the

Little Projects

of Shawn M. Jones

I noticed when ripping and encoding my CD collection that GRIP crashed on certain CDs. Thinking this had to do with poor handling of CD scratches, I started setting CDs aside.

I should have known better. Having used it for years, I’d never seen this behavior before in GRIP.

It turns out that there is a buffer overflow that manifests itself when the genre of the music is set to something “nonstandard”, so, as a workaround, I have to check and sometimes set the genre on CDs to “Alternative” or another “standard” genre.

This isn’t really a problem solved, but more a problem identified and worked around. There is a patch in Ubuntu to fix this problem, but I guess it hasn’t made it into my version (Intrepid Ibex) yet.

Ref: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grip/+bug/283658

I smacked my head on this one, seeing as one of my previous posts had the same solution.

CentOS 5 does not install php-mysql by default. When the WordPress installation runs, it disables error reporting for certain functions, presumably so that they can be dealt with later.

Unfortunately, this error reporting doesn’t get dealt with correctly, and instead the end user is presented with a blank page instead of a message telling them that the mysql functions don’t exist.

I’ve got a patch ready for the WordPress folks, but I’m still waiting for my login to their bug reporting system so I can submit it.

I hope this helps someone else.

In short, if you see a blank screen after putting in your database information during install, make sure that the php-mysql package is installed on CentOS. I spent hours trying to figure out why this wasn’t working right.

Well, it looks like the slow connections I’ve been experiencing with Blogger may be enough to push me back onto my own server. B2Evolution was good to me when I ran it, so I’ll use that software for blog entries. The photos I’ll probably keep on Picasa, but I haven’t given them much thought.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I want to run my own server for web hosting. It is in the small challenge of doing so that I find some joy. Funny to think that the systems administration that I do could be considered a “hobby”?

There are other things I want to do with the server as well, like limited file sharing, that I have a hard time doing with Google Docs.

So, thanks to a tip from a friend, I’m looking at ServerADay for a discount server that will meet my hosting needs. I’m waiting for one in the $20 range if I can get it. This is a far cry from the almost $100 prices at Serverbeach or the $79 servers at Layered Tech.

Once I get a server, the next issue will be moving the blog over to whatever software I end up using. I’m planning on keeping my Calendar and Email on Google Apps for now, as, with slight annoyances, they’ve been serving me well.

I’m thinking that moving to Blogger was a good experiment, but it did not garner the benefits I had hoped for.