about me
A big tumblrdryer of useless junk, probably.
I'm Nathan Collins, or Nate.
My main blog is hintofsarcasm.com
Follow me on twitter, @cardiffblogger
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Remember these Spotify ads that ran early last year for the business I was running at the time? I had almost forgotten about them until I came across the source files…
(Imaginary) Fears Tesco would ‘destroy’ Pontcanna
I love this story, which was published on WalesOnline yesterday.
People are now so afraid of Tesco that as soon as a shop closes down, they start protesting and imagining what it would do to the area - even when Tesco have denied that they are even looking to move into the area!
Talk about creating your own news…
How about asking shopkeepers and the local councillors, while you’re at it, how they would like it if an S&M parlour opened in the place of the old Ballantyne’s wine merchants?
Fears Tesco store would ‘destroy’ Pontcanna - yourCardiff
"Cardiff council’s leaders performed a rapid U-turn last night by insisting construction of a new city centre bus station could start before the London Olympics next year."
—
Anything COULD be done, it’s the DOING that gets it done.
I COULD eat 100 pies, but until I do it, it’s not DONE, and so would be pointless to say.
Council leader insists Olympics is not delaying Cardiff’s new bus station
"The most impassionate song
To a lonely soul
Is so easily outgrown
But don’t forget the songs
That made you smile
And the songs that made you cry
When you lay in awe
On the bedroom floor
And said : “Oh, oh, smother me Mother…"
To a lonely soul
Is so easily outgrown
But don’t forget the songs
That made you smile
And the songs that made you cry
When you lay in awe
On the bedroom floor
And said : “Oh, oh, smother me Mother…"
If you can’t beat them, buy them. Amazon to buy @BookDepository
In typical massive corporation fashion, Amazon have today announced their intention to buy The Book Depository, a humble rooted book seller based out of Gloucester.
The Book Depository has a very faithful customer base, me included, because of their great customer service, free delivery, competitive pricing and their “independent bookshop” feel.
It’s a shame that this should happen now, although we don’t know any of the details yet, will they close it down? I can’t see why they would buy a competitor and keep it running, with its warehousing arrangements, supply chain etc, but I guess that’s what we will find out over the next few days/weeks/months?
Yahoo Finance: Amazon to acquire The Book Depository - http://yhoo.it/lBhzPj
Second disaster recovery #Fail, bye bye @RedGate
Some of you may have seen my tweets over the weekend about having fun, fun, fun spending many hours of my weekend doing prep work on a SAN to get it ready for a new database - up until 5am on Saturday morning, whoosh, I do enjoy it - kinda.
Anyway, so that all went to plan - almost, save for being a few hours out because a process took 19 hours instead of the estimated 10 hours, but nevermind.
Anyway, Tuesday morning I come to restore one of the databases to the new LUNs using the latest backup that is created nightly using Red Gate SQL Backup 6.
I start it and leave it on it’s merry way, low and behold 24 hours later, 8am this morning the restore is still processing - and 0 bytes have been processed.
To say I was frustrated would be an understatement. And that this isn’t the first time that it has happened makes it even more the sour pill to swallow. In fact, the last time I did a disaster recovery dry run back in April the exact same thing happened, and after contacting support at Red Gate software I was eventually told to upgrade the SQL Backup software and all went well after that.
So, I call Red Gate this morning and after not being able to speak to anyone straight away, I eventually get a call back around an hour later (nice start).
So we go through all the usual stuff, I send dumps, screenshots, blah blah and I hear nothing until I send a nice passive aggressive tweet, when I’m told it’s with the developers.
I had this conversation with my boss this afternoon;
Boss: We have backups of all the databases, yeah?
Me: Yes, we do.
Boss: So can you restore it now?
Me: Well, no.
Boss: So we have backups, but we can’t use them?
Me: Yes.
You can see my frustration. I felt like a bit of an idiot having to give those answers.
So, it’s almost 6pm now and I still don’t have a resolution - I upgraded the software again and restarted the restore about 3 hours ago, and it’s still f0rked.
FYI, it should take about ~2hrs to restore.
It is a large database, 3TB uncompressed, 185GB compressed. It is spread over multiple SQL files, but this should not be a problem.
So, I’ll be moving all of our SQL backup processes back to the standard SQL backup offering that comes shipped with MS SQL until I can find a suitable replacement for Red Gate.
If backups are important to you, by all means buy Red Gate SQL Backup - it takes a backup pretty good. If you want to actually be able to use those backups to get your data back, then I’d probably think about looking somewhere else…
“You get to the point where you evolve in your life where everything isn’t black and white, good and bad, and you try to do the right thing.
Well, fuck it, I don’t care what you think. I’m trying to do the right thing. I’m tired of Republican-Democrat politics. They can take the job and shove it.”
Roy McDonald, Conservative Republican who voted to legalize gay marriage in New York.
