Why I like the current iPhone craze

Most people who know me will be somewhat surprised by the title of this post... but it's true. I do, indeed, enjoy the current iPhone craze - simply because I think some good is likely come of it :)

Specifically, there's two main positive things that I think may come from the current iPhone craze:

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Custom hierarchical cursors with the AdvancedDataGrid

Yesterday, I was trying to write a custom hierarchical cursor class that implements the IHierarchicalCollectionViewCursor interface. But no matter what I tried, the AdvancedDataGrid would not recognise my implemented cursor class as being hierarchical. When I extended the existing HierarchicalCollectionViewCursor class, the AdvancedDataGrid would happily recognise it - even I overrode every single method and property... yet, as soon as I switched the class to implement IHierarchicalCollectionViewCursor instead of extending HierarchicalCollectionViewCursor, the AdvancedDataGrid would break again.

MediaWiki 1.13.0

I just upgraded Winki to MediaWiki 1.13.0. But once I had done so, the site failed with following error message:

Now, it turns out that the revision table was added to MediaWiki in version 1.10.0, so it seems this was something broken since the upgrade to 1.10.0 back in November last year, but was only now being exposed. No doubt the issue has arisen because I insist on using PostgreSQL.

An AIR of excitement

Last night I received some pretty exciting (to me) news about something that's just been released on Adobe's pre-release site (which I am a member of)... unfortunately I can't say what it is yet (I've been sworn to secrecy), but it will likely help with a number of technical issues I'm currently facing in a major project at work, so I'm very happy with the timing! :)

Memory leak in ibm_db.fetch_assoc

I had a really frustrating time yesterday, trying to sort out some bugs in IBM's ibm_db DB2 driver for Python. Unfortunately I don't know Python well enough to know whether the bugs are in the ibm_db driver, Python, or my misuse if either or both :( But what I can tell you, is that the following Python / ibm_db code results in a definite memory leak.

AdvancedDataGrid column switching performance

At work, we've been having some significant performance issues with the Flex AdvancedDataGrid control, so my boss has begun a dialog with some of the AdvancedDataGrid control's developers over at Adobe. As part of that dialog, my boss asked me to write a brief summary of the problem - which I've done. But it has occurred to me that the problem description is likely to be very interesting to some people, so I've decided to publish it here too. And so, here it is...

So where is the PC-C37?

The PC-C37 Muse is a multi-media HTPC chassis from Lian Li... one that I've had my eye on for a little while now. You see, I've been planning on building a new LinuxMCE Media Director for a little while now (hence my 35 watt dual-core Athlon 64 blog plost back in May!), but have not found many appropriate PC chassis.

DB2 Net Search Extender's index update sheduling

The DB2 NSE service crashed my DB2 server over the weekend... again!! And this time it corrupted one of my user tablespaces!!! Very annoying. However, in the process of restoring the destroyed database from the most recent backup, I noticed entries in the db2diag.log file indicated that db2text (the NSE indexing process) was trying to update indexes for a database that no longer exists - ie a database that I dropped some time ago.

Never trust a bunny!!

Ok, I screwed up!! I was playing with an xargs command in order to process, then delete, some files. Since I was still "developing" the command, I was simply echo'ing the commands rather than running them... here's what I ran...

Frankenstein's Thecus

We use a Thecus N2050 at work for external backups. The Thecus had been running very well (albeit noisily) in a hosted data-center environment, but has recently been shifted to our local office.

Now, a couple of days ago, the Thecus (as we like to call it) started to have some serious issues - spefically, our Linux kernel was reporting constant IO errors whenever the device was under heavy use. After a quick check, I noticed that the lights on the front were flashing to indicate that the second disk had failed. Since the device was (and still is) running in RAID 1, this should not have affected the device's reliability, but just to sure, I pulled the second disk out.