MySQL on the Fritz

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Earlier today (according to UTC at any rate), NeoSmart Technologies had a severe MySQL problem. After some very heavy load on our resource-intensive NST Gallery it seems that MySQL just started coughing up bytes, nuts, and bolts. It’s all fixed now though, and we’re sorry for the downtime.

The reason it took so long is that we decided to “seize the moment” to upgrade MySQL to the new 5.1.x series, and unfortuantely, we ran into a bug that has been in the 5.1.x series for a while that stops InnoDB tables from loading up. We tried to go back to the 5.0.x line, but that didn’t work either. It took a long time to get our binary recovery data from MySQL to another server to get a SQL dump of the data, then completely scrub the main NST server clean of all MySQL residue, then restore the SQL dumps.

Hopefully everything is well now, and we’ve put in some safeguards that should prevent or at least minimize this kind of problem in the future. If you notice anything weird still happening, please do let us know. Some of the symptoms included an inability to view Forum posts, crashes when commenting here on The NeoSmart Files, and some problems in the Gallery. Again, our sincerest apologies for the downtime.

The Difference Between an Acronym and an Abbreviation

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Ten to one, if you’re posting an article, creating a web page, or just coding some HTML; and you’re about to code in a <abbr> tag to let people not “in the know” get what exactly it is that you’re talking about, you actually should be using the <acronym> tag instead. Maybe you’re not even doing it for the people, and you’re actually just a benevolent person that cares about a truly semantic web and wants the bots to also grasp just what it is that’s being said.

Either way, it’s good to know when to use an <abbr> tag and when to use an <acronym> tag. At face value, <abbr> is for abbreviations, and <acronym> is for, well, acronyms. ‘But what’s the difference?’ Joe Blogg asks…

NASA is an acronym. BBC is another. But gov’t and Mr. aren’t – they’re abbreviations. In Grammar 101 it was easy to tell the difference, but in real life, it can get kind of confusing. But the general rule is, if it’s pronounced by spelling it out, it’s an acronym. If it doesn’t have a period, it’s an acronym. But most importantly, if you can spell it another way, chances are it’s an abbreviation.

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How Pioneers in Technology are Different

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While reading Amy Armitage of Lunartic’s interview with Eric Meyer, the biggest advocate of CSS, it became obvious that there is something completely different about pioneers in computers and technology. Although we can’t testify to having personally spoken to explorers and inventors in other fields, we think it’s highly unlikely that they’re as down-to-earth normal as the “geeks” and “nerds” that bring computing and technology to the next stage.

Reading through the interview, you can’t honestly tell that this is man is the epitome of what some would call “geek;” after all, you can’t write six books on a topic without being some kind of half-human half-android hybrid, can you? But geek or not, here’s a guy that lives in Cleveland, has a BA in History, and had his own radio show for an entire decade.

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What’s Wrong with Technorati??

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Ever since Technorati went down for two hours last week, they’ve never been the same. Technorati.com is slow and unresponsive at times, breaks often, and has a boatload of error messages we’ve never seen before.

The errors are most obvious when searching the tags listings – sometimes it’ll show no posts for a (very popular) tag, and at other times, it’ll show posts from 34 days ago. It’s always 34 days, no matter when you do the looking. The graph on the side is completely messed up, and does not correlate to the entries in the main window.

What’s wrong with Technorati? Is “the authority” on tags, blogging, and the metrics of the online world coming to an end? Google Blog Search may have surpassed Technorati in terms of page views, but it’ll never come close when it comes to the social aspect. Google indexes, Technorati connects – big difference. So for the sake of the blogosphere, let’s hope Technorati gets their stuff sorted out, this is beginning to get old here.

Extend your Vista "Trial" to a 120 Days

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Despite posts, warnings, pages, and articles to the contrary all over the web, Windows Vista does have a trial version. It may be hard to get your hands on a legal copy of the Vista DVD without resorting to illegal means, but once you do, you can legally use it for 120 days – fully sanctioned and supported by Microsoft itself.

Just boot from the DVD, install without using a product key, and start using Windows. When your 30 day “grace period” prior to activation runs out, open up a command wind (Start -> Run -> cmd.exe) and type this in:

slmgr -rearm Continue reading →

AMD-ATi Releases Final Vista Drivers!

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Just minutes before Vista goes on sale to the general public all around the world, ATi [[AMD]] has officially released the final versions of its drivers for Windows Vista. They’re out for Windows Vista x86 and x64, and they’re slightly smaller than the beta drivers in download size, though still downright huge (for drivers that is, but still nothing next to the X-Fi drivers) at 40MB.

Our original rant, posted just days ago, was all about just how irresponsible and ridiculous ATi/AMD’s much-delayed drivers for Windows Vista are, so we’re especially happy someone’s done something about it. It may be too late for AMD/ATi to make good with the techie users who’ve been using Vista without real graphics acceleration for months now, but it may not be too late for the home crowd.

Go and get the drivers, we’re downloading them too. We don’t know if they have OpenGL support or not, but they most certainly better – we’ll let you know when we find out.

Hat-Tip: Wally Ballou

The NeoSmart Files on Microsoft.com!

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NeoSmart Technologies has the express honor of being featured on Microsoft.com as a “non-Microsoft blog” with expert information on Windows Vista. Unlike the 7 other names on that list, The NeoSmart Files is the only blog that discusses technology at large, and everything from Unix to Vista to OS X. It’s actually rather impressive for Microsoft to feature a blog on that list that covers Windows Vista along with other operating systems and technologies, and that the reviews aren’t always positive.

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ActiveWin: Windows Vista Review

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Andre Da Costa of ActiveWin has just written a very good and objective review on Windows Vista as it now stands. It focuses a lot on consumer-related features, and is quite lengthy at 28 pages. It’s a very good overview of how Vista has matured over the years, and what this long-delayed operating system really is.

NeoSmart Technologies’ own review (originally released for RC1; less for the consumer, more for the techie) can be found here, as well as a screenshot gallery for the visually-inclined.

Final ATi Drivers for Windows Vista RTM

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Nope, they’re not here; not yet, anyway. Windows Vista is here, and ATi [[AMD]] still hasn’t released a real set of drivers for Vista users. Currently 3D performance on Windows Vista – if you’re using an ATi card – is close to zero, and ATi doesn’t seem worried in the least. In an email from ATi to a NeoSmart Representative, we were told that the final drivers would be here “before the end of January,” and they would have full OpenGL support – but they’re not here yet, and even if they were, it’s far too late as it is.

nVidia has had its drivers out for quite a while now, and even before that, at least nVidia users did not have to suffer from zero OpenGL support. The rumor was, once AMD bought ATi, their customer support and driver divisions would supposedly improve. Well, that rumor has most certainly been debunked now!

Users of ATi graphics cards have crappy Direct3D video acceleration, and no OpenGL support. The default Microsoft drivers provide worse Direct3D acceleration, but they do at least provide end users with 1MB of memory for OpenGL acceleration… What on earth is ATi thinking!?

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CodePlex Downloads and Internet Explorer 7

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It seems ridiculous, but if you’re interested in downloading source code from Microsoft’s “SourceForge” (aka CodePlex), you’re going to need to use Firefox.

You don’t have to take our word for it. Here’s the download link for Phalanger, Microsoft’s version of PHP for .NET. It’s (stupidly enough), a JavaScript download link, and in IE7, it doesn’t work. So Microsoft’s implementation of JavaScript is broken in Microsoft’s latest browser. Interesting. The JavaScript works just fine in Firefox and Opera, so that’s what you have to use. If you don’t have it, better get installing.

In their defense, Phalanger is a great compiled version of PHP with complete access to the CLR and .NET libraries – highly recommended for anyone on a Windows host!