Boing Boing: Richard Dawkins on the God Delusion

Boing Boing: Richard Dawkins on the God Delusion

All religion is bad. Imagine a world without religion (hmm where have I heard that line before?). Think of all problems at the moment, would they still exist? Would Israel and Lebanon be in such a pickle? Would Bush want to impose his own brand of neochristian democracy on Iraq et al? I think not.

I must get this book. I’ve read the Selfish Gene and Weaving the Rainbow. Both excellent books, and very much thinking along my thoughts. Although obviously much more nicely written than the jumble in my head.

wireless intrusion!

Damm, somebody has been stealing my internet connection for the last few days!!! Imagine! Huh! 🙂
Really I found somebody had hacked and connected to my wireless router. They’d obviously sniffed for my wep key. I shoudl get linux to work with WPA, but I’ve never made the effort. I guess I should so now!!
For the moment I’m restricting on MAC addresses, but I guess this will not last long.

I should also have recorded the MAC address that was connected. But lazily I did not!

un-iTunes I am listening too!

Dreams – redone by Deep Dish featuring Stevie Nicks. Cracking track. I even really like the original Fleetwood Mac one… Eeek!!!

I’m also getting into the solo album by James Dean Bradfield. I forget the name, but it’s a dammed fine old fashioned rock album. Good tunes, great lyrics, and at only 45 mins, is a refreshing change.

Repairing MythTV tables

MySQL 5.0 Reference Manual :: 5.10.4.3 How to Repair Tables

I’ve just been trying to backup my MythTV tables. Previously I’ve used PHPMyAdmin. However, I thought I would try command line and automate it.

mysqldump -u root -p mythconverg > mythconverg-`date +%F`.sql
However, I constantly got a error message
Can't open file: (errno: 145) when using LOCK TABLES mythtv

So i discovered I needed to repair the tables. The above docuimentation is pretty easy but basically.

cd /var/lib/mysql.mythconverg
myisamchk -e *.MYI

Then run the following command on each table that shows errors:
myisamchk -r -q program.MYI

Easy peaasy lemon squeezy!

Raid 5 to 6 conversion possible?

A recent post on Raj’s blog made me think about giving RAID6 a play. This then makes me wonder whether a RAID 5 to 6 conversion is possible? I guess this is completely impossible without a complete reformatting. But there again growing a RAID 5 array is also a similar experience, and this is now possible. I would suggest that both require adjustment of stripes. or am I really talking out of my behind?

I recently used mdadm’s new grow function to increase my 3 drive RAID5 array to 4 drives. This worked perfectly. I trust my backups, so am quite happy to risk its integrity to convert to RAID6. Hmmmm!