Brian's Tech Blog

The startup I had been working for went under, so I have been busy finding a new job and settling in. Got a good gig now at a new place and things are going well.

I'm not doing as much Ruby any more, but I am doing lots of datawarehousing work. There is a new engine out for mysql called 'infobright'. It has proven to be very quick when doing the kinds of queries you do when analyzing web statistics. Easily 10x as fast as MyISAM tables.

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An odd error happened with the blog software today. Not sure what has caused it yet, but I have fixed it. The error was:

ERROR 1016 (HY000): Can't open file: 'evo_hitlog.MYI' (errno: 145)

Executing a 'repair table evo_hitlog' seemed to fix the problem.

I recently had some hard drive issues with this machine, so it is possible that the database files got corrupted. Everything seems to be moving along now, if anyone has ideas on what else may have caused this, please comment.

I needed to add briansblog.net to an existing qmail setup. It was actually pretty easy once I figured out how.

• Add the domain to the files /var/qmail/control/locals and /var/qmail/control/rcpthosts
• If you have a local user existing, just put an email address you want to forward to into a .qmail file in that users home directory
• To catch everything, put an email address in a file called .qmail-default in /var/qmail/alias

Thats all there is to it. Took me an hour to dig around huge howto's and FAQ's to find this one snippet of information.

When I set up this blog, I already had a webserver running serving another domain. It was rather crude httpd.conf setup as managing Apache is not my specialty.

I wanted this domain to work, and to work well. I enlisted the help of a coworker to guide me. What I wanted to do was to make sure that no matter what someone typed in, you ended up at briansblog.net

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I have never used a real blog software other than livejournal before. I was pointed to b2evolution by a friend, and so far I like it.

Downloading and installing was very simple. I already had MySql and Apache 2.2 installed on the machine. Installation was as easy as downloading the zip, unpack it into a directory, run install script. Done.

After installing it there was a myriad of options to change, a handful of skins installed, and a few example posts. I haven't yet mastered all the controls but as you can see I can at least do the basics.