MySQL: To Good to Be True

In the back of my mind for some time now I've planned to move all NacreData projects away from MySQL to a more truly open source solution (almost surely PostgreSQL), and today's news pretty much cinches it. 

Painting myself into a corner and working back out...

Upon leaving my friend's place in Indiana recently (see previous post) I brought back home with me an old iMac, a "blueberry", one of the blue-and-white cute cpu-and-monitor triangle shaped deals. It has a G3 processor and had a broken installation of OS 9. I recovered the important data and transferred it to a couple other media at my friend's place, then started tinkering. 

Having noticed the PPC disk in the OpenBSD distributions I decided to give it a go. Being the last to RTFM, as they say, I blithely blew away the machine's partitions and installed the usual set I'm used to with OpenBSD. The install went fine, but the machine could not be booted off the new OS at all. 

So I read. Don't delete the Mac's boot partition it says. The Mac ROM needs to see a HFS boot partition or it won't go nowhere. Drat. The first many resources I found all describe how to set up the installation presuming you knew this and presuming you were intending to make a dual-boot machine with Mac on the other side. Finally I did find a couple links which provided the clues needed about how to rectify the situation. Use pdisk to create an HFS ("Apple_HFS") partition of at least 1MB size named "boot", along with the other partitions usually used (/, swap, /tmp, /var/, /usr, /home). Then re-do the install. Then mount the OpenBSD install CD and the HD's boot partition and copy the open firmware program "ofwboot" to the "boot" partition. Finally, remove all CD's and boot with Command-option-o-f and issue the command 

boot hd:,ofwboot /bsd

Voilà, it works and I'm off and running :-)

PC Eudora to Mac Mail Conversion

I had a wonderful few days visiting friends in southern Indiana and setting up a network at their rural property where there are outbuildings used for conferences. I went with the latest D-Link b/g/n router over the Apple Airport for cost and the flexibility of a web-based configuration interface for the wireless component of the system.

We also moved over 103,000 emails from Eudora 7 on a Win XP machine to Mac Mail on a new MacBook Pro. This was a bit of a pain. Our original plan was to move to Mac Eudora 6.2 for consistency, but the Eudora help for this process was entirely inadequate, and in places just flat wrong. Eudora 6.2 for OS X still uses OS 9 line endings (CR) for some reason, rather than the LF used by all UNIX based systems. Overall Eudora 6.2 felt like an outdated OS 9 piece of software I thought. The Mail importer, however, worked reasonably well (though slow) on the Eudora message files. Multiple levels of nested mailboxes were retained.

The third-party Eudora Mailbox Cleaner did a good job with the multiple address books, but the Filter->Rules import only imported the name of the filters, not any of the content, which was disappointing.

Updated site, new email gateway

Eva's design work is up now at http://guide.BuyLocalCA.org/ and it looks rather nice I think. This is the next version of the site, which I've been working with for a couple years, which formerly looked pretty much like http://www.BuyLocalPA.org/ (designed by Design for Social Impact). NacreData's role in the new CA site, aside from hosting and getting the existing database to display information in the new design, was the integration of Google Maps into the search display. What do you think? I went with the "bounding coordinates" method for the zip code search -- calculate the lat/long coordinates corresponding to the bounding points of map X miles from the center of the chosen zip code and search the database for lat/long values falling within those bounds. This was quicker than comparing the distance of every listing in the database.

I also set up a new email gateway, OpenBSD 4.1 / Postfix to handle the primary flow from the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture. The qmail server on the web server machine was getting inundated and the old machine serving as secondary was failing, so time to upgrade. Seems to be working fine, though it seems such a shame for a nice fast machine to spend 99% of its time refusing emails sent to non-existent email address...

Updated Sites

I should mention a couple of the sites I've been working which have recently been posted. First, the Heartwood website has had a long-overdue complete overhaul. See see the article on the site for a full list of attributions and thanks to all who contributed!

Also at the first of May we launched the wholesalers portion of the Philadelphia area online local food guide. The local food guide for Charlottesville, Virginia is also freshly live, though I have some adjustments to make to the categories on the site. Should be done today.

Lastly, I love my new office at our new home. I feel more productive already :-)

On second thought...

You know all those things you're not supposed to have to worry about with high-level language? You know, like memory management and declaring variables?

Yeah, right.

Then you read books on security and run into crashing database server hung on aborted connections and, well...

Worry about those little things.

for the want of a "6"

More interesting chroot challenges today.

First the challenge of perl modules which want to use Dynaloader to load shared C libraries at run time. Not gonna happen if the path isn't the same under the chroot, which it surely isn't. I got around this one with mod_perl and a startup perl script, so that the perl module is run as root, loading the libraries, before the chroot happens.

Then LWP returned an obscure error about tcp being a bad protocol. Hm. Google groups search to the rescue, and we find there is a table I never noticed before relating named protocol names to numeric values which also couldn't be found. Simply copied this table into the chroot with read-only permissions.