This week the BBC has been showing a further series of Guitar Heroes (tonight was number 4, and there are 6 in total).
Tonight, they showed Horslips playing Dearg Doom from their 1974 The Táin album.
Horslips circa 1974
Horslips (website here) were one of the best bands of all time, but being folk-rock fusion they never hit mainstream. They were the first band I ever saw live (at the Birmingham Hippodrome in 1978). Brilliant guitar and keyboards, they flipped effortlessly between heavy rock – and I mean proper heavy rock, not that laryngitis-fuelled crap you get now – and acoustic traditional Irish folk.
In fact, here is the Dearg Doom segment from the BBC programme:
They released another album ( Rollback ) a couple of years ago – a semi-acoustic retake on their older stuff with some newer tracks. I wish they’d tour again.
I really recommend checking out some of their stuff. The album The Book Of Invasions is incredible, and holds up well considering it was released way back in 1976! Also take a look at The Man Who Built America (the album tour I went to).
EDIT 01801/2010: Worth pointing out that the episodes can be viewed online using the BBC iPlayer . Don’t forget they are only viewable for a limited time.
I had to go somewhere on Christmas Eve – a long drive south in snow and fog. I knew it was going to be a potentially risky journey, so I took special care.
You see, the night before – bearing in mind the many, many roads our illustrious Nottingham City and County Councils had seen fit not to grit – we had a strange combination of weather. The roads were already slick with compacted snow, and what first happened was that is rained heavily on top of this .
I’m not sure if those who work for the councils are aware of what happens when you pour water on top of ice when the outside temperature is at or below freezing, but if they do they certainly don’t seem to care.
After about half an hour of rain, the precipitation turned progressively through sleet and then to heavy snow. I should say that about another 1cm or more fell by the time it stopped.
Now, just imagine the surface that resulted from the following:
compacted and untreated sheet ice
water at 0°C
partially frozen water (sleet)
frozen water (snow)
further compaction by vehicles
sub-sero temperatures
I didn’t have to drive on this, fortunately (though there were some rural roads in Gloucestershire and Wiltshire closed for similar reasons). But listening to the radio as I started my journey on Christmas Eve, it appears that conditions Wednesday night and Thursday morning were some of the worst in memory. Police had had to close roads on just about any hill (according to the radio) because it was impossible to get up them. But unlike Gloucs and Wilts, where it was a few isolated rural roads they had closed, at least some of these in Nottingham were in the centre of the the City (Mapperley and Carlton).
Last night (Christmas Day evening) the temperature stayed above freezing and a lot of the snow finally began to melt properly – although the compacted and untreated surfaces are even more treacherous in this state. The roads have been iced over for a whole week, yet the Nottingham City and County Councils have done almost nothing.
The last week has cost me at least £400 in lost income.
Still, at least the councils saved some rock salt, eh?
And strike 3! My 9.37am test this morning at Colwick MPTC has also been cancelled. That’s all my tests this week.
I was thinking: since the Nottinghamshire County Council and Nottingham City Council have shown their combined incompetence by not gritting so many roads for over a week now, I wonder if there is any avenue for litigation by driving instructors? You know, suing them for lost income?
The roads around both test centres are abysmal – even a week after the bad weather arrived. I have seen gritters out, and I can see exactly what our illustrious councils are up to: they are only gritting large roads – no doubt in an attempt to conserve rock salt supplies so they can’t be accused of running out of that again (remember February this year?)
What makes it worse is that Nottingham has had no more than 1-2cm of snow spread over 3 or 4 light dustings. The problem is hard, compacted, and completely untreated ice.
My web host is 1&1 – I joined up with them a couple of years ago because they were doing a ‘free year’ offer, and my then web host (UKHosts) had really annoyed me by being hacked (and whoever did it had deleted all the index files and main images)… but not telling me until some of my clients complained their websites were down, and I called them! (And see the comment right at the end of this article – looks like it may have happened again.)
The old “we tried to call you when it happened” crap didn’t cut any ice with me.
Anyway, the great thing about 1&1 is that if you email them with a technical query (or any other type of question come to that), they respond within an hour. UKHosts used to ignore their emails and it was always the same guy who eventually dealt with any query after you’d eventually lost your temper and sent an arsey email. Plus, their phone was permanently engaged or otherwise on answerphone – which they also never used to respond to.
Anyway, I use WordPress to run this blog. Every so often there is an upgrade to fix bugs or add new features, and so far that hasn’t been an issue. However, with the last upgrade you can only run WordPress from a MySQL database version higher than 4.1.something (I forget which now). Mine was 4.0.something.
My account allows me to create MySQL 4 and MySQL 5 databases, and in the recesses of my mind I seem to have a recollection that WordPress specifically mentioned MySQL 4 when I first set it up. Therefore, I was running WordPress from the earlier version of a MySQL database.
Creating a new MySQL 5 database was easy – but it was empty! I needed to be able to transfer my old database data into the new one. Everything indicated that this was a walk in the park. An absolute doddle. After all, I had made periodic backups of my database, so I could restore the site quickly if anything ever went wrong. Well, all I can say is, I am bloody happy that I never had to do that. I had plenty of fun and games doing what appears to be a simple operation.
The only criticism I would have of 1&1 over this was their FAQs. Basically, they are wrong (unless they have updated them as a result of my problem). At best, the FAQs are incredibly misleading – missing out spaces on instructions for command line operations is a guaranteed disaster – and command line systems are not known for being logical in the first place.
Anyway, without going into huge detail over what went wrong, here is how to do it right (and it was 1&1 who sorted this out for me). I will assume you have created a new MySQL 5 database from within your Admin Panel.
First of all you need to back up your old database. Go to yourAdmin Panel, go to the MySQL Admin area, and choose the database you want to back up:
Select Your Database
In the PHPMyAdmin area, click on “Export”:
Export The Database
In the database window (shown below), leave everything unchanged except for the tick box (circled) – you want to save your file – and make sure the SQL option is selected:
Select Settings And Save File
Just choose somewhere to save the file where you can find it (call it something simple like ‘dump_db’), then click GO. This will create your backup file.
Now you need to use your FTP client to upload the ‘dump_db.sql’ file to the root directory of your webspace – that’s the highest level you can go to, above all your folders for your websites.
All of this was the easy part. 1&1 has various FAQs for importing the dumped database, but none of them worked for me. It turned out my database was too big (it was less than 7MB, but they’d told me it just needed to be less than 9MB for the standard import from MyPHPAdmin to work).
If you are lucky, clicking on the SQL button will allow you to browse your PC for the dumped file and restore it from there. But I wasn’t lucky. I had to use SSH to complete the restore.
I downloaded PuTTY (an open source telnet client). You just run this program from the downloaded file – it doesn’t install anything to your PC. When it opens, it looks like this:
PuTTY Settings Window
Type in your host name – it’s the name you use in your FTP client and will be something like ‘ftp.yourdomainname.co.uk’. Make sure SSH is selected, then click ‘Open’. You will now get the telnet window, like this:
PuTTY Telnet Window
At the prompt, type in your username (again, the one you use to access your webspace using your FTP client – with 1&1 it’ll be something like ‘u50012345’), then press ENTER. Enter your password (same as your FTP again), and press ENTER. You’ll now see something like this:
Logged Into Your Server
Now you’re ready for the most important – and most tricky – part. You’ve got to run a command to copy the dumped database into the new one. It has to be typed EXACTLY right using the EXACT parameters (this was one of the confusing parts of the FAQs, because the usernames and passwords are not what you’d expect unless you’ve done this before).
Look at your list of databases again (in your MySQL Admin area):
The Database List
Those values I have highlighted are the database name, the database username, and the database host name. You’ll also need a password – and this is one which you set up specifically for SSH from your main Admin Panel. Note that the names are for the MySQL 5 database – the one you want to copy your dumped data into.
At the prompt in the telnet (PuTTY) window, you must type the following. It has to be exactly like this (substituting the relevant data from your Admin Panel):
mysql -h db9876.oneandone.co.uk -u dbo343434343 -p db343434343 < dump_file.sql
Let me just repeat that, but highlighting the spaces you must type using the symbol “• ” in red:
Press ENTER, then type in your SSH password when prompted, and press ENTER again. The command will execute and your new MySQL 5 database should now contain all your dumped data.
EDIT 03/01/2010: I noticed someone searching for “how to open an sql file and edit”. This is quite simple – you need to use a text editor that doesn’t alter the file by adding headers or messing with file extensions. Notepad++ is an open source program and works perfectly for this and other code editing.
EDIT 22/1/2010: In the last two days I have had several hits on the search term “ukhosts hacked”. My experience was well over a year ago (I’ve been with 1&1 for over a year, and I changed to them directly as a result of the example I gave at the start of this article). I can only guess that UKHosts has been hacked again.
If anyone knows, use the Contact Form from the menu above and give me the details.
I had a 9.17am test and didn’t expect it to go ahead. It snowed a little more last night and the temperature is stuck at -1ºC – and the roads were already treacherous around the test centre and on side roads.
To add to the problems, a lorry had shed its load this morning on the Colwick Loop Road – the examiner I spoke to on the phone said that alone was enough for them to have to cancel the first couple of tests as there was gridlock down there, but the weather was going to stop them going ahead anyway.
It is still hard to believe that the Nottingham City and County Councils have not gritted the minor roads. All it would take is one pass and they’d be free of ice.
Yesterday afternoon I had a lesson with the pupil whose test today has been cancelled. We couldn’t get up her road on the way back – the only way was with a run up, and trying to do it from a standing start was impossible (and that prat in the ice cream van who lives on Allington Road in Lenton who hooted us got stuck as well – serves the tosser right).
As an artefact to upgrading my database from mySQL 4.0 to mySQL 5.0 (so I could apply the latest WordPress update), I noticed a whole heap of ‘Â’ symbols had appeared in my previous posts.
I started to edit them out, then realised there must be a better way. Thanks to Brad J Frey’s blog, I fixed it in about 15 seconds.
All you have to do is log into your PHPMyAdmin control panel for the database you want to change, then choose the SQL button, as shown here:
PHPMyAdmin For Database
This opens up a window – make sure you select the SQL tab:
MySQL Query Window
This is the query I used to get rid of the  symbols:
UPDATE `wp_posts` SET post_content = replace(post_content,””,””);
The general format is:
UPDATE `tablename` SET fieldname = replace(fieldname,”what-to-replace”,”what-to-replace-with”);
Just hit GO and the replace operation is done very quickly.
EDIT 22/12/2009: But even better than this, I found a plugin for WordPress which does the search and replace for you. Thanks to thedeadone.net for that. It’s much better.
I had an 8.40am test this morning, and I picked the pupil up at 6.45am. It was deadly on some roads – on some downward slopes you simple couldn’t stop.
I knew the test would be cancelled, but I couldn’t confirm it until the test centre staff got into work (that turned out to be 7.30am). I didn’t charge her – how can you? – but we used the hour we were driving around to get some valuable snow/skidding experience.
I’m not optimistic about my next two early tests tomorrow and Wednesday.
EDIT 21/12/2009 #1: Oh. And I have STILL not seen one gritting lorry. Some of the bigger roads have been done at long last – but 99% of the others haven’t. Good ol’ Nottingham City and County Councils, eh?
EDIT 21/12/2009 #2: The test centre cancelled the whole day of tests in the end – I had a quick chat with the SE this afternoon while I was out with a pupil. And I saw ONE gritting lorry while I was out with another pupil tonight at around 6.15pm.
I’ve recently installed some tracking software on my site so I can see who is online, who’s been online, and where they were from. Nothing sinister, but I just like to know what people are searching for in the context of where they live.
The software also lets you see which bots are crawling on your site. A bot (or spider) is sent by search engines to index your site so people can find it.
Now, you’d think that the likes of Google or Microsoft would be the ones doing all the crawling, wouldn’t you? In actual fact, a Googlebot makes a visit at such frequency that you will most likely not notice it has been there. At this moment in time, I have had a visit in the last 10 minutes or so from a Googlebot in Cabot, AR.
But get this: at the same time, I have been visited 22 times by Baiduspider (based in Beijing, China). And I bet the use of the words ‘Beijing’ and ‘China’ are going to get me a few dozen more visits.
Baiduspider appears to aggressively hunt for new posts. It has indexed my post about the first snow on all tags in a fraction of the time it takes Google to pick up on the same. Over the last few days, I have noticed that it is more or less continually present on my site.
I say this with my tongue firmly in my cheek, but I wonder why Beijing is so anxious to find all new posts so quickly?
EDIT: Wow. Both Google (Cabot, again) and Baiduspider got this within 1 minute of publishing! However, whereas the Googlebot is a single entity, Baiduspider is (so far) TWELVE separate entities. That’s 12 separate bots.
Had a lesson at 7.45 this morning… there was a dusting of snow last night, and the temperature was fixed on 0°C (it still is, even at 10.30am with the sun shining). But I noticed a couple of things…
First of all, the number of roads which hadn’t been gritted. I took my pupil past the Chalfont Drive Test Centre and the road was slick with black ice and compacted snow (we may have had only a slight dusting, but it was a little more in some places). I don’t think for a moment that any of the 8.10, 8.20, or 8.40 tests went out – but they could have done if the gritters had done their job.
It’s annoying, because this cold weather has been forecast for a week – and especially seeing that last year, the biggest hazard on the road was the grit! They were shovelling the stuff on in lorry-loads full. I sometimes wonder what the Nottingham City and County Councils (and whoever their bureaucracy says is responsible for gritting) actually do for a living, because whatever it is it is rarely the appropriate thing. I should imagine they were all in meetings this morning discussing where to grit.
The second thing I noticed was the number of drivers who – as usual – haven’t got it into their heads yet the two most important things:
snow + cold = slippery
slippery + crap driving = accidents
They are driving too close, too fast, braking too harshly… it’s no wonder so many accidents occur. And there were plenty on the radio to listen to.
It’s the time of year when pupils suddenly realise they have an alternative use for their time and money, and start cancelling their lessons (or not booking anymore until January).
I’m not too worried, though. For a start, I originally had over 40 hours booked for this week (this is one useful little trick to help deal with cancellations: book as many as you can, so that cancellations don’t matter). The freed up slots I can now offer to pupils who’d said they wanted lessons, but who I couldn’t fit in – even if a only a couple take the offer it helps offset the lost income. And even if they don’t, it’s time off for me, and I’ve still got over 30 hours scheduled.
To be fair to my lot, they are at least being honest by telling me they can’t afford lessons with Christmas coming up. I can also understand where they are coming from: learning to drive is definitely not cheap when you add it all up.
One thing I will never agree with, though: other instructors who insist that Christmas is when it traditionally goes quiet. The worst that can be said is that – for two weeks – some pupils will not be taking lessons. This is no big surprise, seeing how Christmas is celebrated in this country. Other than that, it is business as usual as far as I am concerned.
EDIT 8/12/2009: And there you go! Just after I wrote this entry, I got an email from a pupil booking 12 hours of lessons over the next three weeks!
Mind you, I feel sorry for one of my others. He had a lesson booked for tonight, and he’s off to Australia tomorrow on a school cricket tour. I got a call from his mum about an hour before saying he has been injured playing rugby (someone stood on his knee). I hope he’s OK – his family was going out to meet him in a couple of weeks and they were due to be spending Christmas out there – but his mum sounded upset, and his injury seems quite serious.
