web operations, apache web servers, perl, mac os X

Today, one of our MySQL database suddenly went unresponsive. The first thing I noticed was the following lines in the error.log:

InnoDB: Unable to lock /path/to/ibdata1, error: 11
InnoDB: Check that you do not already have another mysqld process
InnoDB: using the same InnoDB data or log files.

Upon further investigation, I found a not perfectly matched issue but does look similar: http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?22,22344,24497#msg-24497.  I took a chance and did the following:

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At work, I had just received a new Dell desktop computer pre-installed with Windows 7.  First thing I did was to ‘join’ the computer into our internal Active Directory domain.  That was all good and I was able login to my desktop using my domain user id.  Then I started installing software and ‘personalizing’ my windows 7.  At some point, for some stupid reasons, I somehow removed my user profile folder (C:\Users\{myuserid}) … oops    

From that point on, I wasn’t able to persistently store any personalization.  Everytime I logged off and re-logged in, a new ‘temporary’ profile is created.  On every logged in, windows would present me with a ‘warning’ message that in essence said it was not able to find my ‘profile’.  I did a few things to try to fix this issue, including:    

1. manually adding C:\Users\myuserid folder
2. removing/re-adding my domain user to the desktop
3. detaching/re-joining the desktop to the domain

None helped.    

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Problem:

I have a directory structure from one server that I need to mirror onto another server.  The directory structure/tree is deep and contains hundreds of subdirectories.  I do not want to spend hours manually creating the directory structure on the other server.  I also do not want to have to back up and restore the content in the subdirectories.

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How can we ‘stop’ macmail from automatically marking mails as read when we scroll through them? Answer is practically we can’t. A simple problem that’s very annoying.

There’s a work around. The so called ‘preview’ pane is, in mac mail, actually a ‘reading’ pane. Because it is a reading pane, your email is, obviously, marked as read as soon as it shows up in the reading pane. The work around is to close the lower window (so called preview pane) by dragging it’s edge down to the bottom of the page then mac mail won’t mark any selected messages as read. Still … very annoying and not a solution I want.

So come TruePreview (http://christianserving.org/project/truepreview) to the rescue. TruePreview adds a preference panel to Mail’s preferences that allows you to mark messages as read immediately (Mail’s default), never, or after a delay. It also allows you to specify these settings independently per-account, if desired. That’s just what I need … now mac mail is so perfect. Thank you!

For some unknown reasons, CPAN on my macbook suddenly stopped working.  This is the error I got whenever I tried to use CPAN to install a module:

Catching error: "Undefined subroutine &Compress::Zlib::gzopen called at /Library/Perl/Updates/5.8.8/CPAN/Tarzip.pm line 122.\cJ" at /Library/Perl/Updates/5.8.8/CPAN.pm line 390
CPAN::shell() called at /usr/bin/cpan line 198

I found a lot of suggestions from googling for it. The best solution for my case was to remove all Compress::Zlib (Zlib.pm) from every perl libraries, manually and re-install a new one.

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