Copying forward posts from an old Drupal install in case they help and also to pad this blog a bit! Also copying the comment on this one since it’s probably better than my post:
Category: Tech
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TF300 becomes dogged slow with time
Apparently so does the 2012 Nexus 7.
Over time I’ve noticed that the TF300T tablet I have has become almost unusable. It just hangs and hangs. Looking into this it appears that with these newfangled devices you need to worry about how well the storage performs. I totally get that having gotten the Rasberry Pi. I bought the cheapest SD card so any disk access is dogged slow.
So it turns out that Android just freezes due to slow disk access on Asus tablets. Here are some benchmarks discussing that. Next time I buy a tablet or phone I’ll make sure and check how well the storage performs. Its been ages since that mattered but it does once again.
I was clued into this with this Ars article about Android 4.3 and its addition of TRIM support. iOS doesn’t need TRIM support (as far as I’ve found) as apparently the storage doesn’t suck. 3-5 years in and both the iPod touches (2nd and 4th gen) have no horid freezes like the 9 month old Android tablet.
So you do in a way get what you pay for and again Apple products may be again worth the premium (I say as I write on the perfectly functional 5 year old MacBook, about to watch movies on the 7 year old iMac both working perfectly fine still). I suppose considering how old the Apple products are I don’t know much about the newer ones…
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Raspberry Pi!
I gave into impulse and bought a Raspberry Pi finally. Not sure what I’ll do with it but it cost around $60 (with case and SD card) so why not give it a try?
I have it running Drupal right now. Works fine but a bit slow. I think the slowness is the SD 4 Class SD card serving as the database filesystem though… Use an external USB disk and I bet it’d be decent. Once the pages are in memory its plenty fast.
It’s so tiny:
Who needs a big computer? Me still. Here the Pi is on top of a small box of a computer:
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Django, Ubuntu, and Nginx
So I switched back to Ubuntu so that I could do me some bitmining. That’s all I’ll say about bitmining, going swimingly.
Switching to Ubuntu I had to move my Django site over. We’re recording all sorts of trivialities there. Normally this goes easily. There was no problem moving from Ubuntu to FreeBSD or between OS X and those. You just copy the project directory over, simple!
But I had switch to Nginx which was a change from using Apache. And I kept randomly getting ‘Template not found’ errors. It’d always work if I connect with the MacBook, but connect with any other computer and I’d get the ‘Template not found’ errors. If the MacBook was on it all worked ok on other computers though. Still I didn’t know the MacBook was the reason it was working yet…
So I’ve been trying to figure out these darn errors. I’d been using FastCGI and was going to blame it so decided to switch from it to uWSGI. I went from FastCGI to uWSGI as the Django server. I thought that finally fixed it but then the errors came back!!! I connected on another random computer and it didn’t work. Then I ssh’d into the Ubuntu server as my user and it worked again!
Solved!
You see Ubuntu can encrypt your home folder. I’ve always just had the Django files in my home folder. The deal was whenever I was on the MacBook since Terminal automatically opens it connected to the Ubuntu server as me and unencrypted my home folder. That’s what happened today too on the other random computer. Tricky. Most of the time Ubuntu unmounted my home folder, encrypted it, and caused the ‘Template not found’ errors since the files were indeed gone. So I moved the folder to somewhere other than my home folder. Many hours wasted on that one!
(Seems like WordPress is this easy as well)
Just so anyone else can feel better about needing to do it, it’s a piece of cake to move a Drupal site from one server to another. I’m very pleased with how easy it is to do that. All you have to do is:
- Save off the database
- Save off the drupal folder
- Move the database and drupal folder to the new server
- Load the database to the new database server
- Move the drupal folder to the proper location to be served
It worked amazingly well! Not a single hiccup.
A note from 2016 – I ended up using TTRSS and it works great!
Like many I recently found out that Google Reader is going away. So after a feeling of loss I set about finding a replacement. For some reason I couldn’t get Tiny Tiny Rich Site Summary to download onto FreeBSD. I think something must be amiss in the distribution files or whatnot.
No matter! It turns out Drupal has a just fine feed aggregator. Sure, it’s missing the ability to ‘star’ entries but I can do without that. So if you’ve lost Google Reader and have Drupal running your set anyhow. I’m just using the default feed aggregator and it seems fine for my needs.
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Cleanliness and allergies
So I don’t know how well known or believed this is but I believe it. The cleaner we get as a species the more allergies we have. There is likely some good to having eaten dirt as a child. Little Z doesn’t seem to have any allergies and she gets plenty of contact with the dirt stuffs out here.
Anyhow, here’s a book review at ars techinica about An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases.
Apparently the original aluminum iMac does not boot from Firewire. No Mac from before 2008 apparently boots from Firewire. They only boot from USB.
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Tricky php issue
So, after switching over to the new server all of the sudden everything was hanging every time a comment was entered. I couldn’t figure it out for quite some time. I looked at all the error logs to no avail. I noticed that it worked for one site but not the other. What was it????
It was this seemingly unrelated message about sending an email:
Feb 23 23:55:21 topbarbee sendmail[51753]: My unqualified host name (topbarbee) unknown; sleeping for retryFeb 23 23:56:21 topbarbee sendmail[51753]: unable to qualify my own domain name (topbarbee) — using short nameFeb 23 23:56:21 topbarbee sendmail[51753]: My unqualified host name (topbarbee) unknown; sleeping for retry
Not sure why it references sendmail since that’s off but whatever. Finally! Once I made the connection (a few hours later) a quick Google shows you need to update you /etc/hosts for both the internal and external IP address! I was missing the internal bit.
::1 localhost localhost.my.domain topbarbee themumsy127.0.0.1 localhost localhost.my.domain topbarbee themumsy
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Migrate from MySQL to MariaDB
MariaDB is the offshoot of MySQL created by the original creator of MySQL. The point being to maintain a non-Oracle, open-source version of ‘MySQL’ since Oracle has since aquired MySQL. I don’t know I care either way but supposedly MariaDB is faster than MySQL also so that’s why I did the switch.
The switch was a piece of cake. I moved from MySQL 5.1 to MariaDB 5.3 just by exporting the databases from MySQL, moving them to the new server, and loading them to MariaDB.
So for anyone afraid of making the switch you don’t at least have to worrying about the migration of data. So far MariaDB seems fine inasmuch as I don’t have any issues, it just works.