Cody Taylor

“Ubuntu Studio is a multimedia editing/creation flavor of Ubuntu, built for the GNU/Linux audio, video, and graphics enthusiast or professional”

At first I thought it must be a mistake, so I decided to click the Stumble button and see what would happen. Instead of jumping back down to 98 as I expected it would, it went down to 499 and then continued to count down as I stumbled more pages.

A Collection of all the best free photo editing services, which will keep You busy for quite a while and You will receive amazing results – maybe funny, maybe silly – but You’ll get original photos and few more reasons to smile

An anonymous reader writes “Accurate face recognition is coming. Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition, a face recognition start-up spun out from Carnegie Mellon University, has posted a tech demo showing an analysis of the entire original Star Trek series using face recognition. The online visualization includes various annotated clips of the series with clickable thumbnails of each character’s appearance. They also have a separate page showing the full data of all the prominent characters in every episode including extracting thumbnails of each appearance.” Their software can recognize frontal or near-frontal face instances.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

krou writes “In Dec. 2006, we discussed the Espresso Book Machine. Well, on April 27 the bookseller Blackwell will launch a three month trial of the machine in its Charing Cross Road branch in London as a ‘print on demand’ service for shoppers in an effort ‘to consign to history the idea that you can walk into a bookshop and not find the book you want.’ When the trial begins, it will be able to print any of some 400,000 titles; Blackwell’s overall goal is to extend this to a million titles by the summer, and to spread out more machines to the rest of its sixty stores once it works out pricing. Currently, they charge shelf price for in-print books, and 10 pence per page for those out of print (about for a 300-page book), but are analyzing customer behavior to get a better pricing model. Says Blackwell chief executive Andrew Hutchings: ‘This could change bookselling fundamentally. It’s giving the chance for smaller locations, independent booksellers, to have the opportunity to truly compete with big stock-holding shops and Amazon… I like to think of it as the revitalization of the local bookshop industry.’ Their website notes that in addition to getting books printed in-store, in future you will be able to order titles via their site. (They also mention that one of the titles you can print is the 1915 Oxford Poetry Book, which includes one of Tolkien’s first poems, ‘Goblin’s Feet.’)” You’ll also be able to bring in your own book to print — two PDF files, one for the book block and one for the cover.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I came home today to find that my computers were powered off. All my clocks were blinking. Power outages suck balls.
I don’t have a UPS but I am running a test web site on my local machine that has been getting some nice traffic lately so I should probably invest. After starting everything up I tried running one of my php scripts that access my mysql database. Error.

Warning: mysql_connect(): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2) in /home/ctaylor/scripts/webcrawl.php on line 8

Why isn’t my database running? I have seen this before. Possible database corruption? I prayed that this wasn’t the case and executed:

codytaylor@desktop:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/mysql start
 * Starting MySQL database server mysqld                                                                 [fail] 
codytaylor@desktop:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/mysql restart
 * Stopping MySQL database server mysqld                                                                [ OK ] 
 * Starting MySQL database server mysqld                                                                 [fail] 

Awesome. So now what?
Hoping to get a handle on what exactly is causing it not to start I first checked /var/log/mysql.err and /var/log/mysql.log.
They were both empty. Useful right?
I then did decided to check syslog. I didn’t find anything at first but then I followed syslog while trying to restart mysql.

codytaylor@desktop:/var/log$ tail -f syslog
Apr 24 19:59:54 desktop mysqld_safe[8173]: started
Apr 24 19:59:54 desktop mysqld[8176]: 090424 19:59:54 [Warning] Can't create test file /var/lib/mysql/desktop.lower-test
Apr 24 19:59:54 desktop mysqld[8176]: 090424 19:59:54 [Warning] Can't create test file /var/lib/mysql/desktop.lower-test
Apr 24 19:59:54 desktop mysqld[8176]: 090424 19:59:54 [Warning] One can only use the --user switch if running as root
Apr 24 19:59:54 desktop mysqld[8176]: 
Apr 24 19:59:54 desktop mysqld[8176]: 090424 19:59:54  InnoDB: Operating system error number 13 in a file operation.
Apr 24 19:59:54 desktop mysqld[8176]: InnoDB: The error means mysqld does not have the access rights to
Apr 24 19:59:54 desktop mysqld[8176]: InnoDB: the directory.
Apr 24 19:59:54 desktop mysqld[8176]: InnoDB: File name ./ibdata1
Apr 24 19:59:54 desktop mysqld[8176]: InnoDB: File operation call: 'open'.
Apr 24 19:59:54 desktop mysqld[8176]: InnoDB: Cannot continue operation.
Apr 24 19:59:54 desktop mysqld_safe[8183]: ended
Apr 24 20:00:08 desktop /etc/init.d/mysql[8336]: 0 processes alive and '/usr/bin/mysqladmin --defaults-file=/etc/mysql/debian.cnf ping' resulted in
Apr 24 20:00:08 desktop /etc/init.d/mysql[8336]: Could not open required defaults file: /etc/mysql/debian.cnf
Apr 24 20:00:08 desktop /etc/init.d/mysql[8336]: Fatal error in defaults handling. Program aborted
Apr 24 20:00:08 desktop /etc/init.d/mysql[8336]: 

I executed the restart of mysql as root didn’t I? All the folders and files are owned by the mysql user. WTF?
So it’s saying that first it can’t create a test file /var/lib/mysql/dektop.lower-test and then that it can’t open ./ibdata.
My first instinct was to set everything to 777 and just go get a beer. But probably not a good idea.
So obviously this is a permissions error. But seeing as the mysql user owns everything in this folder it’s a little confusing.
I then executed:

codytaylor@desktop:/var/lib/mysql$ sudo chmod -R 755 ./*

I tried starting mysql again. Same error.
I got frustrated and said screw it for the night. This morning while I was trying to get rid of the hangover I tried again to start mysql again and I got a totally different error in my syslog.

Apr 25 20:49:48 desktop mysqld_safe[31095]: started
Apr 25 20:49:48 desktop mysqld[31098]: 090425 20:49:48  InnoDB: Started; log sequence number 0 60274
Apr 25 20:49:48 desktop mysqld[31098]: 090425 20:49:48 [ERROR] Can't start server: Bind on TCP/IP port: Cannot assign requested address
Apr 25 20:49:48 desktop mysqld[31098]: 090425 20:49:48 [ERROR] Do you already have another mysqld server running on port: 3306 ?
Apr 25 20:49:48 desktop mysqld[31098]: 090425 20:49:48 [ERROR] Aborting
Apr 25 20:49:48 desktop mysqld[31098]: 
Apr 25 20:49:48 desktop mysqld[31098]: 090425 20:49:48  InnoDB: Starting shutdown...
Apr 25 20:49:50 desktop mysqld[31098]: 090425 20:49:50  InnoDB: Shutdown completed; log sequence number 0 60274
Apr 25 20:49:50 desktop mysqld[31098]: 090425 20:49:50 [Note] /usr/sbin/mysqld: Shutdown complete
Apr 25 20:49:50 desktop mysqld[31098]: 
Apr 25 20:49:50 desktop mysqld_safe[31119]: ended
Apr 25 20:50:02 desktop /etc/init.d/mysql[31263]: 0 processes alive and '/usr/bin/mysqladmin --defaults-file=/etc/mysql/debian.cnf ping' resulted in
Apr 25 20:50:02 desktop /etc/init.d/mysql[31263]: ^G/usr/bin/mysqladmin: connect to server at 'localhost' failed
Apr 25 20:50:02 desktop /etc/init.d/mysql[31263]: error: 'Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2)'
Apr 25 20:50:02 desktop /etc/init.d/mysql[31263]: Check that mysqld is running and that the socket: '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' exists!
Apr 25 20:50:02 desktop /etc/init.d/mysql[31263]: 

All of a sudden it’s only a problem with the bind address? What happened to the permissions error? I didn’t reboot or anything.
Easy enough to fix though.
I open up the my.cnf file which resides in /etc/mysql/.
I look for the bind-address and noticed it was set to 192.168.2.10 instead of my new ip 192.168.1.11.
DHCP assigned it a new ip address which sucks.
So I change the line to reflect the change and restart again. All is now well.
-Cody Taylor

Can’t Mount Drive in Ubuntu Linux 8.10. Cannot mount volume. Unable to mount the volume.

mount_point cannot contain the following characters: newline, G_DIR_SEPARATOR (usually /)

After a power outage it seems something got screwed up with my drive mounting.
I got this error when I decided to access my 500gig drive on my ubuntu linux desktop. A quick google and I found the solution.

Type this into the terminal:

codytaylor@desktop:~$ gconf-editor

Looks like a linux regedit a little eh? Scary.

Go to System -> Storage -> drives.

This will show you the value of the mount point. Change it to only one word without any slashes.
Thats it. For me it put it in as /media/disk-4 but it showed up properly in all the menus. I wish it would just auto mount so I don’t have to reconfigure sharing every time this happens.

-Cody Taylor