Mícheál Ó Foghlú's Weblog

M-Zones Workshop

I spoke at the M-Zones Workshop last week, and event hosted in WIT.

Jon Udell's mindshare tool

Catching up on Jon Udell's weblog showed that he'd updated his mindshare tool: Jon Udell: Web mindshare calculator revisited. I had read and been excited by his original posting in 1999, and it seems just as interesting today. The mindshare tool was originally a perl script which pulled all the sites from a Yahoo! category and then queried AltaVista for how many other sites linked to each of those Yahoo! sites extracted. The idea being that this gives a good map of the web "mindshare", and a clue as to which sites were mst relevant to a particular category. The updated version looks at multiple different search engines (including Google, accessed via its web services SOAP interface). It is still an interesting concept and an excellent of an aggregated service using the capabilities of the modern web.

Weblog Active Again

Well, this weblog has been inactive since April 2003 now it is active again. You may be glad to know that I didn't drown in a terrible Kayak accident off the south coast of Ireland (as the last entry might indicate). The lack of postings were due to the much more posaic issue of a server migration problem and a lack of time to address this problem. The TSSG external Linux server was re-located to a new server (from Texas to the UK) and as a result MT broke (a Berkeley DB problem). It has taken me this long to fix it, which turned out to be relatively easy. The version of DB on the new machine was 4.0.14, which meant that the .db files it needed (for Perl's DB_File in MT) were Btree (version 8). The files I had were Btree (version 6). Unfortunately, the binary rpm of db on the server did not come with the conversion tools needed to upgrade these files, so this is procedure I used in the end.

• Find out what version of db is running

  rpm -qa | grep db

• Download the full source package for that version from sleepycat.org
• Compile it following instructions in README and INSTALL
• Use the binary db_upgrade tool to upgrade the .db and .idx files

The problem is that if you cannot access the DB files, everything is broken. For example you cannot login, as your username and password are stored in author.db which cannot be accessed. So expect more postings once I get things tidied up. For good measure I have also upgraded to using an MySQL backend rather than DB.