What Jessie Did Next… – Page 4 – …being the inane ramblings of a mundane Yorkshire bird.

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Lightroom 4 Slowness Revisited

Since I wrote about Lightroom 4 speed issues on the Mac, I’ve installed version 4.2 and done quite a few big shoots including gigs and a wedding; there’s been no shortage of images to process.

Regrettably, it appears the LR4 fixes involving Time Machine and recreation of the catalogue had only a temporary effect and the software has reverted back to its previous slow behaviour. On a shoot of 1200 images this makes it painful to sort through and has an extremely negative impact on my workflow.

There seems to be little alternative out there though (at least, not a solution where I can seamlessly move the catalogue across) so I’m just going to have to stick it out for the moment. This annoys me – it’s yonks since Adobe put out Lightroom 4 and still these problems. It’s very very tedious.

If you were considering a leap to Lightroom 4, I’d advise you not to. Stick with Lightroom 3 if you can, or suffer the consequences 🙁

Lightroom 4: Speeding Up On The Mac

September 12, 2012 / Jess / 2 Comments

You might have noticed over the years but I take a lot of photographs, and like many photographers I keep them in a catalogue on a computer: this catalogue allows me to find photos quickly and easily, and also apply retouching, colour changes, and all that sort of thing. The application I use is called Adobe Lightroom and I’ve been a user since version 2 back in 2009. Now with over 110,000 photographs in the catalogue spanning 34 years you might say I’m a power-user.

When Lightroom 4 was released in Spring 2012 I pre-ordered it, but as with critical applications within my workflow I wanted a few days to get my head around it before using it ‘in anger’. I’m glad I did, because quite quickly it became apparent there were major problems with it – principally, the speed of the software. It’d lag for 30 seconds switching between modules, and using the sliders to alter an image was almost impossible. I reverted back to Lightroom 3.6 which worked perfectly, as did everything else on my laptop.

Sidenote: for the benefit of the hardware nerds out there my main machine is a MacBook Pro Core i7 2.66GHz model (MacBookPro6,1), with a 512GB SSD, 8G RAM, running (at the moment) OS X 10.7.4. It’s not the most recent MacBook Pro, but it’s a 2010 model which with updates has no problems with anything else.

Time passed and I bought a new camera: a Canon EOS 5D Mark III. This wasn’t supported by Lightroom 3! Indeed, it took Adobe until version 4.1 before Lightroom could read its RAW files so I suppose you could say I was forced to upgrade. I bit the bullet, installed the software and predictably the speed problems returned: a photoshoot which I would have previously been able to sort in a lunchtime would take me 4 or 5 hours simply because of the lag when picking images to retouch (the ‘triage’ stage of sorting a shoot). The whole experience became incredibly frustrating and a solution was needed. Adobe released a beta of Lightroom 4.2 which made no difference.

Googling around led to plenty of other people with the same problems, and even Adobe acknowledging there was a problem but there was no solution. I got naffed off, and decided to do some investigating of my own. So here’s what I did, and what it fixed (touch wood, so far):

A Solution Of Sorts
The first thing I did was try and blitz the Preferences files. This has been known to work for Windows users, but of course the Mac version is different – at least that bit is. I’ll save you some time and tell you now that it didn’t do a dicky bird other than freak my copy of Lightroom out, so I ended up reinstating the plist files.

Then a friend suggested recreating the catalogue (cheers Gaz!). My LR4 catalogue came via a port from LR2 to LR3 over the past few updates. First thing I did was create a new catalogue and import everything from the old catalogue in to the new one via File -> Import From Another Catalog. It took a while but gave me a clean catalogue which sorta worked a bit better – still not massively fast, but faster.

The real paydirt came with Time Machine though. In common with a lot of Mac users I have a small external disk which I use to keep backups, handled by the OS. In addition to that there’s a sort-of journalling system which handles versions and Time Machine when the external disk isn’t connected (and incidentally will explain disk space discrepancies – you can read more about the phenomenon here).When I added ~/Library/Caches to the backup exclusions, LR4 was back to the speed I’d have expected.

To do this, click on your Time Machine icon (on the menubar, it’s the little clock with the arrow going backwards), and thenOptions on your Time Machine screen. It’ll allow you to exclude particular directories from the backup.

I can’t think of any particular downside to this as cache files are usually temporary, but I’m sure another Mac fanboi will correct me in the comments if this isn’t the case. As it is, it seems to have fixed it for me so far and I’ve been using Lightroom heavily for the past day or so. Whether it gets slower in time I don’t know and I’ll post an update if it does so. But I do hope this helps other frustrated Mac photogs out there!

Yashica MAT-124G

April 20, 2012 / Jess / 1 Comment

You know all that medium-format stuff I was going on about with my Grandfather’s Halina A1? I’ve been bitten with the MF bug well and truly since then, commandeering the kitchen on a Sunday evening to develop whatever film I’d experimented with that week and going to bed with my fingers stinking of fixing fluid. I’ve also been painfully aware that Grandad’s Halina is a delicate thing – not an expensive item but certainly I’m emotionally attached to it and bits of it fell off long before it was in my custody! I’d already resolved a while back to get another MF setup for proper photography work, carefully digging through the pros and cons of Bronica, Rollei and Mamiya setups…

Then last week I acquired a Yashica MAT-124G medium-format twin-lens reflex (TLR) camera from Harrison Cameras in Sheffield. I’d been keeping an eye on their website and they do a great job of tweeting what secondhand kit has arrived – it’s a 10 minute walk from where I currently work in Sheffield so it was a bit of a no-brainer. The guy who served me took the time to walk me through the device which was substantially different to the Halina A1 in operation, and off I went with a fresh spool of Ilford Delta 400 loaded.

Once I’d got the hang of cocking the shutter (which hadn’t been covered in the shop) I started taking photos. I blew a stack of film over the weekend trying different things – in the park, inside Unity Hall, and at a gig. It’s definitely a lot sharper than the Halina (especially at the edges) and is much easier to focus, although in low light it’s still a pain as I can’t see what aperture or exposure time I’ve got it set to. It’ll be fine for acoustic gigs though.

The internal light meter had been frigged with a modern battery cell (it’s meant to take Mercury cells which aren’t made any more) and consequently there’s about a stop and a half overexposure if you go by the light meter itself. After the first couple of films the overexposure was pretty obvious so I spent a few hours comparing the on-body meter with a proper hand-held meter: it’s a linear difference so fairly simple to compensate, thankfully.

Overall, no buyer’s remorse yet and the remote trigger works fine with it. I’m looking forward to photographing the Rhubarb Bomb 5th Birthday this weekend (maybe with a flashgun as well), there are acoustic and eclectic acts which will work nicely on that format. Results, as always, will be posted on Flickr.

Poor Resolution And Retro Effects Destroy Memories

April 4, 2012 / Jess / 3 Comments

A few weeks ago I spent a spare evening importing pre-1999 photos into my Lightroom catalogue: about 10,000 images which had been taken on both digital and film since 1977. I’m not especially OCD about my photo organisation but I needed to access some of my older gig pics and a few photos from my Star Trek fanclub days (1992ish) for the Leeds Starfleet reformation – the images I waded through set me thinking how sad it was that some were such low resolution.

Back in the late 90s when I started out in digital photography I borrowed a small digital camera from one of my Mailbox Internet colleagues for a few nights. It took photos at a VGA resolution of 640×480 which were perfectly adequate at the time but now are way too small to be used on the high-res monitors we have nowadays. Given availability of hi-res scanning I regret not using more film even though it was pricey (24 exposures would set you back at least £7 on film+processing) as I’d love to have decent, untainted, nice images. Sadly I have to resign myself that those memories are forever held in under 1MP of poorly colour-balanced postage-stamp JPEGs. The Kodak DC200 I bought in 1998 was marginally better, a great little point-and-shoot which was convenient (if you saw me taking photos in a pub with friends in the late 90s, odds on it was this particular camera) but still 35mm outweighed consumer-grade digital… put up with 2MP or shut up.

However (cue fanfare) we can make the decision nowadays: we have splendid small high-resolution point-and-shoot cameras available to us on the high street for the price of a tank of petrol… yet many people still insist on using low-resolution low-quality cameraphones. Why?!

Don’t get me wrong – I believe that there’s fun places for cameraphone pics and there’s a whole branch of imagery (“phonetography”) which takes advantage of it. My beef is that many people will use them instead of a decent little point-and-shoot at important events. Case in point: I asked a friend if they wanted to borrow one of my better P&S cameras for their best friend’s wedding; the answer came back “oh no, I’ve got my cameraphone thanks”. The resolution’s there, but the glass in the front of the phone, the absence of flashgun, the light balance issues, even image stability are all going to factor into taking a pretty bad shot.

It gets worse: with the prevalence of Instagram, Hipstagram and all those ‘retro’ iPhone apps, you don’t just get to destroy your memories with bad photos, you get to utterly demolish them with ‘cool’ effects which in a few years time are guaranteed to be cringeworthy. Those wonderful memories of your honeymoon? The gorgeous photos of your newborn son? “Oh, yeah, they’ve got that really really cool negative ID mark and colour-burn and they look oh so retro, but… well, sorry we can’t fix it, we’ve only got that pic of Grandad holding Billy when he was just a few hours old and it’ll have to just do.”

There’s a final issue: when was the last time that you, as a consumer, copied the images off your camera onto a better storage solution? I’m not talking about uploading to Facebook (see arguments passim along the lines of “online is not a storage solution”), I’m talking about sticking them on a memory stick and putting it in a drawer. Several friends have lost images through phone resets, broken memory cards and such; when I’m asked to help, sometimes I just can’t and I have to break that news to them. So copy those images off, frequently! Memory sticks are less than a tenner from WHSmith, are your memories worth less than a tenner? Can you guarantee they’ll be worth less than a tenner in a few years time?

So here are some suggestions: get a reasonable little point-and-shoot, stick it in your handbag, take that to your events. Don’t rely on your cameraphone, and especially don’t chuck your images through some naff retro-image-processing tool without keeping the originals safe (I’m picking on Instagram and Hipstagram here but there’s loads more). No matter how random the photos, they’ll form part of your memories in later life so keep them safe and untainted.

PS. Some may consider this hypocritical considering my enthusiasm for B&W photography recently. In actuality I’ve made this mistake myself but using B&W instead of my 5Dmk2 at a family event, so it’s still fresh in my mind…

Box Brownie

February 16, 2012 / Jess / 0 Comments

Today’s fun, assuming it gets sunnier in Headingley by lunchtime… a Kodak Brownie Model I!

Acquired from the Wakefield Hospice warehouse for a fiver, it takes 620 film although I’ve managed to frig it for 120… and it’s f/14 so I’ll need the sun! More info about this particular model on Camerapedia.

You’re So Square: Photography Developments

February 2, 2012 / Jess / 2 Comments

It’s been almost a month since I wrote about my adventures in B&W photography and there have been some developments (pun intended) since then.

As it seemed to be a hobby which was sticking around, I invested in an Epson V700 scanner – various places including DPReview and Amateur Photographer stated that this was pretty much the best flatbed I could get. Why was I after a flatbed? Well I’d already anticipated I wanted to do some medium-format (MF) photography and most affordable slide scanners are limited to 35mm film and slides so would be useless after a while. The Epson was an investment, and proved to be an exceptional one.

Sadly what lets the Epson down is the software. It’s bundled with a package called SilverFast (version 6.6SE in the case of my purchase) which doesn’t work very well with the Apple UI and can be quite hard to use. It frequently crashed and ate a lot of CPU, and the version shipped was crippled in various ways (including being able to profile film emulsion – the entire reason I’d bought the scanner in the first place). When trying to use the support forum I came up against messages such as ‘Sorry but you cannot use search at this time. Please try again in a few minutes.’ Eventually I gave up and bought a copy of Vuescan which at a few cents shy of $40 was a lot cheaper than the SilverFast upgrade, gave better results and has a reasonable English-speaking support base. It would appear I’m not the only person to have done this switch…

So back to the photography: I did a photoshoot on Ilford Delta 3200, the subject being a punk-electro band called Minny Pops. Back in the early 80s they were on the same billing as Joy Division, they were a Martin Hannett-produced band and they were signed to Factory – hell, even Rob Gretton was involved with them; this made the act a perfect band when they played at The Brudenell Social Club in Leeds, perhaps in the style of one of my favourite photographers Kev Cummins. Here’s an example shot (dig around my Flickr stream for more), processed using Ilford Microphen high-grade developer (that particular image was picked up for publication by a UK music national which I’m quite chuffed about – still to see it ‘in the wild’ though). Not bad, and I resolved at that point to start using film a little more on gig shoots where the act would warrant it.

I spent most of January experimenting, and mentioned to my Grandmother what I was up to. She told me that she had a big box of photographic kit once belonging to my Grandfather and I was welcome to have a dig round and see what might be useful. It was quite a fun box-ful: the cache consisted of lots of lenses, a few USSR and GDR-manufactured 35mm bodies in varying condition, some filters and a few unexposed spools of film – but the unexpected bonus was finding a Halina A1 twin-lens reflex medium-format camera from the late 50s/early 60s… it had a spool of film inside which I wound on.

Now I’d thought about doing MF back in December, even going so far as to working out if I could afford a second-hand Bronica ETRS camera outfit, and I’d decided I would eschew the 645 format in favour of jumping straight to square 6×6 (being a substantial move from plain 35mm so I figured I’d appreciate it more). Dale Photographic in Leeds had a Hasselblad I coveted, but spending £1500 on a MF film setup rather than getting a family holiday wasn’t going to endear me to Nicky so I left it for a while. However, the whole MF thing was still bimbling in the back of my mind, and finding the Halina was timely.

I worked out a short workflow to see how it would fare – heck, I didn’t even know if it was light-tight. Thoughts of light-meters led to the brainwave of downloading one from the App Store for my iPhone (perhaps a bit of cheating, others may say ingenuity!). It hardly made a noise when the shutter activated I wasn’t even sure it was working and spent ten minutes exploring to make sure! So far so good.

The next day I wandered round the streets of Headingley with the Halina and a fresh roll of Ilford FP4+ 120-roll film. Colleagues at work were curious. I scared the living daylights out of some poor lady in St Michaels Cemetery in Headingley taking photos of gravestones (sorry missus!). Once back at home out came the dev tanks and (after following this tutorial on YouTube on loading 120 film into the Paterson tank) I ended up with some perfectly passable 6×6 medium-format negatives. The images were a lot sharper than I’d anticipated, having seen reports that this particular camera was favoured by the lomography crowd because of its soft focus – hooray!

Into the scanner. Set the controls. Forgot I set them for 35mm and of course MF has larger negs so I ended up with a gigapixel image – Lightroom struggled over it and Flickr hated it, so eventually settled on 4800dpi, 95% JPEG, 4-pass-plus-IR out of Vuescan. Here are the results (click backwards to see more I took that day) – banal subject matter but I’m very very pleased how they’ve turned out! Wonderful square high-contrast images which would make perfect album covers!

As a sidenote, you remember I mentioned that exposed film in the Halina? Purely on a whim I developed it. It was a Kodak X-Pro film (I think) and thought there wouldn’t be any harm in giving it a shot – but the bloomin’ thing dev’d fine and after scanning I saw the face of my Great-Grandfather staring at me. Blimey – I didn’t actually think almost 40 year-old film would process properly (nor had I really worked out timing for the dev tank, I just left it for 7ish minutes in Microphen). Ellie was fascinated, and we’re soliciting family members to try and date it as it’ll give us an idea when the camera was last used!

Anyway, as I left you in my last blog entry tonight I’m heading to another gig, this time to try and shoot a friend’s acoustic act in MF using Ilford HP5 which I intend to push to 1600. How I’ll get on I don’t know – this is a completely manual attempt! Even the practicalities of winding film with only the red-coloured rear window of the camera body may defeat me (given stage lighting) – maybe I should take a torch! I’ll be sure to post the results on my Flickr stream if there are some presentable images, of course.

Leeds Grub Shoutout

January 10, 2012 / Jess / 0 Comments

I always enjoy reading food blogs, especially when they’re local – but I was exceptionally chuffed to see Leeds Grub blog heading down our way to review Deli Central in Wakefield, just off the Bullring. More of that please!

Back To Black (And White)

January 9, 2012 / Jess / 0 Comments

When I was 7 I bought myself a film camera from Wakefield fleamarket – a Halina 35mm camera purchased for £1. I took it all over the place and went through the first couple of films like mad (mostly taking photographs of the sky or the floor because I couldn’t get the hang of the viewfinder). My father was processing film at the time and started loading the occasional spool of B&W in and that’s how I started out in photography… once we’d moved to a larger house he took over the cellar and we did prints too.

Almost 30 years later I’m using digital for my semi-professional work: I carry various Canon pro digital bodies around and a complement of lenses (a partial kit-list is on my Flickr profile), and I post-process using Lightroom on the Mac. An average gig shoot for me results in about 200 photos per act and I pare those down into about 40 or 50 shots for a client, all of which is a far cry from 24 frames on film.

I recently did a contract in Halifax (good lord deliver me) as part of my dayjob. Lunchtime wanderings uncovered a camera shop near the market (Janet Green Photographic, I’d link to a website but they don’t have one) where there was a window full of second-hand photographic kit – everything from mid-1950s medium-format bodies up to low-end digital, and so a germ of an idea formed – get an old film camera and learn to develop my own photos again. I pressed my nose to the glass almost daily in the hope that a suitable camera would be on display. Christmas drew closer, the end of the contract loomed, but less than 2 weeks before I’d be out of the area one appeared in the window for just £29: a Canon EOS 500N, one of the more recent 135 Canon range. I bimbled in and after verifying it would accept my Canon EF lenses I walked out as the proud owner of a film camera body, some chemicals and a few spools of Ilford FP4+ film.

The first thing I noticed was that I was conscious how many photos I wasn’t taking using film. I assumed I’d go through film like wildfire but it took me the best part of 3 days to blow my first 24-exposure film (the second film took a little less time principally because I was out in sunny Halifax getting some gritty industrial images :)). This did make me realise that although I scattergun at gigs I am more inclined to take time to set up a shot elsewhere.

Once home and in the kitchen I mixed up some developer and spent 20 minutes lightproofing the understair cupboard. Every last LED from the wireless base-station, burglar alarm, central heating system got double helpings of gaffer-tape. Hallway lights went off, the cracks around the door stuffed with scarves. Total darkness, hooray. I turned the safelight on, loaded the film into the canister and went off to develop it.

Right. Safelight. Yeah – about that: there’s no safelight for film… I’d forgotten that bit and overexposed it. I had also been using a dodgy thermometer, not that it would have made much difference. The second time I was a lot more careful and some success ensued, having processed a spool of Ilford HP4+ (ISO400) in Ilfosol-3 developer: this resulted in quite a chunky grain. Still, not bad considering I’ve been trying to remember how to do it all based upon vague memories of watching Dad.

As a sidenote: I haven’t been doing any printing, instead using a slide scanner from Maplin to throw the negatives into JPEG files; it’s only a cheap thing with a lamp which shines the slide onto a small CCD and auto-compensates for exposure etc. – the results aren’t very good. This one will do for the moment as long as I put the images through Lightroom, at least until I find a USB slide scanner I’m happy with.

Subsequently I walked into Halifax and blew off a spool of Ilford FP4+ (ISO100). I haven’t tried pushing the film yet, I’m taking baby-steps and since Christmas I’ve been using it as an occasional ‘grab camera’ to play with rather than anything serious.

Most of my supplies are coming from Amazon marketplace sellers (RK Photographic are sending me most of it including a black bag, a load of FP4+ and a film spool opener). Locally Dale Photographic in Leeds sells chemicals and film which is useful in an emergency and if anyone wants to buy me a present they have a secondhand Hasselblad MF 6×6 120-roll camera with a couple of lenses for £1500… thought not!

Tonight though the 500N gets a proper run at a gig using Ilford Delta 3200 film (ISO3200) which I will probably process using Microphen developer later on in the week. I’m hoping to replicate some of the more iconic Kev Cummins film shots from the early 80s – somehow doing colour-to-B&W in Lightroom feels like cheating and I’m hopeful of good results. At least I don’t have to worry about red/yellow saturation 😉

(The photo is me aged 8 with the Halina – my Dad took it when we went on a photowalk in Wakefield; the courtyard is round the back of the old Post Office, and it’s now known as ‘The Latin Quarter’.)

Update: Julian (aka @liquidsquid on Twitter) said that this was his idea. If I’m going to be perfectly honest it was discussions with quite a few folks which led to this, not least @leica0000, @john2755 and my landlady in Milton Keynes towards the end of last year who gave me a box full of old Patterson developing kit. That said, the Delta3200 was definitely Julian’s idea.

And Off We Go To WordPress…

January 5, 2012 / Jess / 0 Comments

I finally got sick of the blog spam under my very hacked up version of Nucleus, so I’ve shifted myself to using WordPress. Apologies if the RSS feed has just given you the past 10 articles as being ‘new’, or whatever.

Anyway, in porting all the data from Nucleus I happened upon nucleus2wordpress.pl which purported to be a hack to shift all the posts from old versions of Nucleus into, er, WordPress. It didn’t work first time since the categories system within WordPress has changed so I’ve frigged it to work with the new WordPress taxonomy system.

You can download my updated version (which works with WordPress 3.3) here – no guarantees implied etc. and it depends on your Nucleus database being the same as your WordPress database (I just copied the tables over and then removed the Nucleus ones when I was happy). Enjoy!

I’ll be back blogging soon. ‘Interesting times’ over the past six months have taken priority…

Addendum: After running this script and becoming more familiar with the concepts involved in the WordPress database, I discovered the comment counts were incorrect (even though the imported comments themselves appeared within the posts). To correct this, run the following on your WordPress database (remembering to back it up first!):

UPDATE wp_posts wpp
 LEFT JOIN
 (SELECT comment_post_id AS c_post_id, count(*) AS cnt FROM wp_comments
 WHERE comment_approved = 1 GROUP BY comment_post_id) wpc
 ON wpp.id=wpc.c_post_id
 SET wpp.comment_count=wpc.cnt
 WHERE wpp.post_type IN ('post', 'page')
 AND (wpp.comment_count!=wpc.cnt OR (wpp.comment_count != 0 AND wpc.cnt IS NULL));

This worked fine on WordPress 3.3 and corrected the comment counters on the front page and search results.

Review: DeLonghi ESAM4200 Bean-To-Cup Machine

September 19, 2011 / Jess / 9 Comments

Some time back my Gaggia Baby-D coffee machine died in a leaky can’t-maintain-pressure-and-piss-water-everywhere way. It was a sad loss mourned in our house given that Gaggia-the-company had also died and been taken over by Philips who weren’t honouring warranties, especially not on the ‘refurb’ unit I owned. I resorted to making espresso on the hob using my Italian espresso pot but I really missed the steamer and the convenience of it all.

Meantime, over on a UK techies maillist there was a discussion of bean-to-cup machines. Nicky and I had a few savings from birthdays and anniversaries and I talked her into letting me buy a DeLonghi-branded Magnifica ESAM4200. That was back in July; I figured I’d let the dust settle before I blogged any sort of review of it, but the short version is that I like it 🙂

It’s a nice unit, and tends to do everything for you including cleaning itself (an absolute boon as far as I’m concened – dismantling and cleaning the Gaggia was one of the onerous pains, especially since bits of it weren’t dishwasher-safe). Beans go in the hopper in the top, and it chucks out little coffee-poos into a box inside once finished.

It’s also fast – powerup to dispense is less than 30 seconds, and the steamer is ready within 15s from pressing ‘the button’. Thanks to this, if the daughter forgets to switch it on in a morning (the usual state of affairs) I can still grab a very quick coffee before work. In that regard, it’s quicker than the kettle if a little noisier with its ‘clunk’ and ‘whirr’ and ‘grrrtangfrrrrvvvv’.

As for coffee control itself, it’s pretty flexible – there’s the usual quantity and strength dials on the front, as well as a hidden knob to alter the grinder so the beans can be coarse or fine (I’ve left it on the default setting). It’s consistent and reliable, leaving a rather delicious-looking crema on the top every time. The coffee I’ve been using is the 1kg sacks of beans from CostCo (Starbucks brand) – although if you really want you can use pre-ground coffee just by moving the strength dial all the way back.

There’s a couple of things which are a bit tedious: the grinds disposal bin isn’t big enough so after six or seven shots it still needs emptying; similarly the water tank is a bit small (and it uses water on startup/shutdown to clean itself so doesn’t last very long). Keeping a jug or an old mug under the spout is mandatory as it dispenses a small amount of water whenever it cleans itself and the driptray could get full (and is more hassle to clean than a mug!). It’s a bit noisy, but the build quality is much better than the Gaggia though and seems to cope with the amount of coffee I require it to throw out on a daily basis.

It’s also important to set the water hardness correctly on installation – I waited (well, to be fair I didn’t read the instructions properly) and it nagged me for a descaler cycle after a month when it didn’t need it. Once that was triggered there was no way of telling it to stop nagging without doing a full descale which takes about an hour and requires the DeLonghi-specified descaler solution (or it invalidates your warranty).

If you want one of these units I’d recommend shopping around: for example, John Lewis list them at £399, but I managed to get it sub-£300 by going online to Amazon (though at time of writing they don’t seem to have any available direct). Still, recommended and seems to have been a good buy!

Bear-Traps In MySQL Fulltext Search

September 16, 2011 / Jess / 0 Comments

Once again in a contract I find myself writing a small search engine, this time for an internal Intranet content management system. The client has several use-cases of which several contain words 3 characters long such as ‘cog’ and ‘net’. Additionally, they’ve got a couple of abbreviations with punctuation in (‘H&S’ being one). And once again I find myself explaining to the boss why the MySQL fulltext search doesn’t return a full set of results because (out-of-the-box) the fulltext defaults aren’t very useful.

So here’s why, and how you might be able to fix the issues (and ‘don’t use MySQL’ is not going to be an answer here, dolphinistas)…

For a start, it only indexes words of 4 characters or more, so if you’re trying to index ‘cog’ or ‘net’ then it won’t unless you explicitly configure MySQL to enable this behaviour using the ‘ft_min_word_len config parameter. Perish the thought if you’re search for your own name and you’re called Bob, because MATCH(keywords) AGAINST(“bob”) will always return nothing, as will searching for the classic album ‘Let It Be’.

Then let’s take the stopword list. Stopwords in MySQL are words which won’t be indexed – common words such as ‘the’, ‘and’, ‘or’, etc. (there’s a full list here if you’re curious). However, it also prevents indexing of words such as ‘will’ – a real bugger if you’re indexing a list of users: pity the poor guy in sales called Will who can’t find his own name. You can give MySQL an alternative stoplist in the config, or disable it completely using ‘ft_stopword_file‘.

(It’s not looking good for poor Will or Bob is it!)

Finally, we’ve got the punctuation. This one is a little bit more silly because of the MySQL boolean search which uses various forms of punctuation to specify which words are mandatory, optional, grouped, and so on: the default list is ‘+ -><()~*:””&|‘ (note that we’ve got & in there). Personally I change & to ? since I’m less likely to index with the latter, using ‘ft_boolean_syntax‘ in the config file, and things like ‘H&S’ will get indexed.

Therefore your my.cnf gets the following extra bits:

ft_boolean_syntax=+ -><()~*:""?|
ft_min_word_len=3
ft_stopword_file=

So, mostly sortable right? Wrong: these are server-wide variables and if you alter them you must reindex all fulltext-indexed tables using REPAIR TABLE (or the dreaded myisamchk if you have a lot to do). Now read that again: it’s server-wide so will affect all databases on that server… As an example, the client I’m working with right now shares the CMS database server with a MediaWiki installation which has configured in some places therefore it comes under the banner of ‘service-impacting’ straight away. It also means if you’re on a shared hosted service, no matter how much you lick your ISP it’s unlikely that they’ll change the config on a shared box full of users (with all the reindexing that implies) just for you.

I understand that the InnoDB engine is getting fulltext capability in the next major version of MySQL – about time too: I hope that will herald fulltext configuration changes on a per-database (or even more usefully a per-table) basis.

(Postscript: Nowadays I tend to tackle most of this by creating a search index from data I need to make searchable, a simple script which assembles data and removes unneeded words in a self-configured stoplist table (that way I can also write something which warns the user that not all their search terms were used). I still need to do the changes above but it affords me a lot more control over index sizes, etc.)

Wharfside Music Festival 2011, Wakefield

August 21, 2011 / Jess / 1 Comment

Right, so there’s this pub which isn’t exactly on the way to anywhere (unless you’re going to the Double Two factory shop). Used to be The Jolly Sailor in Thornes, but more recently became a bit of a restaurant-pub called The Wharfside. They’d put out a shout for bands to play at a one-day free music festival: Obvious Pseudonym put ourselves forward as did The Tracks. Time passed, we heard nothing, eventually with a fortnight to go Dorian and Faye (keys and bass players in The Tracks) headed down there to see what’s going on: they discovered from landlady Vicky there was no PA and no marquee and no lighting and… well, it could be disastrous. So we got involved…

Really it was all a bit ‘Challenge Anneka’: build a decent-sounding PA using kit I’d got in the garage, get the lighting rig down there, borrow a van, and work out how to use the digital desk with a full band. Dorian and Faye did the street-team thing with posters, and we put out calls for more acts to perform. In the end though it sounded and looked ace – definite proof to myself (if nobody else) that I can do it.

So came the day: I disappeared off at 8:30am to pick up the van, diverting via St Michaels to pick up Dorian and Mac (The Tracks’ drummer) who are both young lads with muscles. We loaded the van with every bit of kit under the sun (it just fit) and headed to Wharfside to find Graham and Harry of StagePro sitting outside waiting to unload the drum riser we’d hired. A bit of huffing and puffing later, we’d got all the tables out of the way and the riser was in place. Next up: the marquee.

Now, this damn marquee wasn’t in the best of nick – it had obviously been used a lot and the plastic poles were cracking from stresses unknown (presumably in the course of its life at Diamond Studios, who’d kindly lent it to us). Mix in the complication that it was so windy getting it erected was going to be a bit of a mad job! It took six of us to get it upright at which point it became evident something was wrong as the wind was whipping it up far too much (“it’s going to end up flying across the Calder!”) and no amount of of gaffer tape was going to fix it. Fearing a Pukkelpop moment, Vicky and I passed the buck between us on whether we’d have the marquee at all. Then…
     “‘ang on, this isn’t right…” opined John J, who’d turned up mid-erection (fnar).
     I stared, trying to work out why the guyropes were on the inside. “Er. Oh. The roof’s on upside down, it’s meant to fasten up.”
     “Right. Let’s flip it over, might work, and if not then we do without it!”
It was a bit more stable after that!

I built up the PA using amplifiers I’ve had kicking around for ages and various other bits of stuff, all lashed together to a programmable digital remote desk FOH where I could also control the lighting rig. I had the usual bits of EQ and had a discussion with a few folks to try and get the best mix. Consensus was that it sounded excellent, and we’d easily packed enough power for the event. Maybe if anything it was a bit mid-heavy at the sides of the venue but you can’t have everything can you.

So to recap, 3pm: marquee’s up, PA is in place (7KW of stuff with an exceptionally heavy amp cab and borrowed tops from OP’s bloke Pete), lighting rig is in one piece and working, we’re surviving the onslaught of quips from volunteer Chris and there have been no disasters yet. Hooray! We soundcheck with The Tracks, who are the first full band and due to hit the stage four hours later at 7pm.

First act was up: Dorian and Tom doing an acoustic set, 20 minutes of songs to get things going. I wasn’t expecting it to be busy at all until about 6pm although the beer garden started to fill up once the music began. Sound was good, a couple of tweaks on the EQ but nothing serious. Nicky arrived and started taking photos, so it was documented – excellent! At this point Chris grabbed me and pointed at the left sub speaker which was lying on the floor having been blown out from its cabinet by the sheer air pressure involved in moving a 1KW high-end Celestion 15″ driver. Oopsie, I guess building a new cab for those is on my job list this week!

Callum Macintyre next: one mic, one guitar. He was excellent, no disasters, place is filling up nicely. I looked across to see Rob Dee (Philophobia music boss) had arrived with Mike Ainsley and Harry Rhodes ready for their slot, plenty of friends milling around and other luminaries from the Wakefield music scene. We were running to time – maybe slightly ahead of it, good. I rigged and line-checked for a duo called ReaderMeetAuthor who announced this was their first gig and they’d only formed as a band three hours ago: cue epic muddling through some covers, but it sounded OK (Mathieu’s other band The Ran Tan Waltz is a lot more polished and I recommend a listen). Nice to see Jon Pinder and John Jowett photographing lots.

Almost 6pm: level-check for The Cullens and they’re on. I see Danny Cullen in town quite a bit (especially at Open Mic Monday) but I don’t think I’ve actually concentrated on their sound before which was wonderfully polished, and by this point we’d got some folks dancing. The beer-garden was full, and looking across towards the river there were people lying on the verges in what Summer sun was shining, having a beer and enjoying the afternoon. Taxis arrived ferrying new listeners, still no disasters and still no rain despite it being forecast for around 5pm. As we were a little ahead of time, the Cullens got a couple of extra songs: sound-man’s privilege 😉

Mike Ainsley was up next, together with Tim and Harry from St Gregory Orange. They insisted on sitting down and we couldn’t find any chairs or stools so we pulled up a few unused guitar amps – very rustic. No major adjustments on the desk, maybe a little bit of EQ on Harry’s guitar. A really rather splendid set from Mike (another act I’d been remiss in not listening to previously) and that was our acoustic acts done! I spotted various OP followers in the audience including Jayne and Bez, and felt a little buzz of pride that they’d come down to the out-of-town venue to see it all.

The Tracks were on at 7:15pm and I was all-on to get the sound right so didn’t stray far from the FOH post. They’ve got lots of dynamics in each song with thrashy crashy guitars followed by quiet thoughtful passages, full drum kit mike-up and all 12 XLR channels on the sound desk which lit up like a Christmas tree. Lots of dancing, two scruffy old blokes have shinned the fence and are trying to get people to buy them beer, and some nutter in the audience has got hold of a tambourine. Tom’s face is a picture. Good reception and an encore was demanded: the band did not disappoint their fans!

All of Obvious Pseudonym were present and accounted for by now, so while The Tracks got their stuff offstage we loaded ours in and tarped it at the side. Still no rain although there were a couple of reports of it spitting a little. Nothing blew up: always the important thing. Meantime the next act (“I R Hero”) set up with a little bit of a problem in that the drummer only had one working arm and needed an extra snare mic for his kick-snare. No problems I guess, especially since they’d initially asked for a 10-mic setup on the drums – er, no chance boys…!

I R Hero launched into their rock-pop-punk set, but no sign of the snare kick on the sound-desk… I sent Dorian up to investigate but we ended up replacing the mic. It was still a bit touch-and-go with the monitor mix not being brilliant, but again the sound out front was ace. I left to find a pint of Guinness, and came back just as the drummer resigned from the band. A bloke in the crowd stepped up and drummed on their last song… the drummer wasn’t seen again.

9pm, we were running to time, nothing destroyed, no disasters, no rain; I bravely ventured an opinion that the whole thing seemed to be going OK. Vicky glared at me: don’t jinx it sunshine. We plonked Obvious Pseudonym’s stuff on stage and I set up the keys on the drum riser so I had a little stage of my own, woo! Dorian familiarised himself with the desk to do our sound. I admitted to myself I was nervous, this was the first time I’d trusted someone at the controls who wasn’t a professional sound engineer or music technician: be strong, lad!

We went on at 9:20pm, five minutes late, bouncing into Westgate Run and doing the Summer set we’d mostly done for the past four weeks on our International Tour Of Wakefield with one notable exception: Eclipsed had been replaced by the new song Dad Dancing. People danced, genuinely and ironically. It sounded good from where I was, and we got some excellent comments: one couple even came across from the flats over the Calder to see us after hearing what we were like. New fans!

We came off around 10pm and by midnight everything was back in the van. Nicky and Jayne were dispatched to find curry and I sat in the bar with a (fresh) pint of Guinness (after not getting around to drinking the last one). Still no disasters, still no rain, and we’d managed to put on our first full festival; thoughts of next year pervaded through the exhaustion as Dorian, Jim, Faye and I came down off the ceiling. Pretty damn good for amateurs and the sound was ace, I just hope the desk recording is as good: I’ll find out later. Uberthanks to the people who helped by lugging, lifting, erecting, removing and all that stuff including Chris, John, Jim, Nicky, Ben, Carl, Tom, Rob and Mac. You guys were ace and made the job so much easier; I’m exceptionally proud of what we achieved.

…now, I’m off to unload the van and collect the drum riser!

Clarence Festival 2011

August 1, 2011 / Jess / 0 Comments

Another year, another Clarence: Wakefield Music Collective’s almost-annual jaunt down to Clarence Park Bandstand for fun, japery and a big pile of bands, all cemented together by a crowd sat in the sun on The Hill lubricated by alcohol.

Whereas in previous years I’ve been on the periphery, this year I was a little more involved. I say ‘a little more’ as the Collective organisational meetings take place on Wednesdays which is notorious for being booked up with other stuff (mostly for Nicky which means I need to source a babysitter). However I did get tasked with putting together the poster, programme and branding which considering I’m not a designer didn’t come out half bad: you can get a PDF of it by clicking here, brought up to date with the stand-in bands.

Load of acts playing (including us, but I’ll come to that in a mo) and those I was really impressed with included acoustic lass Hannah Atkins who looped together herself playing guitar, keyboard and violin to build up entire accompaniments live; I’ve coveted a loopstation of some sort for a while but I don’t think I have the talent to bring it off (at least not multitimbral talent!) and I’m always impressed when I see someone using one competently. I also quite liked Diamond Dac’s Delta blues guitar and dobro work, very relaxing for Sunday. The real highlight of my weekend though was Lorenza Woods, a female-fronted rock group which borrowed bits of Rage Against The Machine, Cannibal Corpse and other similar genres to build up some really angry screamy rock interspersed with quiet sweet sections; they’re a Wakefield band so I think I’ll try and catch them again sometime.

We played, sans Dan on guitar cos he was on holiday. This wasn’t planned at all – we were asked to play only a few days before and thankfully we’ve got a pile of gigs coming up so have a playable set (without Dad Dancing, you’ll have to wait for that one): it went well really, a lot better than I expected especially when the backing/drum machine crashed off the table towards the end of Sex Noises and left us without percussion. Oops. We carried on as if nothing had happened and ended with an acoustic take on it – a definite tribute to Pete keeping the rhythm going on the bass! I’m not sure many people noticed. Jon Pinder has some photos here (et seq.). I am also extremely proud to announce that Obvious Pseudonym were the first act this year to knock a tile off the bandstand roof with the sound; this is becoming an annual challenge, and were it not for the netting in place the tile would have ended up embedded in John J’s head. Again, oops. Oh and we were the first act where the sub-bass rattled the hill: according to Marci you could feel it through the ground – yay!

One thing I was really impressed with was sound engineers Middi and Tom using the iPad to remote-engineer from halfway up the hill; I spent ten minutes watching Middi twiddling EQ and all sorts of things during The Greeting Committee’s set, remote-controlling the desk on-stage where Tom was keeping an eye. It’s a great way of keeping the budgets down and negates the use of a front-of-house tower. Still, it’d be nice to have a delay tower next year 😉

So, yeah, it went well. Clarence is a lot easier these days with the absence of the second big stage and the addition of the security stuff at the bandstand – it means that at the end of Saturday it can all be securely stowed and we don’t need to have a large security presence on-site. That said we did have some security issues still overnight, but mostly due to pissed-up kids coming back from town and seeing if there was anything left in the beer tent. There wasn’t, of course… but it’s still a pain in the arse. Lots of people came to watch, and I think that it’s still a success despite being a shadow of its former (Council-funded) self. Damn you, austerity measures.

(ps. I wasn’t going to mention it but I got stung by a wasp, and it bloody hurt. Ended up pulling the sting out with my leatherman. Ouchie. I may or may not have mentioned it over the weekend.)

My Long Division 2011

June 24, 2011 / Jess / 0 Comments

Recently I blogged about Long Division Festival 2011, which took place a couple of weekends ago.

In short, it was utterly mindblowing and Wakefield did us proud (for the most part but we’ll get to that later). Six venues were involved on Saturday: Mustang Sally’s, The Hop, The Graziers, Wakefield Cathedral, Wakefield Town Hall and Henry Boon’s; you needed a wristband to get into each one, which involved forking out the pithy sum of £12 to see 40 acts throughout the day and evening. A phenomenal bargain when you consider some of the acts playing – hell, The Wedding Present would charge that for a single gig. It was all the brainchild of local fanzine editor Dean Freeman and local promoter Chris Morse (aka Morsey), both familiar faces on the scene and both of whom I enjoy a pint with occasionally.

For my initial involvement I’d volunteered to do photography together with a small team of friends – John J, Nicky and Laurie Cooper-Murray (of StageZero photography). Morsey knew I’d lit the Cathedral for the Dr Feelgood gig last year and asked if I’d do the same again for the acts there – no problem, but a few days before the festival started he also asked if I’d got a rig for the Town Hall too. Um, OK, in for a penny and all that 😛

So Saturday came: the first job was rigging up the Town Hall. I got there with Ellie at about 9:30am to find nobody around and the stage in bits… turns out everyone was already running a little bit late! Middy, Harry and the StagePro chaps (who were doing sound for all the venues) showed up presently and I lent a hand lugging stuff around before I had to disappear to deliver Ellie to orchestra practice. Home for a quick shower and change of shirt and I’m off in with the camera kit to get started, calling at The Hop to pick up a press pass and my yellow Long Division t-shirt (photo courtesy of John J).

First band I saw was Blood Oranges, catchy indie-pop up at the Town Hall. Nice guys, very enjoyable and I was pleasantly surprised how many people were there from the start – the Kingswood Suite was almost full already and some foot-tapping going on. Good one. This also gave me a chance to get the lighting right and take the first photos of the day in a non-stressful atmosphere. Earplugs in and off we go!

I figured I should get used to the headline venue, Mustang Sally’s, so strolled down there to catch The Finnlys – again, jangly guitar indie but I find it hard to take a band seriously when the lead singer looks like Roy out of The IT Crowd. The red saturation in the venue was horrendous (quite probably the worst conditions in which I’ve found myself shooting) and we’d already had a stipulation of ‘no flash’ – I did try a couple early on to see what it’d be like but really it was absolutely awful.

The next band on my list was Dinosaur Pile Up. Last time these guys were on at The Hop, John had photographed them and said they were loud – bizarrely this time round they were quieter! This was a distinction which didn’t carry through the rest of the bands upstairs at The Hop: despite sound engineer Tom’s efforts the new PA rig is just a bit too loud for that small room I think. Some work needed.

Once I’d got enough shots there I wandered down to the Graziers (stopping in at the Bull & Fairhouse en-route for a sneaky half-pint with Lisa the landlady). I’ve not photographed down there before and was surprised to find a full stage although there was no lighting which reduced me to the sole gig where I had to resort to flashgun. On-stage was Standaloft, a young rapper beatboxing various comedic songs (and some not so comedic) along to a backing on an iPod. I was pretty impressed actually, not usually my cup of tea but songs which wouldn’t be out-of-place in Joel Veitch‘s repertoire.

A stroll back down to catch my only act at Henry Boon’s: a lass called Clemence Freschard backed by various members of David Tattersall’s band The Wave Pictures. It was packed in there and very little air circulation but I stayed long enough to grab some shots and listen to her singing. Very pleasant stuff, made even more pleasant by the French accent (via Berlin, apparently) – I’m a sucker for that kind of stuff. Both Laurie and I didn’t last in there cramped in a corner and disappeared off to the bar to find a quiet half-pint – how the heck Nicky managed to do the whole set of The Wave Pictures themselves I don’t know.

The Wind-Up Birds weren’t on the Long Division band page so I was largely in the dark regarding their style when they hit the stage up at Mustang’s. Not too shabby, quite similar in style to the Cardiacs (the lead singer bore more than a passing resemblance to Cardiacs frontman Tim Smith) and they played an extended set as the subsequent act had pulled out.

I left in time to get up to the Town Hall for one of the bands I definitely didn’t want to miss: Fonda 500. Both John and I had been seriously impressed with this lot when they visited The Hop earlier in the year and we expected a treat. Unfortunately, although the band went through the motions I don’t think the lead singer really wanted to be there and seemed out of sorts consistently stating that ‘this might be our last song’ after the first couple. Boo. Don’t let this minor aberration stop you from seeing them in the future though!

It was at this point I’d got it noted down to go to the Cathedral and set the lighting up for Emmy The Great. Lots of folks told me to try and catch her, and I was fortunate to find the band were soundchecking when I arrived. As I cabled the lights around them I got my own little show which was lovely and I resolved to go back later on and catch at least some of her set. A wander back up Westgate via Subway for a hurried tea, getting goosed by Rachel of Chat Noir who was on a hunt for cheap vodka.

The next ‘must-see’ was Darwin Deez. Pete Fabs (he of Obvious Pseudonym) told me of their stage antics, and they really did not disappoint: choreographed dance moves between toe-tapping bittersweet songs, and the venue was packed out for it. Photogenic guy, I stopped for the entire set and bought the album on my way out: not the first Amazon 1-click iPhone order of the day, certainly not the last.

Back to the Town Hall for I Like Trains. I was still a bit worried about the lighting rig falling over as it was wobbling a bit, but this particular band were somewhat gentler. There wasn’t much illumination to the front of the stage by now owing to closed curtains and some fading light but a few fisheye shots were squeezed out and then dashed back to Mustangs to catch Piskie Sits.

Well that was the plan anyway. I got there to see Harry and co soundchecking but was distracted by Morsey waving frantically from the other end of the stage to check my phone which read “urgent sarah needs photos at hop quick”. I made a swift exit and dashed across Westgate narrowly avoiding the Saturday traffic where landlord Ian Fisher was waiting for me, “the sponsor for upstairs needs photos, it’s a condition of the sponsorship, it’s rammed up there though…” – hardly surprising since the next act was Los Campesinos! and even I’ve heard of them.

The thought process went something like this: “250 people, I reckon, all squished into a room which wasn’t designed for 250 people. Hardly any aircon, windows wide open. I look across the venue to where I need to stand, co-photographer Jon Pinder has chosen the easy corner near the door and I need to get to the other side. Urgh. Right. Excuse me please mate, can I just get thr… what the f…” I felt myself being bodily lifted up, camera kit and all, raised aloft on a sea of wristbanded hands. It’s years since I last crowdsurfed and at the age of 37 I wasn’t really prepared to do it again. Too bad, the only thing going through my mind was “Er, crap, there’s a wide open window coming towards me, and we’re on the first floor!” – so I nosedived, landed head-first on the aluminium crowdbarrier and almost hoofed the poor teenager behind me in her mush with my boot. But there I was – I grabbed the required crowd photos plus some of Los Campesinos! themselves and reversed the process to get to the door (which was, mercifully, a lot easier).

At that point I’d guess it was around 8:30pm. The Piskies were still on at Mustangs but I had a stinker of a headache by that point, almost a migraine. I wandered outside The Hop and bumped into Dean (Freeman) who commented I didn’t look too well, but I needed to man up and get the Piskies on their largest stage gig. Back at Mustangs the lighting hadn’t improved but there were quite a few folks watching the band, mostly stragglers from the Darwins set or who had arrived early for The Wedding Present. Long-standing drinking buddy Bez had arrived by then and bought me a beer which did nothing to improve the migraine situation but rehydrated me enough to get the shots I needed in the final two songs of their set.

A wander back to the Cathedral to listen to some of Emmy The Great with Laurie. Both Nicky and John were already there: I’d missed a lot of the set plus this migraine was really kicking in by now. Laurie had suggested I chug a can of full-fat Coke and some ibuprofen which seemed to do the trick at least temporarily: I soaked in the beautiful sounds in the Cathedral while dumping off some photos onto the netbook hard disk as I’d run out of CF (or at least the non-Kingston CF, and remember the last time I used those). Some quiet long-lens photos of Emmy, some relaxation, and then I was raring to go again.

Headliners The Wedding Present were trumpeted, not least because it was their first visit to Wakefield in 20 years. I arrived at Mustangs after the set had started and annoyingly I’d already missed my favourite Weddos song ‘Kennedy’. The sound wasn’t fantastic but quite literally the joint was jumping – too much in fact and the bouncers kicked off at the poor punters. While bearing in mind that the bouncers are usually used to a raucous Saturday night Wakefield crowd they were completely out of order – any exuberant pogoing and you got ejected out the back door with a few well-aimed punches from the door-staff at the same time. Very very sad and put a damper on what was otherwise a fantastic day. For my part I was right above where the bouncers were kicking off and managed to get a couple of photos of the ruckus but nothing useful. The gig was stopped while the bouncers were ejected from the premises – I mean, it must be bad for the security staff to get thrown out of the gig they’re meant to be policing!

After all of that, Gedge and co went back on, I took lots more photos, it was pretty good, and once they’d finished I went back outside to find Saturday-night Westgate in its typical unsurprising state of pissed-up perma-tan tarts and Ben Sherman meatheads. A bit of a scene-change. John, Laurie, Jon P, Nicky and I decided it was time for a hard-earned pint and repaired to The Jam Inn (the new chillout bit of The Hop) for a jar of Yorkshire Blonde and a chinwag. Hardcore to the last, Laurie caught Middleman (as they’re “his” band) but I was just too knackered and I’ve seen them before a few times anyway.

So that was my Saturday. We gigged on the Sunday but that was about it – I’d planned some more photos from the Fringe but was just too shattered and I’d got over 20,000 photos to sort through. There’s some good reviews of it all including this one at Sweeping The Nation and Dean’s account of the day from an organiser’s perspective (just in case you think I nicked his idea for this blog, I actually started writing it the day after the festival… best laid plans though, I’ve had a lot of photos to sort and I forgot to take the following Monday off work!).

A selection of photos from the day are being uploaded to my Long Division set on Flickr and there’s some pics from other photographers in the Long Division Flickr Group. Full sets of bands are gradually going up to photos.jml.net as I’m sorting through them. Should be finished in the next few days hopefully.

(A postscript: Monday morning came and a delivery van showed up with a large box of CDs. The moral? Multi-venue festivals and iPhone Amazon 1-click don’t mix. Ouch.)

Segfaults in keepalived

June 6, 2011 / Jess / 2 Comments

I’ve recently noticed a spate of problems with a keepalived install which I’m using to distribute load over several application servers, manifesting itself as:

[874439.982041] keepalived[7079]: segfault at 0 ip 0804d5fe sp bf976e80 error 6 in keepalived[8048000+20000]
[874439.987336] keepalived[7081]: segfault at 0 ip 0804d5fe sp bf976e80 error 6 in keepalived[8048000+20000]
[874439.992815] keepalived[7083]: segfault at 0 ip 0804d5fe sp bf976e80 error 6 in keepalived[8048000+20000]
[874444.956732] __ratelimit: 534 callbacks suppressed

This is using Debian 6.0.1 (squeeze) on i386 architecture.

After lots of digging around it seems the answer is simply that the module ip_vs isn’t loaded.

To fix, just do:

# modprobe ip_vs

It’ll stop the segfaults and all will be returned to sweetness and light.

(This post is intentionally Google-fodder. Hope this helps someone else with the same issues.)