Guide

While trying to edit a menu on a Drupal site, I found that none of my changes were being saved. Looking at the logs led me to the following error message:

PDOException: SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 144 Table 'cache_menu' is marked as crashed and last (automatic?) repair failed: DELETE FROM {cache_menu};

Simply restarting MySQL did not fix things and it looked like I had to get my hands a li'l dirty.

After a recent server migration, I found that my MySQL instance was not starting up (on Debian Squeeze). A look in the logs revealed that MySQL was having issues with corrupt InnoDB tables and therefore refusing to start. A number of forums informed me to do the following.

In Linux, you can simplify some of your SSH commands using an SSH config file. For example, create a file named config in your ~/.ssh directory with something like the following:


Host bar
HostName bar.examplecom
User bar user

Host foo
HostName foo.example.com
User foouser

This will allow you to ssh into the specified hosts using short commands such as ssh foo and ssh bar.

mIRC is by far the most popular IRC client in the world. However, it's a bit of a pain to use if you connect to different networks with different nicks and so on, as mIRC only supports one user profile. One of the ways to get around this is to have multiple mIRC installations for each profile. But as you can well imagine, this is a pain. However, salvation is here as a friend on IRC put me on to this nifty trick to get his happening without all the brute-forcing. Here's how it is done.

If you've ever worked with Debian or Ubuntu servers, you've very likely had to set up a firewall at some point or the other. However, any changes that are made are not saved and loaded if the server is ever rebooted. The following is a quick guide on how to get this happening:

(root or sudo access is required)

If you've ever visited a webserver's error page, it will usually state the error followed by information about the server. This will customarily tend to include the webserver software, its version, possibly information about some of the modules compiled in as well as the server's address and port. While this might look generous and helpful, it also allows bad guys as well as other parties to probe the server to find out what it is running as well as other details such as version information. This information can be used for nefarious purposes.

Today, I was trying to get Drupal to automatically announce new posts on Twitter. To do this, I had to install the Twitter and OAuth modules. Following instructions, I created an application on Twitter and linked my Drupal account to it configuring it to announce new posts upon publishing them. However, this did not work as I ran into the following long-winded error message in the logs:

If you, like me, enjoy playing on your guitar to music from your PC, you will share my annoyance at the fact that bands often tune up or down a step or so for different songs. While it might be simple enough to tune your guitar up and down as and when necessary, I think that everybody will agree that it's a bit of a pain. Here's a solution for people like me who tend to have, well, an indolent approach to their guitar.

Rather than use images with transparencies, it is often preferable to replace transparent pixels with a suitable background colour.

In ACDSee 4, the background colour of transparent PNG files (or any other image file that supports transparency) is by default set to black. There is no immediately apparent option whereby you can change this colour and then save the file as a JPG or similar. After some asking around, I was told that while it is possible to customise this colour, it's a bit of a pain. Here's how:

Continuing on with my workarounds for moving system files around, today, I decided to look into moving my user profile folder to a different partition. While IIRC, it used to be possible (in earlier versions of Windows) to do this by setting the home folder to an appropriate value in the user management snapshot, that did not work for me.