Author Archives: Joseph

Joomla error number 2006 MySQL server has gone away

I look after a number of servers in my spare time 🙂 One of the guys who I help out contacted me recently with a weird Joomla issue when trying to install a particular component.

* JInstaller::install: SQL Error. DB function failed with error
number 2006
MySQL server has gone away SQL=CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS
`jos_comprofiler` ( `id` int(11) NOT NULL default ‘0’, `user_id` int(11) NOT

Other modules and components would install fine, the only one failing to install was comprofiler, part of the Community Builder module for Joomla/Mambo. Other parts of the same module were also installing fine.
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Got fine print?

Reading a recent advert that made it’s way into my inbox, I was bemused by the amount of small print and clarifications you see in advertisements of this type.

Is it because consumers are too uneducated or the product supplier over complicating a product?

Seems to be like this across many products and services these days, maybe it’s defining human stupidity.

Experiments in HDR

I’ve had a crack at HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography a couple of times over the last few months.

The idea is that you take multiple pictures of the same scene bracketed at different settings, ie. plus or minus 1 Fstop. You then combine all the images together with something like Photomatix and maybe tweak things up a bit.

Once the images are combined you should get something that looks better than you could take in a single image. It’s also bit of an art form where people come up with all sorts of wacky images 🙂

Anyway here’s one I took and put together on the weekend, the last day of Autumn.

More HDR experiments over here, will see what else I can try when I get some time.

Pingdom GIGRIB

Pingdom offer a commercial web site monitoring service, they also offer a free monitoring solution that you can join, GIGRIB.

Pingdom GIGRIB is a unique, distributed website monitoring service. GIGRIB users can add websites they want monitored, and in return their computers become a part of the GIGRIB monitoring network.

A while back I setup the GIGRIB client on the only Windows PC in the house and it seemed to run ok. I was contributing several thousands of checks a day to the project and monitoring a couple of sites I was interested in.
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