Archive for January, 2013

So, this happened.

To solve the problem of lots of different scrums wanting to release at the same time, we recently introduced a “release token” – some item that you had to have in your possession to allow you to release – and if you didn’t have it, you couldn’t release anything, thereby preventing conflicts.

Enter Gregory, the Release Bear.

Unfortunately, it was soon felt that tracking down a bear every time you wanted to do a release was too tiresome. So, after only a few days in the job, Gregory was retired in favour of a digital token. Unlucky, Gregory.

Last Friday, we headed to Fazenda for lunch.

I’ve never had the lunch time menu before, though I knew to expect a very much cut down version of what they served in the evening. Overall, I thought it was quite disappointing though. Most of the options were not available on the lunch time – indeed, the only steak cut available seemed to be rump, although there might have been sirloin – but nothing beyond that. I was expecting the fancy stuff to be reserved for the evening session, but I was hoping there would at least be some good choice of standard steak cuts. Apparently not.

Normally, you can restart Apache using the restart command for the init.d script.

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

However, you may encounter the following error.

chris@server /root $ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
 * Stopping apache2 ...[ ok ]
 * Starting apache2 ...
 * start-stop-daemon: /usr/sbin/apache2 is already running 

This is due to a bug in the init.d script. You can resolve this with a one line change.

vim /etc/init.d/apache2

Change line 105 for the one below (they should look very similar).

while ( test -f "${PIDFILE}" && pgrep -P ${PID} apache2 >/dev/null ) \

Save it and run the restart command again to check it has worked.

chris@server /root $ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
 * Caching service dependencies ...                                                                              [ ok ]
 * Stopping apache2 ...                                                                                          [ ok ]
 * Starting apache2 ...

If you get an output like the above, you’ll know it’s worked.

Turns out, I’m the new Vice President of Education for White Rose Speakers.

White Rose is a Toastmasters group, that meets on the 2nd and 4th Wednesday of each month, at the Jury’s Inn Hotel in the city centre. If you’re interested in improving your communication and leadership skills – why not come down to our Open Meeting on Wednesday 27th February? Or indeed any of our meetings, as guests are always welcome!

Do you need a work queue system but think a message queuing system like Rabbit or Active MQ would simply be too complicated? Probably not, but imagine you did. Enter Beanstalkd. The super simple work queue daemon.

I went down to Leeds PHP for the first time in a while last week, where there was a talk about Beanstalkd. It’s effectively a FIFO queue – you can put a message in the end, and have another process take a message out of the start, the effect being that you can take some of the load off server intensive processes, and do them later when you’re not busy.

I had a play around with it in PHP, using the Pheanstalk and it really is a simple as that to work. You create a connection to your Beanstalkd server, and then just push and pull messages from the various queues, that you can create on the fly, like Mongo.

Last week, the San Francisco 49ers defeated the NFL’s number one rated team (statistically), the Atlanta Falcons, at their home stadium, the Georgia Dome, to win the NFC Championship title. There is a full report on A Brit Talks Football.

To be precise, it’s the sixth Championship title the 49ers have won, and the first since 1994 season, when they beat the Dallas Cowboys. But the quest continues – this books them a place in the Super Bowl, against the Baltimore Ravens. The 49ers are five for five on Super Bowl victories so far – will they keep their perfect record?

Last Friday, we went for dinner at Chaophraya.

However, to my horror, I found they had removed their Thai curry, in a Yorkshire Pudding, on a steak dish from the menu! This, of course, was the greatest food ever known to man, and as such I will be writing a strongly worded letter to the management, insisting the dish is reinstated. Anyone who wishes to sign the petition, get in touch.

Starting Apache on Gentoo, you may get warnings similar to the following.

chris@server ~/lime $ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 stop
Password: 
 * Stopping apache2 ...
WARNING: MaxClients (150) is not an integer multiple
 of ThreadsPerChild (35), lowering MaxClients to 140
 for a maximum of 4 child processes,
WARNING: MaxClients (25) must be at least as large
 as ThreadsPerChild (35). Automatically
 increasing MaxClients to 35.                                                                                    [ ok ]
chris@server ~/lime $ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 start
 * Starting apache2 ...
WARNING: MaxClients (150) is not an integer multiple
 of ThreadsPerChild (35), lowering MaxClients to 140
 for a maximum of 4 child processes,
WARNING: MaxClients (25) must be at least as large
 as ThreadsPerChild (35). Automatically
 increasing MaxClients to 35.

You can resolve these warnings by editing your mpm file and changing ThreadsPerChild so that MaxClients becomes a multiple of it. In this case, setting it to 25 should do the trick.

sudo vim /etc/apache2/modules.d/00_mpm.conf

Change the values and save the file. Now restart Apache and it should stop the warnings.

You could also change MaxClients, but this would only resolve the first warning, and not the second.