I rather like the Delicious re-design

Flipflops

DeliciousTerrible puns aside, I’ve been using delicious for years and years – it has become, as these things do, just another part of memory (not that I don’t back up my links from time to time).

Got confronted with the new design last night, as with any change to something very familiar it takes a bit of getting used to, but overall I think it’s pretty good.

Love the previews and comments for all my bookmarks.

During a re-design it’s easy to get carried away adding new features and updating what is there already. It’s only natural, designers and developers get bored and want to try out new ways of doing things.

It can be hard to show restraint, but my initial impression is that the delicious team have managed to pull off a re-design that actually improves the user experience. Well done.

What is in a girl’s head?

Flipflops

In our bathroom we have a framed poem on the shelf by the toothbrushes.

The poem is ‘A boy’s head’ by the late Czech poet and scientist Miroslav Holub

In it there is a spaceship
and a project
for doing away with piano lessons.

And there is
Noah’s ark,
which shall be first.

And there is
an entirely new bird,
and entirely new hare,
an entirely new bumble-bee.

There is a river
that flows upwards.

There is a multiplication table.

There is anti-matter.

And it just cannot be trimmed.
I believe that only what cannot be trimmed
is a head.

There is much promise in the circumstance that so many people have heads.

Miroslav Holub

I often read this poem while I brush my teeth.

It always make me wonder what might be in a girl’s head.

I have some theories, but am still working on a definitive list…

IMG_0212

Keep an eye on your MongoDB

Flipflops

I don’t use MongoDB that often, but sometimes it is the perfect tool for a job.

I have one database with about 2 million documents in the main collection. We needed to rebuild and reprocess the documents in the collection recently – essentially emptying the collection and letting it rebuild naturally as new data came in.

After a while I started to notice some severe performance issues on the server as the collection grew. Mongo was consuming vast amounts of CPU. Eventually the penny dropped. After the update, the new indexes had not been created.

As soon as the indexes were added, the amount of resource used by Mongo dropped back to an almost irrelevant level. I am astonished as the performance difference they made.

Not a mistake to make again!

phpize error on RHEL server

Flipflops

Trying to install the MongoDB PHP driver using Pecl (as per the documentation) on a Rackspace managed server running RHEL I ran into the following problem:

pecl install mongo

/usr/bin/phpize: /tmp/tmpNW0rIa/mongo-1.2.12/build/shtool: /bin/sh: bad interpreter: Permission denied
Cannot find autoconf. Please check your autoconf installation and the
$PHP_AUTOCONF environment variable. Then, rerun this script.

ERROR: `phpize' failed

It took me a while to remember and then search through old tickets, but the problem is that on Rackspace’s RHEL servers the /tmp partition is mounted without script execute permissions. (Is this standard for RHEL in general?)

Pecl uses the /tmp – and so therefore, the install fails.

The solution is to temporarily allow script execution in /tmp

[root@server ~]# mount | grep /tmp
/dev/sda2 on /tmp type ext3 (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)

[root@server ~]# mount -o remount,exec /tmp

[root@server ~]# mount | grep /tmp
/dev/sda2 on /tmp type ext3 (rw,nosuid,nodev)

Install the MongoDB driver with Pecl…

[root@server ~]# pecl install mongo

Revert the permissions on /tmp and then check the permissions are correct…

[root@server ~]# mount -o remount,noexec /tmp

[root@server ~]# mount | grep /tmp
/dev/sda2 on /tmp type ext3 (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)