Blown off The Ben
Derry Hamilton - 31/12/2011
T and I had headed up to Fort William with the intention of doing the CMD arete, but in the end, the weather proved unsuitable for anything as Grandson-of-Bawbag was trying to take down even more trees and remove all the snow. So we headed to The Ice Factor for some indoor snow. I was somewhat...
Repairing a Watson FC-130
Derry Hamilton - 24/11/2011
There's a range of relatively inexpensive frequency counters, badge engineered by various companies; Watson, MFJ, Optoelectronics, etc. that appear to share a lot of common design. (I suspect that the only thing that changes is the front panel, and the switches installed.) At least, the Watson FC-130, and the Optoelectronics Scout 40 seem to share...
A Powerpole Busbar
Derry Hamilton - 19/11/2011
This is a brief howto, to create a basic PowerPole busbar, useful for connecting various bits of kit at temporary locations. It's fairly robust, but not environmentally sealed. It's also not fused, so you need to fuse the supply seperatly. Required parts: Plastic housings PCB connectors Single sided PCB Small box Potting compound The first step is to assemble...
mysqldump: Error 2013: Lost connection to MySQL server
Derry Hamilton - 19/11/2011
mysqldump: Error 2013: Lost connection to MySQL server during query when dumping table Trying to dump and reload a large (multi-hundred GB) database via a pipe, was failing with that error. mysqldump [stuff] | mysql [other stuff] Most of the pages on the internet fail to find any useful resolution, most suggesting that...
Table Auditing in SQL
Derry Hamilton - 19/11/2011
I've seen many weird and wacky ways of creating an audit trail in databases, some better than others. The basic requirements are that users are able to do their jobs, but aren't allowed to do anything they aren't supposed to. And that what they do is logged usefully, securely, and automatically. So, assuming that you...