Cron Errors

I’m having a strange problem on some of my Drupal sites. Hourly a cron job runs to rebuild caches and do regular maintenance. This is something every Drupal site needs.

Some time in the last 6 months I was finding that cron would get stuck and not complete in the hour. Another would get started and block. Eventually my webhost stopped spawning processes for my user which lead to weird errors on my web page (page not found errors).

I was logged in as me, not the uber administrator when I started messing about. I cleared the cache tables, including the cache_menu table. I was planning on rebuilding the cache table, then the menu system. I was logged in with the wrong account, and I couldn’t remember the administrator account. Since I had thrown out the menu system, I couldn’t navigate to the lost password page.

I had royally messed up my site.

I fixed it by going into the DB and copying the known password from one user to that of the administrator account. I logged in as administrator, ran cron.php manually, then hit up the page to rebuild the menu system.

So far so good. The next day I ran into this tip: How to reset the password of user 1. A little DB query action to set the administrator account password.

I am still having the weird cron blocking issue though. Every couple days I just log in to my web host and kill the running processes and then everything runs fine for a bit. Bandaid solution that is labour intensive.

I can’t figure out how to debug cron issues in drupal though. I’ve read some tips that running update.php can reset things, but that didn’t work for me. I’ve read this page that suggest modifying core files to add more logging about which module is running cron. I think that will be my next step.

Machinery Project

I got out for a bit of a photo walk today in the gorgeous sunshine. Most of these pictures were taken near Point Hope Ship yard on Harbour Road. The chain link fence was a bit of a pain, and it would be awesome to have free run of the place for photo taking. I imagine there is a bit of risk in that though. There was lots of heavy machinery working and a few boats in dry dock getting worked on.

Some old buildings in the area were perfect for taking texture shots.

I happened to come across an open house for the UBC Blue Whale project. There are still in the process of getting this huge skeleton ready for display, but there was lots that was ready to be viewed. This was an amazing animal and its size cannot be described easily. The section in the photo below was likely around 20 feet long and there were a few more sections before it. Then the massive head.

There were few flowers in the industrial area, but I still managed to find some.


Studios Annoy

I saw this infographic on BoingBoing recently, and it really struck home for me. This is even more painful when you have an impatient child that just wants to watch their DVD and doesn’t understand why they have to watch previews and can’t skip things.

I’ve always wondered why movie studios think that it is a good idea to annoy and harass the customers that have paid for their product. To me that seems like a great way to drive away customers. Perhaps for my kids DVD’s that we have bought, I should make a backup copy that allows me to skip the unnecessary previews and ads.

The worst previews are the ones that advertise movies coming “this spring”. Once the DVD is a couple years old this just sounds silly.

via BoingBoing

Direction Moronic

This morning I was driving Sox to work, and the kids to daycare. We were heading along Catherine St to Esquimalt Ave. A car pulled up to a stop sign on a side street. I watched as the driver looked to her right, then proceeded to go all the while talking to someone in the car. She never looked left, the direction I was heading from.

I hit the brakes, and hit the horn. Visibly she whipped her head over to my direction and looked shocked. Yet she never hit her brakes, nor slowed. Glad I scared her.

Later today I was near Mayfair mall and I was wanting to turn right. The car in front of me wanted to turn left desptire two signs saying right turn only from 7am to 6pm. I honked and he glanced in the rear view at me. I hinked again and pointed right, then pointed to the sign. He pointed that he wanted to go left.

I know you want to go left, but you aren’t supposed to buddy. It doesn’t take a moron to see what you want. If you want to go left against a sign and noone is behind you, then I personally have no problem, but to hold up traffic while you make an illegal turn is moronic.

Beer Brewed

Today I bottled my latest batch of beer at Bedford Brewing.

My last batch wasn’t quite right and during its bottling I saw lots of foamy bottles. This usually means contaminated bottles. I wanted to avoid that again so I inspected my bottles very carefully and I was shocked that over half my bottles will have to be sent for recycling! There was lots of sediment, and some of them had mould growing in them. No wonder the last beer wasn’t right.

I was able to watch the hockey game while I bottle which was nice too. Olympic hockey, Canada versus Russia. Lots of excitement coupled with fresh beer. Mmmm.

This time around I brewed their New World Brown. Very tasty. I am enjoying a bottle of it right now 🙂