Kieran

November 19, 2012 Petrol-head, Rant

Ferrari are still cheats

Yes, this is another controversial post, so what, it’s a controversial issue.

Formula 1 has engineered itself criticism again, through the same rules that got the sport into hot water years ago, and even more worrying – by the same team, Ferrari.

I fully agree that it’s a team sport, and one driver should be able to help out the other driver, but, and this to my mind is crucial, it should be that driver’s choice, not the team’s enforcement.

However, once one driver doesn’t have a realistic expectation to win the title, then, I think it is a reasonable expectation from the team that the driver should “move over” during the course of a race, and again, crucially, if, and *only* if that driver’s team-mate is immediately behind them on the track – but *not* by the team deliberately sabotaging the drivers car in the case of what Ferrari did to Massa’s car at the US GP.

What they did, was to deliberately break the seal on the gearbox of Massa’s car, so that they would deliberately get a penalty, of 5 grid positions for Massa, thus both dropping Massa behind Alonso, but also pushing Alonso to the “clean” side of the grid.

That is deciding the outcome of a race outside the scope of actual racing miles.

A race has got to be defined as multiple cars and drivers doing their best with their talents and machinery, to beat the next man out there, the desire to battle it out against all others, and come out on top.

This fight is why I like Hamilton’s style, he is that fighter, like Schumacher, Senna, and Mansell were. (and, to my eyes, a little unlike Prost, Button, Hill, good but too “professor-ish” only doing *just* enough)

Did it work ? Well, it appears that way, Alonso got a good start, and ended up on the podium.

Did it influence the outcome of the championship, definitely, it has pushed the championship to the last race, Bernie and the FIA have got to be delighted about that, which is one reason I think that no sanctions will be metered out to Ferrari.

Ferrari says, through Domenicali, that the deliberate tampering of the seal on Massa’s car was done within the rules, ok, maybe I grant them that, at least to the letter of the rules, however, he also says it was done within the boundaries of the “spirit of the rules”

That, I very much disagree with.

The spirit of any rules in *any* sport is to ensure a fair, consistent level playing field amongst all competitors, this artificial tampering, alters those rules, it changes the playing field, it creates a nasty taste in the mouth.

All the drivers that busted a gut in qualifying, i.e. all of them, ended up the session knowing where they were, and by all judges in the crowd, you know, the important ones, the ones that *PAID* to see the quail session, they had witnessed a proper shoot-out, people ended up in grid slots that were appropriate to the level of skill, both from car, and driver.

To alter that when *NO* technical rules were broken, is quite frankly appalling.

The grid place penalty is there for one reason, to penalise the driver/team of the car that has *unfairly* gained an advantage through either poor driving, or infringement of the technical rules that ensure the level playing field, such as ensuring the same level of reliability by restrictions on number of gearboxes etc.

Now, if Massa’s gearbox had really broken, then ok, not a problem, but it hadn’t.

I also not sure about the status of things such that if an engineer saw that a gearbox was *going* to fail at some point during the race, should the team be allowed to change it and incur a penalty?

No, I think they should be forced to race, and take the consequences, i.e. a retirement, that is a *MUCH* bigger penalty for mechanical failure than a 5 place grid drop in my (very humble) opinion.

Anyway, back to the “problem” with Massa and his deliberately tampered with gearbox seal.

Well, the 5 place drop made 5 other cars change their positions on the grid.

OK, some could argue that someone who was in 5th, now got promoted to 4th, but, it’s not that easy.

At all circuits, there is a “beneficial” side of the circuit as that is the side of the circuit that the racing line is on, and this means there is more rubber laid down, on this piece of tarmac, which means there is more grip.

In Austin, the track is new, so there is a massive difference in the two sides of the track, so those that qualified in the odd side of the track, and thus behind pole, are on the grippier, or better side of the track.

So, the demotion of Massa, meant a group of drivers got penalised by being put onto the less grippy side of the track – HOWEVER – in Alonso’s case, this meant that he went from the less perfect side, to the better side – all for the team.

Bottom line – Ferrari artificially altered the grid, thus Alonso’s chances in the race at the *detriment* to a number of other drivers on the grid, and *not* because of a technical infringement or technical failure, but by a cynical manipulation of the rules, in complete contrast to the spirit of the said rules.

Martin Whitmarsh, the Mclaren team boss, is a little on the fence.

Reading between his lines here, I get the distinct impression that he doesn’t approve, and also from the same article, I get the impression other teams feel a little uncomfortable.

I can understand why, I feel uncomfortable as a spectator (albeit armchair one)

From where I sit, could I say, that in my humble opinion that Ferrari have brought the crown in the motorsport world into disrepute again ?

Yes – I do, that is what I would charge Ferrari with, bringing the sport into disrepute, but I will bet that no action is taken at the FIA, as it made the last race of the season the title decider, and that will pull in the crowds in Brazil, and on the TV…. and make Bernie a fair few more dollars.

November 18, 2012 Rant

Appliance Insurance.

We all have white goods in our kitchens, be it fridge, freezer, cooker/oven, washing machine, maybe even a tumble dryer and dishwasher, as well as things like boilers elsewhere in the house.

All have electronics and moving parts, so at some point, something is going to break on them.

One’s gas boiler should be regularly serviced every year for safety, I’m not allowed to do that servicing by law, only a registered Gas Safe engineer can do that, and that is to protect people form blowing themselves (or others) up, or messing with oxygen flow and suffocating either themselves, or others – so as I’ve said, fine, I’m happy with that.

For a monthly fee, £25 in this case, we can call upon the services of British Gas to come out to so the annual servicing, and fixing for free, along with fixing any failures with the heating/hot water system that the boiler is attached to, great

What isn’t so great is that these cowboys try to repeatedly bludgeon you into taking out their entire “white goods” insurance scam policy for at least £60 a month.

Woah, hold on there, I’ve said something controversial, I’ve called it an insurance scam.

It is, and I will explain why.

I’ve lived at the same address for 12 years, all with new appliances from day 1, fridge-freezer, cooker, oven, boiler and washing machine.

In that time, the washing machine has played up twice, the heating/hot water once, the boiler once, and the fridge freezer died.

So, lets look at the costs shall we.

Cost for the repair of the washing machine, £70+£50, boiler = nothing, hot water = nothing, (they cost nothing due to having the insurance of the regular boiler being serviced annually for £25 a month) fridge freezer replacement, £650 (but, note I got a Neff, so not cheap, in fact, one of the best built-in fridge-freezers money could buy, as well as one of the most expensive – it’s lovely).

So, in total, £720, but could have been as little as £550.

Now, the boiler and hot water would have cost about £300 all in to fix., so say £1100.

That’s £1100 in twelve years, or £100 per year.

With British Gas’s HomeServe scam at £60 per *MONTH* that would have been 60*12*12 = £1728.

I’ve just looked at a well-known electrical retailer’s site (no, not Comet as they are now in administration!!!) and here, let’s tot up the costs.

Assuming I didn’t buy the best new fridge-freezer I could have laid my hands on, this little lot could have set me back, 329, washing machine, 270, new gas hob, 230, new oven, 220 – thats £1049.

That’s £700 *CHEAPER* than paying British Gas for the insurance of the items over that same period, and that’s assuming that all the things break – but in actuality, what has broken that needed full on replacement ?

Only the fridge freezer, which I could have replaced for £329, leaving me around £1400 out of pocket had I taken up British Gas’ “generous” offer of appliance insurance.

Let’s take a second here, I would have had installation issues, as I would need someone else to install the gas hob, but, seriously, when does a stainless steel gas hob ever break ? Near as dammit, never.

Ovens, yeah, they fail, but, the cost of a new one and installation, not going to cut drastically into my £1400 saving of not paying an insurance to British Gas.

So, even *IF* my devices all broke, I’d still be less out of pocket by simply replacing them than I would be if I were paying BritshGas to “maintain” them.

In fact, in my case, they’d have to all fail twice, and require complete replacements before I would be noticeably out pocket by *not* having British Gas’ insurance policy.

Coming down to the financial bottom line, as everything does these days, it costs *MORE* to have these insurance services for your home appliance than it does to replace the bloody things when, and importantly *IF* they fail.

Services such as the British Gas HomeServe are not uncommon, there’s insurance for your Sky Box failing, one for your water pipes to be replaced – I could go on and on.

Bottom line here, as one expects, the insurance companies are ripping us all off – and we as the general public are stupid enough to cough up.

It’s no bloody wonder we as a country don’t have enough money to buy things to get the economy going – we are all paying the banks/insurers for another gamble that is unlikely to pay off.

November 10, 2012 *Nix, Geek-tech

Flush, flush – and flush again.

I am not talking toilets here – although for a short while, I wish I was – it would have been less frustrating.

I work and play in a LAMP environment, for example, this blog and site lives on a LAMP stack, and have recently needed to look at tweaking some performance handles.

A number of things have made me properly swear this week.

memchached, APC, and suexec primarily, along with the caches that exist in the software “running” the sites – like WordPress and Drupal.

Caches are so vitally important for anything in computing, as the direct path for repetitive data from storage to consumption, either via a computer or ultimately a human is simply, even in this era of super fast computing, just too damn slow.

We have files from disk cached in physical RAM done by the Linux kernel to increase the performance by dropping the latency at which frequently accessed files are actually read off the disk.

We have caching on the storage controllers for much the same reason – disk storage is slow ( SSD isn’t that common – and is still relatively slow when comparing access times of CPU cache )

We have caching of snippets of “compiled” code with APC (or similar) because it is computationally more expensive, which means time expensive, to recompile the code for an interpreter (PHP) than it is to store that compiled code in memory.

We use caches of commonly requested SQL queries because requesting the data from the actual database every time is expensive time wise – this is memcached.

We have the application itself (WordPress/Drupal) caching pages, or most if the pages and some calls it makes to save time when that is required.

All of these caches improve the user experience, even if that user is a computer doing automated queries.
We’ve come a long way.

The downside comes when data in one of these caches can trample over the data in another one of these caches, not from a memory perspective, because the areas of memory that each if these caches uses is very definitely separate (if it wasn’t – then there’d be huge opportunity for data trampling and associated corruption) – but from a a re-use perspective.

A page has been requested by a user, the application has done it’s caching, and thus could serve that page again without having to re-execute some parts (or all) of the request.
Great …..

Until we, the systems engineer wants to tweak more performance by adding another level of caching.

And due to the nature if the beast – the application’s cached results try to get executed at the next level in the chain – and end up having problems with, for example “Cannot redeclare class insert MySQL”

Enter the world of hair-pulling and head-table banging.

Enable APC, from the php/apache configuration perspective, first page off the site works, second, the infamous PHP white screen of death, and a nasty message in the apache log.

All worked perfectly on a test environment, but the only difference in the test environments is that there was one application installed on the server, not two or more.

Different site, same server, works properly.
Eh ? go figure!

Now, this other site, was the one that I had configured with APC/memcached first, so were were talking cached prefix keys trampling over each other ?

This thought ends in this from a google search.

Bottom line, yes, the APC module configuration from the first site could easily have been stamping all over the requests from the second (and third) sites.

So – configure the

$conf['cache_prefix']

as appropriate on both sites, and restart apache to clear the APC cache.

The problem was still apparent !!!!!!

Stop/start apache to clear APC cache, first page, fine, second page, no matter what that page, CRASH.

Bugger.
Now what.

Damn – disable it all, and put to the side for the day.
Next day, start from a clean slate.

And that term, clean slate was what got it for me.

Clean, totally, clear everything.
There is a reason there are a lot of instructions in Drupal for “drush cc all” when deploying new code or functionality, or modules etc, it clears all of Drupal’s internal cache, and starts everthing afresh.

So, clear all caches, Drupal, wordpress, restart memcached, restart apache, – then try accessing the website(s).

All perfect!!

Multiple pages, one ofter another work perfectly now.

We also get some interesting statistics with the use of APC, out of the 512MB we assigned, we are using about 380MB of it at the moment, but, by God the sites are faster.

Therefore, the words of wisdom for today – like you do after visiting the toilet – pull that chain, and flush all caches in a system every time you flush one. Flush ’em all.

October 3, 2012 Petrol-head

Lewis and McLaren

When Eddie Jordan first disclosed that Lewis was transferring to Mercedes, I tweeted that it was a mistake.

I still think that it is.

Schumacher might have been once great, but Mercedes haven’t supplied him with a fast, reliable car, or a reliably fast car (both!!)

I don’t think that will change with Lewis in that hot, recently vacated, seat.

What I don’t like also, is the manner in which this has been done.

Poor Schumacher, whilst I couldn’t stand him in his first incarnation as an F1 driver, I actually like the guy now, but he should have been left to properly announce his future *first*.

It would have been the proper thing to do in my opinion.

Then, and only then, should Lewis been offered the drive, at least publicly.

As to the mistake – the glory is in winning the championship – not the money.
Money may be nice at the end of the day, but, unless Lewis is really stupid, he could retire today and live a very comfortable life for the rest of his long years.

Thing is, like all great racing drivers, Lewis is a proper racer – the championship is the *only* thing that should matter, that is what makes you into a lasting “name”.

Lets look at it this way.

I would name, Fangio, Stewart, Lauda, Piquet, Prost, Senna and Schumacher as names of F1 drivers that have a *massive* legacy – why ?

Ask yourself – how many times they won the championship…

All of them, 3 or more times.

Clark, he won it twice, and he’s British, so he normally gets recognition, fine.

I’d list Damon Hill and Nigel Mansell, but they only won it once each, and Mansell went on to win the Indy CART championship the following year, and again, they are British, so get a little bit of a nod.

But – in comparison to the others that have won 3 or more… no, sorry, great as they are, they are not quite in the same league.

I mean, I forget Villeneuve (both of them), Rosberg (Keke), Rindt and a few others that only one it the once (Hulme ????)

That championship winning is what gives you a legacy, Vettel and unfortunately Alonso are only one more championship win away from making that grade, Lewis could be, but only with McLaren IMHO.

Mercedes, and the Brawn team before them, I think got very lucky with the year that Jenson won the championship, and no, I won’t take away the fact that Jenson is a good driver, he is just a Prost – a little too clinical, “Professor-like”, in the same manner as Prost, but, Lewis, the guts to put the car where it needs to go, that, I personally like.

After Jenson’s run of wins the year he won the championship, he didn’t do that great, the other teams had caught up on the technological advantage that Brawn had at the beginning of that year.

Can Mercedes do that again ?

With Brawn at the helm, possibly in 2014, with the proposed new rule changes for engines, however – not next year IMHO, and that is another year I don’t see Lewis winning the championship now.

I hope I am wrong, but, I fear he has made a mistake.

September 27, 2012 Photography

Elan Valley, the return to be.

I *still* blame my good friend, it’s all her fault…. 🙂

I am so enamored with the place that I want to go back, and spend the time taking some of the shots I missed. (principally due to light being wrong – i.e. the sun in the wrong place in the sky)

Having thought about it quite hard, I think I have decided that I am going to ride the route, yes, ride, by bike, and not the Harley I don’t have, but pedal power, human (sorta – it is me we are talking about here) driven.

I’ve already plotted the route, all 33.7 miles of it, here.

Scary thing is, as you can see from the link, that I am likely to burn through 5500 calories, and that is just with my weight.
It doesn’t take into account the weight I will be carrying camera wise – or even food and water.

Camera-wise, my 7D coupled with the 24-70mm f/2.8 lens on it’s own is 2.5kgs.

I may even take my EOS 1v, and potentially with a 24-105mm f/4 on it – which is another 2.5kgs.

I am also going to need around 750-1000ml of water per hour if it’s a nice sunny day.

Each litre of water weighs a kilo, so, depending on how long this is going to take me, remember I’m not going to be doing this as a single non-stop ride, I’m gonna need a lot of water.

Lets put this into context – 33.7 miles, it would theoretically take me no more than 2 hours to do if I’m riding my racing bike at my normal decent clip (about 90 minutes should do) – thing is though, I’m going to be stopping regularly to take photographs, so my pace is going to be well off a “normal” ride, as low as 6mph – maybe even as low as 4mph.

I’m also not likely to do the whole thing quite in the order that it is listed as a “route” – as I will need to be in different places at different times of day, and that route plan doesn’t take that into consideration.

Remember here, I am going here to take photographs, and to do so requires light, and more importantly, light in the correct direction, hence the to-ing and fro-ing.

It’s no good to try and take a shot of some wooded area, with a narrow slice of sky in the background, which is nice and bright from the sun, but the wooded area is shaded from light, because the sun is the wrong side – as the contrast between the two gives you a shot that is basically a completely blown out sky, or a wooded area so under-exposed, you may as well have taken a shot of a black piece of card.

Anyway, back to that distance at the minimum, those 33.7 miles is therefore going to take me 5-8 hours maybe, so that’s 5-8 litres of water, or another 5-8kgs to carry.

And I’ve not touched on food….
6000 calories is a helluva lot of food, one site says 76 hard boiled eggs.

Hell!!! I’m not gonna carry 76 boiled eggs !!!!!
Or even 20 McDonald’s Cheesburgers………..

So, whatever the food requirements are, I am going to have to take them with me – lots of high density energy food is going to be required, but again extra weight.

To carry all this gear, I am either going to need to be a little mad and have it all in a backpack on my bike, or better, in a little trailer I can hook up to my bike, they really ain’t designed to have a trailer hooked up to them.
That means my mountain bike – which is about a billion times heavier than my racer…. more weight..

More weight = more calories = denser food…

Or just say to hell with it, and understand that I am going to be in a proper calorie deficit that day…

Damn – too complicated to figure out the calories, so buy myself a bike trailer and just do it with what I “feel” will be right.

That, I think is my final answer….

Now – when is this crappy weather going to break so as to be decent enough for me to do this at a weekend ?
That is the bigger question.

September 15, 2012 Photography

Wales – Part 2, Victorian Engineering Excellence.

I blame my good friend.

It all started with a conversation with my friend about the potential for meeting up in Wales during my holiday, and the routes that we both take to virtually the same place that we frequent in Wales. (like about 3 miles apart!!!)

Me, I like night cruising up the motorway in my RS4, cruise control on, clear road in front of me, no idiots about, and due to my normal, preferred, time of travel, listening to the “Best time of the day show” with Alex Lester on BBC Radio 2.

My friend however, well, she drives up the back roads, and up past the Elan Valley.

It was this discussion about the route, her recommendation that it was a beautiful place, and my interest in the fascinating history behind the Elan Valley that made me decide to wonder home via this route after my few days shooting my fast jets.

Well, I wasn’t disappointed, not by half.

It’s amazing!

It’s like all Victorian Engineering, supersized, supremely simple, but at the same time, craftily complex.

It’s immense, solid, even overkill, but, beautiful, and all well engineered.

If you don’t know about it’s history, or engineering, then I recommend going here to have a look at some of the history.
(Yes, it appears to be a little kid orientated, but, I have to say, I did enjoy reading it, and it did it’s job – provide more enticement for me to visit)

Bottom line, is that the Victorians wanted to give Birmingham some drinking water, and wanted to do it without a pumping station, so, they built a few dams, and one long pipe, and let gravity and nature do the rest.

Yeah – gravity…..

It’s gravity that feeds the water from the Elan Valley all the way (70 something miles) to Birmingham.

Now, to me, that is impressive.

What is also impressive, is that most of this pipe from Elan Valley to Birmingham is covered, and hidden – that took some thought to get done.

Well, enough about the engineering itself, and back to the lovely views that it gives.

When driving around the valley, there are times that you have a nice gurgling stream next to the road, and driving round a corner, you get a *WHAM* – an immense view of a stone damn, rising strong, proud and forceful out the ground to hold back the vast lake behind it.

When I was there, there were a group of engineers on the road above one of the damns, abseiling down the front face to clear the face of weeds and small trees that have started to grow in the cracks.
To do this, the water level in the lake behind had been dropped to allow them to work on the face of the damn without tonnes of water flowing over and down.

I don’t know whether this made for an extra *wow* factor, as this particular damn, Claerwen, being dry, was just so “solid”, I am not sure what he view would have been like had their been water flowing over it.

There was another damn where water was flowing over it, and that one glistened beautifully – at least what little of it was in sunlight when I saw it around 16:00 🙁

And that brings me to my “problem”.

The time of day that I was there, not just at that damn, but overall.

Sunlight plays a massive part in landscape photography, and there are times, like 16:00 in the afternoon, where a location is near as makes no difference, damn impossible to photograph satisfactorily, let alone have the ability to create something truly marvelous, simply because the sun is in the wrong position to light up the scene to do it justice.

All the data you can look up, and plan around, sometimes doesn’t help, you just don’t know what the view will be like until you are there, and in my case, there at the wrong time of day, and that can be a frustrating thing.

The good news is however, there isn’t anything stopping you going back, which is precisely what I am now planning to do 🙂

I loved the day over there, and other than the minor frustration of finding places that I can see the opportunity of a great photograph if I’d been there at a different time of day, I am rather happy with the shots that I have taken.

And with that – here are my photos from the day.

Hope you enjoy the photos.

September 9, 2012 Photography

Wales – part 1

Well, relaxation at last.

I’d “engineered” some time off between jobs, so, it was holiday time.

Wales is one of my favorite places to go, the scenery is astonishing – and I occassionally get to find low flying jet planes.

This time I might have met up with a good friend as well – but alas, they came back the day before I went 🙁
We keep missing each other in Wales by a few days every time… guess that is the way of the world.

Anyway, time to relax, pull out my camera, climb a few mountains (yes – they are a bit bigger than a “hill” 🙂 ) and shoot some planes, or sit and chill in the peace of the mountain air and let all life’s little niggles drain out.

Whilst walking, and being atop a mountain I also get to meet a fair few people as well, so hi to Mark, Paul and Ruud if they are reading.

This trip, I appear to have gotten pretty lucky, I’ve got a fair few decent shots IMHO, and I have now processed them and uploaded them here.

Hope you enjoy them as much as I did taking them.

August 27, 2012 *Nix, Geek-tech

Drupal and Oracle….. Pain

You may or may not realise it, but my “other” site, a pure testing site, www.macgyver.yi.org runs Drupal on an Oracle database.

I’ve done it to actually to learn Oracle, and give me a site I don’t care (so much) about breaking when I am learning.

Well for a good couple of weeks now, I’ve been getting the “There are new releases available for MacGyver.yi.org” email as there has been a new point version released.

OK – good, I like it that I am getting the emails, fantastic, I know that I need to do the work to do the upgrade.

So, today, as part of the bank holiday relaxation, I decided to do that upgrade (update as Drupal defines it, upgrade is from one major version to the next, update is a point release within the same major version)

Great – using this link, there appear to be some nice instructions.

As far as I was concerned, all worked great until step 6.

To quote:-

Run update.php by visiting http://www.example.com/update.php (replace www.example.com with your domain name). This will update the core database tables.

If you are unable to access update.php do the following:

Open settings.php with a text editor.

Find the line that says:

$update_free_access = FALSE;

Change it into:

$update_free_access = TRUE;

Once the upgrade is done, $update_free_access must be reverted to FALSE.

And running the <http://site/update.php> where I came a cropper:-

A PDO database driver is required!

You need to enable the PDO_ORACLE database driver for PHP 5.2.4 or higher so that Drupal 7 can access the database.

See the system requirements page for more information.

Two things here:

1) Version of PHP stated in the error message is wrong (very wrong – not even major revision close)

2) PDO driver for Oracle ? Eh ? Already have Drupal talking to Oracle, from the installation, so what goes ????

Damn, it’s not a simple as I was hoping, and now I was looking at a little bit of a fight to get this working.

Double damn – I had some more plans for today, other than relaxing 😀

Google has some answers, in the form of this link.

I’m going to copy the instructions here – at least then I have a copy of them.

Please note: the patch you will do uses “11.1” as the version number. It will work with version 11.2 and later (but unless you update the patch, you should continue using “11.1” in the ./configure command).

## Download the following instantclient files from Oracle’s website

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/linuxx86-64soft-092277.html

NOTE – You will need to have an Oracle account, and accept the terms and conditions.

Once downloaded, and copied to your webserver, unzip them.

unzip instantclient-basic-linux-x86-64-11.2.0.2.0.zip
unzip instantclient-sdk-linux-x86-64-11.2.0.2.0.zip

## Move the files to our install location, /usr/lib/oracle/instantclient

mkdir /usr/lib/oracle
mv instantclient_11_2/ /usr/lib/oracle/instantclient

## Fix some poorly named files and add them to our system’s library index:

cd /usr/lib/oracle/instantclient
ln -s libclntsh.so.* libclntsh.so
ln -s libocci.so.* libocci.so
echo /usr/lib/oracle/instantclient >> /etc/ld.so.conf
ldconfig

## Fix more stupid paths:

mkdir -p include/oracle/11.1/
cd include/oracle/11.1/
ln -s ../../../sdk/include client
cd /usr/lib/oracle/instantclient
mkdir -p lib/oracle/11.1/client
cd lib/oracle/11.1/client
ln -s ../../../../ lib

## Download PDO_OCI

mkdir -p /tmp/pear/download/
cd /tmp/pear/download/
pecl download pdo_oci
tar -xvzf PDO_OCI*.tgz
cd PDO_OCI*

## Patch PDO_OCI since it hasn’t been updated since 2005

# copy the lines below into the file “config.m4.patch”

*** config.m4 2005-09-24 17:23:24.000000000 -0600
--- config.m4 2009-07-07 17:32:14.000000000 -0600
***************
*** 7,12 ****
--- 7,14 ----
if test -s "$PDO_OCI_DIR/orainst/unix.rgs"; then
PDO_OCI_VERSION=`grep '"ocommon"' $PDO_OCI_DIR/orainst/unix.rgs | sed 's/[ ][ ]*/:/g' | cut -d: -f 6 | cut -c 2-4`
test -z "$PDO_OCI_VERSION" && PDO_OCI_VERSION=7.3
+ elif test -f $PDO_OCI_DIR/lib/libclntsh.$SHLIB_SUFFIX_NAME.11.1; then
+ PDO_OCI_VERSION=11.1
elif test -f $PDO_OCI_DIR/lib/libclntsh.$SHLIB_SUFFIX_NAME.10.1; then
PDO_OCI_VERSION=10.1
elif test -f $PDO_OCI_DIR/lib/libclntsh.$SHLIB_SUFFIX_NAME.9.0; then
***************
*** 119,124 ****
--- 121,129 ----
10.2)
PHP_ADD_LIBRARY(clntsh, 1, PDO_OCI_SHARED_LIBADD)
;;
+ 11.1)
+ PHP_ADD_LIBRARY(clntsh, 1, PDO_OCI_SHARED_LIBADD)
+ ;;
*)
AC_MSG_ERROR(Unsupported Oracle version! $PDO_OCI_VERSION)
;;

## Attempt to compile (this is where you’re probably stuck, make sure you’re in your PDO_OCI folder!)

export ORACLE_HOME=/usr/lib/oracle/instantclient
patch --dry-run -i config.m4.patch
patch -i config.m4.patch
phpize
./configure --with-pdo-oci=instantclient,/usr/lib/oracle/instantclient,11.1

If you get an error as follows…

checking for PDO includes… checking for PDO includes…
configure: error: Cannot find php_pdo_driver.h.

Then you may get this fixed by doing…

ln -s /usr/include/php5 /usr/include/php

And you can continue by retrying the configure.

make
make test
make install

## Add extensions to PHP

# Create /etc/php5/apache2/conf.d/pdo_oci.ini

echo "extension=pdo_oci.so" >> /etc/php5/apache2/conf.d/pdo_oci.ini

## restart Apache

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Congratulations you made it!

## install Drupal!
Read the INSTALL file in the Drupal oracle module. It must be put in a special place in Drupal’s filesystem!

Now, although this all worked for me, in the sense that a phpinfo page returned an “Enabled” for PDO_OCI, but, crucially still failed on the database “upgrade.php” step from Drupal.

Arggggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhh 😡

Thankfully, Google to the rescue again.

http://drupal.org/node/1029080

cd includes/
ls -al
cp update.inc update.inc.bak

So, pulling down the patch (copy/pasting from http://drupal.org/files/1029080-update-database-pdo-rev3_2.patch )

Put this into a file, update.inc.patch

vi update.inc.patch

Or pulling down the file directly to the patch file.

wget -c http://drupal.org/files/1029080-update-database-pdo-rev3_2.patch -O ./update.inc.patch

Now – here I do something different, I edited the file because the file locations were different in my instance- i.e. my file wasn’t in a/includes, and I was running the patch directly from <drupal_install/includes/>

From:

diff --git a/includes/update.inc b/includes/update.inc
index f7c7b66..83fa6e4 100644
--- a/includes/update.inc
+++ b/includes/update.inc

To:

--- update.inc
+++ update.inc

Now to do the patch

patch --dry-run -i update.inc.patch
patch -i update.inc.patch
ls -altr
diff update.inc.bak update.inc

The output of the “diff update.inc.bak update.inc” should match the “update.inc.patch” file.

If it does, everything has gone to plan.

Now re-run <http://site/update.php>; et voila!!! All working.

Wow, what a pain on a Bank Holiday.

July 20, 2012 *Nix, Geek-tech, Photography

I have seen the Light(room)

Well, I blame my friend Cath….
And I am sticking to that.

It is, as always with Cath, in a good way.

The other week, a group of us went to RIAT on the Sunday this year for a good day out, and the opportunity to have some good shooting of fast jets (and not-so fast prop planes, but with the BBMF – awesome planes)

Well, about 24GB of photos later (for me anyway), some of us were sat around munching pizza and reviewing our great (and sometimes not so great, again, more referring to me here) shots.

I fire up mine in Linux using Gnome Photo Viewer, Cath fires up Lightroom, and detail freak fires up Windows 7.

Well, that’s a pretty full complement of alternatives between us.
That, in it’s own right is hilarious, and worthy of a celebration that there is that much choice about, as we have all, in our own way, taken a different path.

However, the one thing that did stand out, at least to my mind, was the power of Lightroom.
Who used that out of the three of us ? Yup, the pro photographer, and yup, of course, on a MacBook.

Opened my eyes I can tell you.

I am used to copying all my files off my CF cards onto an external hard drive.

I then write a script to go through all the files, do a little re-name on them, and then create a new directory, and then move all the RAW files into that new directory.

As I am paranoid, I then back them up to another hard drive, and then sync one of the two external drives to a NAS.

I then go through all the files using Gnome Viewer, and each time I get to a photo I class as “best” – to at least worthy of using, move it to a directory called “Best”.

If those photographs are feeling a little, “missing”, then I will fire up UFRAW, and do a “fix” or, enhancement with that, and maybe use GIMP to do a crop…

I then re-sync all 3 devices, 2 ext drives, and the NAS, so I’ve not lost anything.

Cath showed me, through the gift of Lightroom a whole new, more efficient way of working, just use Lightroom to import the RAW photos, rate them how good they are, and then process them, including tweaking/correcting them for body and/or lenses.

… Oh – and tag them with the date, context, place etc….

And sod the JPG’s from the camera, just take RAW, and process them in Lightroom to JPG if required for my web gallery. (and even print them from Lightroom)

So – guess what happened the following week at work – when my work PC decided to tell me my Adobe Flash was out of date????

Show me a link to a trial download of Lightroom – so, once home, fired up the link again, and dropped myself a copy onto my MacBook.

I’m hooked.
Completely.
… and utterly.

I put it to the test on the photographs I took at RIAT.
Out of the 1800 or so that I took, I rated them, and ended up with 255 shots that I then processed.

Lightroom also then processed them, correcting for my lens (my Sigma 120-300mm f/2.8), then processed them into a web gallery, using flash to create a slideshow, which I uploaded here.

I’ve called it “OLD” as I don’t expect it to be around long, as whilst it was a good test of what Lightroom can do, it doesn’t fit in with the gallery software I use to showcase my photographs, and to be honest, much as that software has been a pain recently, I don’t think I will be replacing it any time soon.

One of the things I will say, is that there is a considerable difference between the JPGs produced by the camera and the JPGs produced by Lightroom.

IMHO, and it is very humble, I am really preferring the output from Lightroom, even with almost no “tweaking”.

Again – let me say that again – I prefer the output from Lightroom.

Is this me looking at the JPGs produced from the camera on one machine against ones on another machine – NO.

Same machine.

And – yeah, I have calibrated the screen.
And yeah, in the same program – in the case of viewing the output, this was using either Safari or Chrome on my MacBook.

The JPGs produced by the camera are too “watery”, it’s the best description of the output I can give.

They are lacking a certain something.

It’s a frustrating position.

It means that on each every shoot I need to process the shots through Lightroom (or equivalent) to get a JPG out for display in a gallery.

It’s a different way of working I guess, but, as I alluded to earlier, I think more efficient.

Well, me being an Open Source software advocate, is there something I can put onto my Linux machine that does the same thing as Lightroom ?
Would it give me the same workflow ?

I had a look around, and found a GPL’d piece of software called Darktable.
I’ve aded the Ubuntu repositories to my 10.04 LTS box (that yeah, is no longer supported, but need a bigger HDD to do a reinstall) installed it, and will report back on it’s functionality as and when.

Whilst I was looking at Darktable tonight, I looked at the status of GIMP and 16bbp editing, something that I personally haven’t worried about, until now.

At the moment, it works, but only apparently in the development versions, nothing stable.
OK – for now, putting off using it for proper manipulation.

There is one other thing that is rather interesting with all my investigation and trial work.

At *NO* point did I even contemplate going down the Windows route and whatever tools I could get on Windows – Lightroom/Photoshop included.

It simply didn’t even enter into my mind as an option, not until I had almost finished writing this entry.

Is that because I haven’t used Windows as a home tool in so long now that it is out of my conscious thought ?

Is it because I don’t know Windows well enough these days to make an informed decision ?

Actually, I don’t know, probably the former, even though I have to use Windows at work, its use as a tool for me, is just irrelevant.

With whatever the outcome of my experiments with Darktable, and the wait for GIMP to do 16/32bbp, I’ve decided it’s high time to finally bite the bullet, and go Lightroom and Photoshop on my MacBook.

I just don’t think that as a photographer, ameteur as I am, I can justify *NOT* going down this route now, not after seeing the power and simplicity that it can give me.

Even though any photo reviewing and processing is going to take some time, like it did in the days of film, anything that can cut it down, and gain me extra time in the “field” shooting, that has to be a blessing.

For the moment, for me, that is Lightroom at a minimum.

Doing it this way does give me a minor headache now though….

OSX doesn’t read my Ext3/JFS formatted disks….

That, however, is a problem I will look at another day.

Thanks Cath, I have a different photographic related problem…. x 🙂
(One I prefer to be honest)

July 15, 2012 Rant Post a Comment

Legalese……

What a lot of crap.

I’ve been looking at more “tidying” up of this site, amongst others, and finding out what I should and should not have on my site.

One of those things is legal bumpf…

What a minefield.

Cookies, Terms and Conditions, Copyright, Dislaimers, Privacy Policies, Linking Policy, “spam” policy.

Good grief, looking at all that stuff has taken me most of the freaking day…
Most of a day of *NOT* writing/shooting/editing the actual content I want for here.

Wondering if I could I simplify it to:

1) Don’t copy my content, ever.
I will get very shitty with you if I find that out, and you will be subject to legal cease and desist notices for which you will comply.

2) I won’t lie, stuff here will have facts behind it, or evidence to support my opinions.
I may be critical, tough, I expect high standards, lots of people don’t meet them, if you are one of them that I am critical of, buck your ideas up, then I won’t be critical.

3) I will link to other sites, for various reasons, either as examples, or endorsements, or whatever I see fit, the why will be obvious in the article(s).

4) Privacy is a concern, if I allow you to register, I will protect your data, whatever I collect,which won’t be much.
I also won’t share that with anyone, unless some idiot court order tells me to, and even then I will try to fight it.
I also probably won’t look at it myself, and I will do my damnest to make sure others won’t either, they certainly won’t be looking with my permission.

I may use your email address to send you an email that, as you have registered, implies you are interested in some of my content.
If you don’t want to be emailed, let me know, and your account will be terminated.
Your IP address, OS type, browser type, and what you looked at is all logged, that’s for me to find out what content is popular or not, and to give me details about how the server and site is performing.

I won’t be bothered to look at that to trace you personally, I just don’t care, unless you try to hack the site, then, I will be pissed off, so I’ll just simply hand that data to the authorities, and they can come smashing your door down at 04:00…… your choice.

5) I will use cookies somewhere to make the site work, your use of the site is implicit agreement you don’t mind.

6) I may use an advertising service (Google AdSense) – they will use cookies, I can’t do anything about them, if you don’t like it, read their policy, and/or stop your browser accepting them.

7) I may use hard language (including foul language if I decide it’s appropriate) – get over it, and toughen up.
I’m not going to be talking hard core sex here, or violence, or such like, so I’m happy for under 18’s to read it.
If you, as a parent don’t want your kids reading my stuff, other than it’s their (and your) loss – it’s *YOUR* responsibility to know what your kids are doing online, and teach them appropriately, not mine to make my content less objectionable to you (or them).

8) I won’t send out SPAM, and SPAM sent to me will be deleted.
If you receive SPAM you think is from me – keep it, don’t delete it unless you have spoken to me, doing that won’t help me fix it if there is a problem my end.
Inform me, and then I will let you know what bits I need from it to prove/disprove it was/wasn’t me to either fix any issue, or to tell you that you are mistaken.

You send me SPAM, and you are a registered user, I delete your account, and ban your email address.

9) I withhold the right to block any and all access to the site to anyone, or any entity that I decide, it’s my site – so it’s my decision.

You know, it’s not very “politically correct” some of that, or probably legal, but, I think it works.

Shakespeare was right…. “first kill all the lawyers”

(yes …. it should be “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”. – (Henry VI; Act IV, Scene II).)

Minor rant over…..
Normal service will be resumed soon.

UPDATE: – I’ve added this to the “Legal” pages of the site, as it kinda says a whole host of things that I agree with, I’d not have said them otherwise.

Also, it’s says nothing that the other policies don’t….

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Author: Kieran