I've been wondering why the new kernel on my dedicated server wouldn't boot. Everytime it started up it would get this far:

Just a quick post for those running Gentoo, to run Drupal 7 you will need to enable the "spl" and "filter" use flags for PHP. SPL is the Standard PHP Library and Filter is the PECL Filter functionallity. And both of these can only be found in PHP 5.2.

I just wanted to post this quickly so I have a reference for it.

This is how I update Drupal core:

wget
tar -zxf
diff -Nru htdocs > out.diff
less out.diff
cd htdocs
patch -p1 --dry-run < ../out.diff
patch -p1 < ../out.diff

The options for diff tell it to:

• N - treat new files as empty. This will install any new files into the web folder.
• r - Recurse
• u - Unified diff format. A style of diff formatting I personally find the easiest to view

Just a quick post to say that the default Administrator password for RightFax is blank. Nada. Nothing. Zilch. Empty. It's not set.

Hopefully that will save someone else a few hours of trouble

I have decided to un-virtualise my development Gentoo/Linux machine.

I virtualised it so that it would be on more often, but that hasn’t transpired. In-fact it is on less often than it was before . Not only does my VMWare machine create a lot of heat it also takes ages to start up and then start the other VMs before performance equalises, consequently I run my development machine less  .

For the last month I’ve been listening to Neil Fiore’s Conquering Procrastination CD set from Nightingale-Conant.

It was yesterday that I had a profound insight into how procrastination was affecting my life.

For ages I have been saying to myself “I want to work on my website” or “I want to develop some software”. Yesterday I realised that every time I sit down to do that I feel:

I’ve got software products like MyLifeOrganized and Mind Manager and yet I’m still not getting stuff done.

What I seem to be missing is a firm direction.

Sure, I can sit down and come up with 5, 10 even 20 things I would like to accomplish but the next day those goals have gone and I’m back in the minutiae of life.

When I created my development server under VMWare I screwed up when sizing the partitions.

I created a half a meg swap size, when really I should have created half a gig swap size. Shucks!

I’ve just put that to rights by re-sizing the partitions.

Easy as pie.

There’s a buzz about Drupal 6 that wasn’t there when Drupal 6 was released.

We’ve had two bug fix releases on 6, but – most importantly – most modules now have a stable Drupal 6 version.

I’m also rebuilding my website. I’ve got a development version on a private server as it gives me the opportunity to test, break and wipe things, if I need to.

I was suffering from a hard drive I/O problem. A quick check with smartctl -A -l error revealed 38 errors on sda, so it had to be replaced.

So this morning the hard drive was swapped for a new blank one and I began the process of rebuilding the RAID.

I booted of a Gentoo Minimal Install CD. These are notable as they are the only install CDs I’ve found that contain the necessary md[0–3] devices in /dev.