Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

You might have noticed that this blog stopped accepting comments about a month ago.. well. stopped accepting is a big word.. I was still accepting comments, only they were never submitted to the database and after entering a comment to my blog people ended up on a white page.

So upon returning from holliday I set out to debug the issue together with one of our Inuits Drupal geeks and quickly ran into the following error.

PHP Fatal error:  Call to a member function has_more_records() on a non-object in /somepath/modules/views/plugins/views_plugin_display.inc on line 1992, referer: http://www.krisbuytaert.be/blog/comment/reply/1014

So apparently my veasion of views 6.x-3.0-alpha3 didn't really like to play with Mollom,
I downgraded views again to 6.x-2.11 and Mollom started showing its Captcha's etc again .

So apart from wondering how I ended up installing that alpha3 version (I`m sure Drush didn't do that), all is back to normal. and you should be able to comment on this blog again

So when you setup an aggregator there's this one thing you miss from a regular planet ...the list of blogs with their individual Feeds.

I wanted to use this for planet.loadays.org again and realized I don't know where I got this snippet from or if I wrote it myselve or whatever .. but I do realize that unless I document it here I won't be able to point other people to it again :) So just create a block like this one :

<?php
 
 
 $subscriptions = db_query('SELECT title,link,url FROM {aggregator_feed} ORDER BY title');
 while ($list = db_fetch_object($subscriptions)) {
      print "<a href=\"$list->link\">$list->title</a> (<a href=\"$list->url\">feed</a>)<br>\n";
 
      }
 
?>

Lots of people writing about Snorkle again today ,Monty Says, help saving MySQL

He gives us different options, a , b or c .. but I , and some others, want an option d

No I don't trust Oracle, it's not like they have been a very good Open Source Citizen, yes they contribute to the kernel and other projects but my feeling says it's only because they have to (Kernel, Xen and others ) not because they Want to (thinking about Unfakable etc) , if they would really want to they probably would work with the CentOS community more etc, and as Monty mentions their InnoDB track record could be better.

But on the other hand I don't think the EU should block the deal because Monty wants his baby back , cheap , as honestly imvho that's what they really want, be able to buy MySQL back for a nice price, either beceause Oracle is being forced by the EU to split up Sun, or eventually the deal doesn't come trough and they can buy MySQL back when Sun really goes belly up (which is what probably happens when option a) is chosen.

According to CNN , Oracle has made some pledges about MySQL earlier today.
My main question there however is about the Opposite of option 5. which is exactly what created the problem.

5. Support not mandatory. Customers will not be required to purchase support services from Oracle as a condition to obtaining a commercial license to MySQL.

Yes we want support, but no we don't want a commercial license with it, we want support on the GPL version, which is a problem lots of Open Source vendors struggle with , some of them
force people wanting to buy support to go for the commercial license. And it is exaclty that upselling that got MySQL in the troubles it has today .

Josh Berkus has a point declaring
Dual Licensing dead, just as I he sees much more future in the Percona like model than in the Dual License model MySQL used to have ..

Dries points to one of the comments on
Lukas Kahwe Smith 's Come On Money er Monty article stating
Monty walks away with several millions in hard cash, while [PHP +] MySQL cheerleaders who bet on "MySQL" franchise only walk away with a cute dolphin T-shirt

Which makes me wonder when I`ll be getting a nice Acquia T-shirt :)

Last Wednesday after the LSec event with Bruce Schneier and the R ans S from RSA , we already had a mini AdHoc GeekDinner in Leuven, one that pretty would have matched Philips requirements for having it called Geek dinner

Philip has been ranting this week about different events titled "Geek" not attrackting real geeks. that know hex and binary is but merely atrackting the Startup/Web crowd, now there's nothing wrong with both crowds, and I happen to be part of both but it can cause strange situations
Geekdinner.beTom K arranged a nice deal with De Troubadour so foodwise it promises to be great.

And with the list currently showing a variety of
Linux and BSD geeks, (both on Kernel and System Level it seems) the Apache geeks , some Ruby geeks, some Legal geeks, some Java geeks, etc that part should be covered ..

So I`m pretty sure that the majority of Geeks at the upcoming Geekdinner will realize there are only 10 kind of people

Still missing however from that list are the Drupal and PHP folks, the Django crowd, some Distribution geeks, some Gnome Geeks and some KDE geeks. Heck you all know I`m talking about you .. so go and subscribe here

I hope we aren't scaring away too much folks with this really Open Source oriented GeekDinner :)

PS. And yes I think it's time for Elise to organise a Real Belgian Girl Geek Dinner :)

While playing around with the great MySQL Activity Reporter , I ran into the following error.

[client 192.168.254.72] PHP Fatal error: strftime() [function.strftime]: Timezone database is corrupt - this should *never* happen! in /var/lib/mysqlard/mysqlar.php on line 62

Now the error is clear .. the Timezone database is corrupt and I`m the one to blame for .. this was on a pretty stripped down Centos that lives in UTC. So there wasn't a real Timezone database.

Obviously a quick apt-get install tzdata solved the problem, but once again the lesson is.. don't strip too much .. you'll eventually endup needing those 3 Kb of free space you gained anyhow.

Dear Future self,

The next time you run into PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined method DB_Error::query() and you are pretty sure all the correct libraries are installed , check if you can connect to the database with the username / password you have configured. Just as today you might have migrated to a new mysql server and forgotten to update the connection string.

thank you for your attention.