairy after that half a bottle of wine, sir.”

We were out celebrating my dad’s birthday and enjoyed a night of great conversation about how you won’t be around forever, so it’s important to spend your life’s savings before you die, while having picked the restaurant specifically because it represented a good compromise between great food and not having to pay Blackhouse prices.

I was very interested to try the pigeon available on the starters menu, but was somewhat worried I wouldn’t like it. Therefore, I did the only sensible thing to do – I made Elina get the pigeon and tried some of hers. Turns out, a pigeon is pretty delicious.

Of course, normally in these situations you would offer to pay, but having recently left my job, and having had our conversation earlier about making the most of your savings before your time is up, I thought it only fair to let me dad pick up the bill.

You can tell Sous le Nez is an authenticate French restaurant because they say everything in perfect English, but then add the word “monsieur” onto the end. So it’s a great to enjoy French food, particularly as if you actually go to France, you just get Greek food.

Awstats is updated by cPanel once per day, but if you want to force a manual update, you can do so with the following command.

/usr/bin/perl /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/bin/awstats.pl -config=example.com -update

Sometimes, you must have to be bold and say “screw it, I’m going to Wendy House in a really outrageous outfit, no matter how much people stare.

That’s when I went in my Panic! At the Disco t-shirt.

If you want to change your SSH port to something a little less obvious, it’s easy to do. It’s debatable how much security it actually gives you, but it will certainly make you feel safer, and that is probably the most important thing.

pico /etc/ssh/sshd_config

I’m using pico in this example, but vim will work just as well. You should find a line which is commented out, specifying that the port is 22. This doesn’t need to be uncommented normally, as it defaults to port 22.

#Port 22

Just uncomment this and put a new port number in.

Port 8473

Now save the file and exit. Finally, restart SSH for it to take affect.

/etc/rc.d/init.d/sshd restart

Don’t forget, next time you SSH in you will need to use the new port number!

ssh -p 8473 hostname

After I had finished explaining all this, he looked at me and said “that may be the case sir. But that’s still no excuse for doing 37 in a 30 zone.”

Worth a try, anyway.

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.

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.

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

There are quite a few different VNC clients available for Mac, and most of them are, in my experience, pretty disappointing. And totally unnecessary, because OS X actually comes with a build in VNC viewing client which works fine. For some reason though, Apple have kept it pretty well hidden.

Never fear though, because once you know the location, it’s easy to find and use.

/System/Library/CoreServices/Screen Sharing.app

It’s pretty simple, but then I’ve never found the need for all the extra crap a lot of the viewing clients come with – I just want to be able to control a remote computer!

From time to time, Firefox might try to update itself and get itself stuck an a loop where every time you try and open it, it tries to upgrade itself, fails, closes and then you have to try and open it again and the same thing happens.

95% of the time, this problem is caused by Logitech webcam software.

I don’t know why, I don’t know how, but the problem has hit my system several times and every time after some googling, the suggestion to try and close my Logitech camera software comes up and as soon as I do, Firefox is able to upgrade itself and open fine.