SwitchBL8’s gebazel

In under 24 hours, I had a server crash twice. On the console I could see something about MySQL running out of memory, but other than that, I could not do much with the system other than pressing the reset-button. For some reason, the WordPress table “wp_postmeta” was about 46 megabytes (about 550,000 records), and trying to do something with that table resulted in timeouts etc. I could see the table contained a lot of records with meta_key = “_utw_tags_” and meta_key = “_utw_tags_0”. UTW is Ultimate Tag Warrior, but that’s a plugin active when I write a post, not when visitors access my blog.
So I performed the following command:

delete FROM `wp_postmeta` where `meta_key`= "_utw_tags_" or `meta_key`="_utw_tags_0"

That deleted about 540,000 records, and now the weblog is very responsive again, and the server is a lot less busy. That’s a good thing, right?

Tuesday I was in the hospital for my final checkup. So I hoped. The neurosurgeon thinks my pain is not coming from another hernia but from a nerve. He thinks one of my nerves has been damaged, which basically means I will have to learn to live with this amount of pain every day. That sucks big time, since without painkillers I can’t even normally walk or sleep or do anything for that matter.

It can also be an inflamated nerve, since that can be tricky to heal and with some people it takes quite some time to be painfree again. Hopefully that’s what’s causing my pain. A couple of more weeks in pain is doable, I’m not sure about the “for the rest of my life” option.

Tomorrow I’ll be having an interview to get back to work. Finally, after almost a year. It’s nearby, it’s a job I can handle and they don’t mind if I can’t show up on occassion when I’m experiencing too much pain, so the conditions look promising. I’ll keep you posted.

Firefox 3 has been released and finally I can use the Del.icio.us buttons and more importantly the Google toolbar again. Why these people didn’t release a beta/RC-compatible version of their add-ons I can’t understand. Like they think nobody uses beta/RC versions?

I have a good camera (a Canon 350D) with a decent set of lenses and a good flashlight. When I go on vacation, I take it all with me. But I also do that when visiting a restaurant, or when doing some other trip or going to an event. It’s a heavy backpack to carry around, and most of the time, it is a pain in the ass. So I decided to buy a compact-camera on the side, and this afternoon I bought the Canon Powershot G9. It’s very sturdy (all metal body), it has all features an SLR has, it creates very good (IQ-wise) images. But a lot of compacts do that. I decided to buy the G9 mainly because it can use my Canon Speedlite, and because it uses the same batteries as the 350D.

Since I bought it, I already shot over a 100 pictures and some movies. The movie quality is very good, but if you really want to make movies, nothing compares to a real videocamera. The pictures are impressive, but it takes some getting used to the slower reaction time of the camera when pressing the shutterrelease. That’s the main reason I sold my first digital camera and bought a DSLR (my previous camera, a Fuji S2 Pro). But compacts have come a long way, and with this camera its not annoying, it’s just that I need to remember it’s not an SLR when using it, mainly because of the focussing speed. There is some time between point and shoot.

Also, I bought a 50mm (f/1.8) lens for the 350D. To weighten the backpack even further…