I was trying to create stored function in MySQL and kept getting the above error. Googling didn’t give me much help, other than suggesting to look in /var/log/syslog.

I’d read that this error can be caused by an incomplete upgrade. Although this was a fresh install of MySQL, I had restored all of the databases from another server on to it. However in syslog, it said:

Aug 2 13:23:09 Hunt /etc/mysql/debian-start[7572]: /usr/bin/mysqlcheck: Got error: 1045: Access denied for user ‘debian-sys-maint’@'localhost’ (using password: YES) when trying to connect
Aug 2 13:23:09 Hunt /etc/mysql/debian-start[7572]: FATAL ERROR: Upgrade failed

I think the restore had overwritten the password for debian-sys-maint, so I grabbed what it thought password should have been from /etc/mysql/debian.cnf, set it correctly and restarted MySQL. This time it reported that an upgrade was not necessary, but still I was getting “Cannot load from mysql.proc. The table is probably corrupted”. The clue lay in syslog:

Aug  2 13:33:36 Hunt /etc/mysql/debian-start[8236]: This installation of MySQL is already upgraded to 5.5.24, use –force if you still need to run mysql_upgrade

Running this command fixed it:

mysql_upgrade –force -u root -p

Hope this is helpful to someone!

First off, let me declare my bias right up front. I like Apple products. I’ve had an iPod, iPod Nano, MacBook, MacBook Pro, iMac and iPhone. I like them because they let me do what I want to do with the minimum of fuss.

Up until December last year, I’d been using an iPhone 3G. I had been planning on getting an iPhone 4, but really wanted one in white (my wife always has black, I always have white). As they became more and more delayed, I decided to give up waiting and buy a similarly priced iPad (since I was going to get an unlocked iPhone direct from Apple) and simply upgrade to an iPhone 5 the next year.

I really had no interest in getting an Android phone because the Nexus One was old news and all the other phones had Android versions that had been munged with. If I was going to get an Android phone, I didn’t want to have to wait for the manufacturer and my carrier to decide when I was going to get an update.

Then the Nexus S came out and I figured I’d get a SIM free unlocked version, see if I liked it, if I didn’t I’d just throw it up on eBay. That was back in December and here we are at the start of Februrary and the phone is on eBay. I’m going back to my iPhone 3G for a few months.

So why am I selling it? There are a few reasons.

First off, the browser. Considering both MobileSafari and the Android browser are based on WebKit, I really don’t know why the Android browser is so terrible. First off, double tap to zoom doesn’t work. You have two options here; first, double tap on something, then it zooms in on it, then it reflows the text to fit into the space it zoomed to, which looks terrible and annoys me because I don’t want the browser to fiddle with page content. Second, you turn off the text reflowing and it zooms in the same amount as before but the text you double tapped on doesn’t fit on the screen. Opera and Dolphin Browser HD suffer the same problem. Tap target detection seems off as well. If there were two links next to each other, one above the other, more often than not I’d end up hitting the lower one. These problems are pretty much deal breakers on their own for me. Apps are nice and all, but I spend most of my time on a smartphone in the web browser and Android’s experience here is terrible.

There are couple of completely maddening things on the Nexus S. Across the bottom, it has these four touch sensitive “buttons”, which are, from left to right, “Back”, “UI elements we couldn’t fit on the screen so we crammed them in here” aka “Menu”, “Search” and “Home”. The problem with them being touch sensitive it that if I’m holding the phone one handed and pressing something on the screen with my thumb the palm of my hand hits the “Home” button, exiting the app. Then there is the “where the fuck is that option?” button. Some apps are worse for this than others, but some developers seem to use the “Menu” button as a dumping ground for controls they couldn’t be bothered to find a sensible place for in the UI. Here’s a hint, if I have to think “hmm, where is the control for that, perhaps its in the menu drawer”, you blew it.

The battery life isn’t great. By default the phone has “Live Wallpapers” enabled, which destroy the battery life. I tried running Skype, it destroyed the battery. Having wi-fi on destroys the battery. You can add a little widget to your home screen to turn on and off various power hungry features and you can dig into Settings to shut down draining applications, but I’ve got better things to do with my time. By having wi-fi off most of the time, live wallpapers off, nothing running in the background, it’ll last about the same time as my iPhone 3G, which considering that is 2.5 years old now, isn’t good.

There have been a number of other little annoyances as well. It doesn’t pick up wi-fi very well. I keep having to turn the whole thing on and off because wouldn’t connect to the phone network. There is no decent media management solution (doubleTwist is a waste of money, don’t bother). It doesn’t ship with standard web fonts.

There were a few things I did like – the voice input is cool and works pretty well. If it didn’t immediately get what I said then what I did say was usually one of the other options. The free Google Navigation worked well when I tried it out when visiting Stratford-upon-Avon to see a play. The portable hotspot was great for using my non-3G iPad on the move. None of these are features I use regularly though that outweigh the annoyances in day to day use, which is why I’ve put mine up for sale.

Please donate on my Mospace page.

This month, I have been growing a moustache for Movember. Movember helps to raise awareness of and provide money to support research into men’s health, particularly prostate cancer.

My own particular inspiration for doing this is my Grandfather, who died in 2008 from a prostate cancer related illness at the age of 81. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer a number of years beforehand; for a long time it was under control and didn’t spread. However, when it finally did spread, his decline was quick and it was very hard for everyone who loved him to see. Of course, losing loved ones is always hard, it isn’t a story unique to me or my family. There are other diseases that are far harder to deal with and at much younger ages as well. However, this is my story, so that is what I’m telling.

The thing with prostate cancer is that it affects far more people than you might think, yet much less money is spent on researching it. 24% of all cancers diagnosed in men is prostate cancer. It is estimated from post-mortem evidence that 80% of men aged 80 have evidence of cancer in the prostate. Most of the time, this isn’t what kills them, but it should be clear that the evidence shows that as men ages, their chance of being affected by it increases drastically. The rate of incidence triples from 151 per 100,000 in the 55-59 age range to 515 per 100,000 10 years later. Average life expectancy increases by a year every 4-5 years, so the number of people affected by prostate cancer can only increase. My grandfather perfectly demonstrated this by saying on his 80th birthday that he was surprised to be celebrating it, because no one in his family had made it to that age before. People are living longer, so we have to deal with the diseases that affect them.

Just 7.9% of cancer research spending in the UK is spent on prostate cancer. To help increase this, I’ve donated my top lip for the whole month of November, or Movember as it is now known. You can donate via my Mospace page, anything you can give will be much appreciated: http://uk.movember.com/mospace/1238756

You can read more about prostate cancer here: http://info.cancerresearchuk.org/cancerstats/types/prostate/

…and yes, that really is a whole month of moustache growth for me. I blame my genes.

Royal Mail’s Online Postage used be a great service. In a nutshell, it allowed you to pay for posting something online. Once you had paid, you could then print out an envelope or label and pop it in the post without having to get a book of stamps or visit the Post Office. No mess, no fuss.
For Mac users, that was the happy situation up until fairly recently, when Royal Mail “upgraded” their offering and completely broke it.

You see, when you download your label, it comes as a PDF with “SAMPLE” in large, unfriendly letters across the front of it and a small box explaining that this wouldn’t print out on the final label. Which was true, whether you were using Adobe’s official PDF viewer, Adobe Reader or Apple’s Preview, which ships with Mac OS X and doesn’t come with a load of crapware attached (Adobe Air? Acrobat.com? Fuck off Adobe). However since Royal Mail “upgraded” the service, if you print the label in Preview it also prints the unfriendly “SAMPLE” and the notice that it won’t print the word “SAMPLE”.

So you have to use Adobe Reader instead. However this doesn’t work either, as I found out. Not only does it force you to install other services that I didn’t want (Still here Adobe? FUCK OFF), but when I first launched it, it halted to install updates. That’s right, updates on software I just downloaded and installed. Then, say for example you told Royal Mail you wanted to print out a DL envelope. Well Adobe Reader can’t manage to print that out for you. Instead, it assumes that the envelope itself is A4 and scales it down to fit on the envelope. Which it then fails to print on, only managing to fit the top 25% of the label on the bottom of the envelope, rendering it useless.

So congratulations Royal Mail. You’ve taken a useful, if little known, service and rendered it useless for me. I guess I should be thankful you haven’t closed the Post Office at the end of my street.

While the iPad is now available for pre-order over in the US, the date when you can do the same in the UK has not yet been announced. There are some questions to be answered: What will the UK pricing be, should you buy one and if yes, what model should you get?

Up until fairly recently, Apple were displaying the US prices on their UK site, with a note that international prices had not yet been announced. This, to me, seemed a strange move for Apple considering their UK prices have usually been substantially more than the (US price * exchange rate) + VAT. Perhaps for once they were going to actually do that, but since the initial announcement of the iPad sterling has slipped considerably against the dollar, which I think was what prompted the removal of the US pricing. They are, however, still trailing it as being available at a “unbelievable price”. Unfortunately for those of us in the UK, this is more likely to be unbelievably high than unbelievably low.

These are the current US prices:

Current US prices in sterling at current exchange rate (£1=$1.517):

What I expect sterling prices to be for the iPad:

It is very much possible that they may be higher, they may be lower. I have no insider information, but on past evidence I would expect prices to be at least those I have listed. There is precedent for worse; Apple TV is available in the US at $229 (£151 at the above exchange rate) but its UK price is £223.

Anyway, regardless of that, which iPad should you buy? Let’s start by thinking about which model to go for – Wi-fi or Wi-fi + 3G (which I’ll refer to just as the 3G model after this point to prevent confusion). I personally think it is unlikely that the iPad’s main use is going to be going on the Internet while on the move, that’s what the iPhone is for. So you could make the case that you don’t need to buy the 3G model. However, the 3G version also has GPS, which to me is justification to spend the extra money on that model. The 3G chippery itself is a mere bonus. The possible applications of GPS in location-aware apps is very exciting and I wouldn’t want to be excluded from that. So get the 3G model.

Next question is how much storage should you go for? When buying a hard drive, my advice is usually to think about how much you need and double it. My 16Gb iPhone is full and only has one movie on it. The iPad is going to be a million times better for looking at photos and watching movies, which will require much more storage. Better to be able to take as much as possible with you rather than wishing you’d put movie x on rather than the selection you brought with you. So I’d go for at least 32Gb, preferably 64Gb.

Does that mean if you can’t afford the £699 top of the range 64Gb 3G model, you shouldn’t get one? No, it doesn’t. If you want one, get the one you can afford, but I’d go for the 16Gb 3G model before looking at the 32Gb Wi-fi model because it gives you more possibilities with it’s GPS. You can always swap around your content if necessary, even if it is a bit of a faff. You can’t swap the features around.

So, am I going to buy an iPad? No. Not yet anyway. At the moment the iPad doesn’t offer me enough to justify getting a device between my iPhone and MacBook Pro. It’s close, though. I suspect the mark 2 iPad will have a forward facing camera, which will make it a great device for video conferencing and all the stuff the mark 1 can do. Roll on the 2011 model.

We had a letter through the door from our MP, talking about Worcester City Council’s proposed (and I believe, now approved) cuts on CCTV. I’d provide a link to the contents of the letter, but it doesn’t seem to be on his website. Anyway, here is what I wrote in reply.

Mr Foster,

Thank for you for letter regarding the CCTV situation in Worcester. I will be filling in the survey and returning it to you shortly, but I thought I would take a few minutes to give you my thoughts regarding some of the points you made in your letter and related issues.

The overall impression given in the letter is that the camera will no longer be there and that we will be less safe without them. You say
that you have “seen the statistics showing arrests made thanks to CCTV evidence”. Neither of these points are particularly informative or
helpful to me. If you have seen the statistics, I think it would have been useful to put that information in your letter, so that I and
others receiving it could make a more informed decision. Without that information how am I to know whether or not manning the CCTV
monitoring room is a cost effective use of council resources?

Which brings me to the second point,  the use of CCTV as a deterrent. Before writing to you, I thought I would take the time to look at the news stories on the issue, to make sure that I was fully informed. None of them say that the CCTV cameras will be taken down, or that
they will no longer be recording. They say that they will no longer be monitored. If this is true, then the deterrent benefit is still there
because the evidence will still be stored.

It saddens me greatly that the image that you portray in your letter is one where we all need to be watched, constantly, to ensure our
safety. Technology and surveillance are not a panacea. The only long term answer to our society’s problem is education. Knowledge is a
shining beacon against ignorance. By informing the young they will grow up to be thoughtful, intelligent people. I would far rather my council spent it’s money on educating the people of Worcester than watching them.

I really do not think that it is the “professional” criminal that makes people feel unsafe in our city. Rather it is the things that CCTV cannot prevent, merely observe. Things like vandalism, drunk and disorderly people, gang violence, etc. I am not surprised that you do believe that it can stop these things with CCTV though, since you are a Labour MP. I find the Labour Government’s cavalier attitude to putting us all on databases and giving us ID cards, so you can track our every move very disturbing. I know the argument, if I’ve done nothing wrong I’ve got nothing to fear. What if the Government does something wrong and gets me confused with someone else with the same
name. How can I argue against the system? Our civil liberties have been hard won and no one deserves, as you voted to allow, to be locked
up for 42 days without charge, even if they are a “terrorist”. Who decides tomorrow who is a terrorist? Could it be someone who disagrees with you?

Which brings me onto my final point. I find it deeply distressing and abhorrent that you raised the 2005 terror attacks in London as a reason to support CCTV. In this case it neither prevented the crime, nor caught the people involved. They had blown themselves up, along with 50  other people. CCTV could not save those people. CCTV will not comfort the people who lost loved ones. The warm glow of the CCTV monitor will not put any warmth back into those people who died. You should be ashamed.

Yours sincerely,

Alex Mace

Ok, so my site has been offline a little while. I fell out with my host when it proved to be a pain the the arse to set up a regular payment via PayPal and couldn’t be bothered to find another one in the short term. So for now, this site is being hosted on a box in my house. It’s not exactly a powerhouse, being a silent little EPIA SP based machine, running at a mighty 800Mhz, but that should do for now.

In the short term I plan to evaluate what blog software is out there at there at the moment and possibly switch from WordPress. I also want to transistion from using this domain name (whythehell.co.uk) to alexmace.co.uk and setup proper redirects.