Neosource Web Development & Software

Why ‘yum search’ returns “Error: file is encrypted or is not a database” [CentOS 6.2]

Joe — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 08:12:31 +0000

I recently installed CentOS 6.2 on my development server and it was running fine up until today when I tried looking for a package via the yum command line:

# yum search host

Error: file is encrypted or is not a database

The error message did not get any more descriptive even after enabling debug output and increasing verbosity. I managed to figure out which repo / file was causing the error after debugging the yum python scripts.

On my system, the file that was causing the error was from the EPEL repository located in /var/cache/yum/i386/6/epel/gen/pkgtags.sqlite. I checked copies on a few different mirrors, and the contents were the same as the source http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/repodata/pkgtags.sqlite.gz.

Here’s what the file contained:

# cat /var/cache/yum/i386/6/epel/gen/pkgtags.sqlite

“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>

503 Service Unavailable

Error 503 Service Unavailable

Service Unavailable

Guru Meditation:

XID: 1920246608

Varnish cache server

Seems that the repository server was having some issues. I reported it to #centos, #epel, #fedora, #fedora-admin at irc.freenode.net, so one of the admins should fix it soon hopefully.

Anyhow I hope this explanation helps anyone else trying to figure out the same error message.

It would be nice if yum was more descriptive with its errors and indicated which repo / file was causing the issue to save people scratching their heads figuring out where the problem is.

If this happens to you, you can disable the corrupt repo by using yum –disablerepo=epel. Replace “epel” with the repo you wish to disable.

For those that wish to figure out which repo/file is causing the above error message, edit the file /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/yum/pkgtag_db.py (requires root privileges). Insert “print repoid, sqlite_file” at line 50.

def __init__(self, repoid, sqlite_file):

print repoid, sqlite_file

When you run “yum search package”, you’ll now see:

# yum search host
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, presto, priorities
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
* base: mirror.primusdatacentre.com.au
* centosplus: mirror.primusdatacentre.com.au
* epel: ucmirror.canterbury.ac.nz
* epel-source: mirror.optus.net
* extras: mirror.primusdatacentre.com.au
* updates: mirror.primusdatacentre.com.au
85 packages excluded due to repository priority protections
epel /var/cache/yum/i386/6/epel/gen/pkgtags.sqlite
Error: file is encrypted or is not a database

$11.8B NBN deal with Telstra and Optus helps censor Australia’s Internet

Joe — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 01:39:06 +0000

Australia's Internet Censored ($11.8B had nothing to do with it)

Well, looks like the cat’s out of the bag in regards to Australia’s controversial internet censorship filter.

Yesterday it was announced that Telstra and Optus are to start filtering their customers internet access in July 2011, as part of a voluntary agreement with the Government. This may come as a surprise to some, but what’s even more surprising (or not), is the fact that both companies have just announced that they have signed a $11.8B with the Government in respect to the national broadband network (NBN).

Telstra signs $11b NBN agreement

Optus strikes $800m NBN deal

Corpocracy seems to be overshadowing democracy, as 96% of people polled are against the internet censorship filter.

Poll 1 – 96% against internet censorship

Poll 2 – Surprise, also 96% against internet censorship

I’m all for protecting children from harm, though the internet filter is easily bypassed, and therefore is a waste of taxpayers money. After seeing the above, it begs the question, what is the real purpose of the filter…

Facebook’s new Instant Personalisation makes your information available to external partner websites

Joe — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 01:37:45 +0000

The new Instant Personalisation feature currently being launched by Facebook allows your personal information (that you make available to everyone of course) to be shared with external partner websites when you visit them. This is different to the social plugins, which do not share your information when you visit sites with Facebook social plugins.

Facebook’s goal is to bring the social experience everywhere you go on the web, whilst giving their marketing partners more ways to access and mine your data.

Instant Personalisation is enabled automatically as it becomes available, but if you do not wish your Facebook information to be shared with external websites, then you can disable it by following the navigation path below.

Account -> Privacy Settings -> Apps and websites -> Edit your settings -> Instant Personalisation -> Edit Settings

Untick the “Enable instant personalisation on partner websites”.

It was not yet available to be unticked when I wrote this, as it said “Note: instant personalisation is not yet available for you.”. So if it’s the same for you then make a note to come back at a later date and check it again.

Your information is accessible to applications and websites through your friends

Another Facebook privacy option you may wish to review is “information accessible through your friends”. This setting is found above the Instant Personalisation setting and allows applications and websites that your friends use to access your information. The list of information sharing options are available under this setting, which you can individually allow or block.

your bio
birthday
family and relationships
what you’re interested in and looking for
your religious and political views
your website
whether you’re online
your status updates
your photos
your videos
your links
your notes
photos and videos you’re tagged in
your hometown and current location
your education and work
activities and interests that you like
places that you check in to

iPad Christmas Bargain 80% off! – Limited Stock!

Joe — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 05:59:55 +0000

If you are interested in getting an Apple iPad for Christmas at a huge 80% off, I can get hold of them through a contact.

iPad Christmas Bargain - Limited Stock!

The numbers are limited and he has 10 Apple iPads going for up to 80% off! – it’s first come first served (they are from a cancelled SouthernHealth contract due to the cutbacks).

2 have already been sold, so click the link below to see what iPads we have left in stock for you!

Click here to see your iPad

The elusive Eternity II puzzle – is there a pattern to it?

Joe — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 15:52:19 +0000

I’ve been fascinated and hooked on Eternity II, the elusive edge matching puzzle, since I first heard about it in November 2009. It was released in 2007 as the successor to the original Eternity puzzle, and offers a $2M prize to the first person that solves it. Submissions are reviewed on Dec 31st each year with the final scrutiny date being Dec 31st, 2010. It remained unsolved as of Dec 31st, 2009.

The puzzle consists of 256 uniquely designed square tiles that have a pattern on each edge. There are 60 tiles that make up the border, consisting of 5 patterns. The inner 14×14 grid is made up using 196 tiles comprising 17 patterns. Here is a playable mini version of the puzzle. There is also an Eternity II Yahoo group where people have been discussing their ideas.

Eternity II Puzzle

Christopher Monckton, the inventor has spent 8 years designing it, and has designed it in such a way that it cannot be solved by raw computing power alone. To give you an idea of the complexity of this puzzle, it’d take 360,000,000 times the age of the Universe to exhaust all of the possibilities using Tianhe-1, the worlds fastest supercomputer. That’s some seriously large numbers, considering the Tianhe-1 has a processing speed of 2,750 trillion instructions per second. There are a number of people writing backtracking solvers to try and find a solution, maybe hoping for a miracle and an extraordinary amount of luck, even with thousands of distributed Tianhe-1′s, the search for a computer generated solution appears quite futile.

Monckton has stated from the outset that a backtracking solver will not solve this puzzle, yet people persist. I myself have created a number of different programs to analyse the puzzle, backtracking solvers with a range of variable options to try and optimise the search. Even if you eliminate 99% of the search space, that still leaves 1% of 360,000,000 universes of time, so any reduction in search space would have to be exponentially better than a mere 99% reduction.

I’ve had a bit of time up my sleeve, and so I’ve dedicated a fair amount of time on this puzzle, trying to understand and figure out how it has been designed. I can’t explain why I’ve been so attached to it, I’ve never been so involved in a single project for an extended amount of time, with no apparent payoff. Sure the prize money would be life changing, but just the thought of being the first to solve such a challenging puzzle before anyone else would be a life changing achievement in itself.

I have looked at the 7 x $1M Millennium Prize Problems offered by Clay Mathematics Institute, though they are above my understanding of mathematics. The E2 puzzle falls into the P=NP puzzle domain, of which there is also a $1M millennium prize offered for solving P=NP.

I’ve always been fond of mathematics, it’s amazing how it appears in so many seemingly unrelated areas, from the golden mean ratio that the spiral of galaxies seem to follow, to fibonacci and the human body, plants, even language. Pretty much everything has a mathematical connection.

My philosophy has been that if I can figure out how E2 was designed, then there must be a logical way to solve it. My quest has led me to explore a number of different algorithms from simulated annealing, mutational algorithms, and an extensive analysis of the tileset to see if I could find any patterns within the dataset and comparing it against other puzzles with E2 like properties. I felt that I’ve been close to cracking the code a number of times, yet the sheer enormity of the puzzle has humbled me time and time again.

In my research I found that Monckton has published a number of Sudoku books, and invented the Sudoku-X variety in which both diagonals also have 9 unique digits. I recently purchased a copy of his Suduko X – Book 1. I was stunned when I read the following statement on page 9, ” I developed Sudoku X using the advanced computer algorithm that I’d originally constructed to help me design the Eternity puzzle.” I had a sneaking suspicion that it was connected to Sudoku somehow! Even so, trying to figure out how this can help solve the puzzle is still proving quite difficult. There is also no guarantee that E2 was designed in the same way that Eternity 1 was designed, though it seems there must be some connection between the two. It is not known whether the official solution to Eternity 1 had any sort of pattern, as the 2 solutions found were not the official solution, and they did not appear to have any distinctive pattern.

It would be cruel if there is no pattern or determinable design to Eternity II, and I can’t imagine it’d be a random puzzle even though it very much appears to be random. If it is indeed random, I’m not sure what kind of implications that’d have for Tomy for selling a puzzle that has no likelyhood of ever being solved.

I won’t yet elaborate on the finer details of my current ideas, as I may yet crack it (haha yeah right), but I may follow up in a future post if it hasn’t been solved and the prize has been withdrawn. With only 10 days or so remaining, to allow time for delivery, I’m not expecting any miracles, but am still giving it a go to the end!

Beware of Google’s pre-emptive AdWords landing page checker

Joe — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 13:04:24 +0000

Today I launched a new website for a client, www.AussieGoatsMilkSoap.com.au – they make natural goats milk soap, apparently really good for sensitive skin – it’s not a plug, just stating the facts . Whilst deploying the site I started setting up a Google AdWords campaign to promote the site.

I prepared an ad and started writing some ad copy, and put in the website URL and info as typically required. I saved it, but the campaign was not yet active as the billing information wasn’t yet entered. A few minutes later I receive an email from Google with the subject “Your AdWords account: Site(s) violation“. I was a little surprised to see this as I’ve set up AdWords campaigns before and never had a problem with violating their guidelines.

The email stated that “one or more of your sites is in violation of our Landing Page and Site Policies.”. As I was in the midst of deploying the site, I figured the site would’ve appeared broken (as it hadn’t finished uploading) when Google’s AdWords bot visited the site to check the landing page URL. As a result of this, the ad campaign was disabled and marked as “disapproved”. I was quite annoyed at this considering the Ad was not yet live. There was no information in the email about the cause of the problem, nor did any useful messages appear in the AdWords console.

I wrote to Google expressing that I wasn’t impressed with how it pre-emptively blocked my campaign before it was live, and sent an email to my client saying the ad campaign was in violation of their terms. I hope they review their landing page checking bot and their policy on blocking sites, as I can imagine many other people could get snagged by this inconvenience, which could be avoided by a simple alteration in the way the Google AdWords bot processes new ads.

“You should’ve deployed the site before creating the ad campaign!”, some of you may say, but even a mis-typed URL could cause the same problem. I believe they should wait until the ad is marked live or ready to publish before initiating any sort of background checking.

If Google reply to my letter, or if I find I goofed something up I’ll let you know!

In the meantime, if you’ve also had a similar experience, share your comments below.

Update 17-Dec-2010

I waited patiently without making any changes to the site or the ads, and on 14-Dec-2010 I received the following email from Google:

Hello Joe, Thank you for your patience. Our specialists have re-reviewed your site and found that it is in compliance with our Landing Page and Site Policies. You should see improvements to your Quality Score soon, reflected by higher Quality Scores for your keywords. We recommend that you continue checking our guidelines and making continuous improvement over time.

Excellent, though why did the bot not approve it in the first place? I tried re-submitting the ads after receiving the email, though it took another 2 days before I got an email with the subject “Your AdWords account: Site(s) approved”.

We have re-reviewed one or more of your sites and found that the sites are no longer violating our Landing Page and Site policies.

The ads are now running without any issues. Thanks Google.

After great anticipation (not), my blog has been launched.

Joe — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 11:30:47 +0000

Background
After months of procrastination, unforeseen delays and a bunch of other excuses I could probably come up with, I’ve finally decided to take the plunge and install my own blog. It’s been sitting idly on my development server longer than I care to mention, just waiting for me to take the time to push it live.

Many a time I’ve written an email to a client or to a software or service provider and thought “this should be a blog post”. Well today is the day that I can cross off “launch my blog” from my ever growing todo list. Then I write 3 pages and think, hmm this needs to be re-written and gets stashed in my list of “draft articles to publish”. Well now maybe they are a step closer to being published, if they aren’t outdated and obsolete within 3 minutes of writing this.

So what do I intend to blog about ?
Whatever I feel is worthy of sharing with people, hopefully making someone’s life a little easier by presenting solutions to problems, or just putting some ideas out there that might inspire someone or cause a revolution, or make front page news, that would be awesome wouldn’t it!

I often find myself searching and finding a lot of useful sites and software, even if I don’t have a use for them myself I’ll see something and think “this is cool, could come in handy someday”, and add it to my endless list of bookmarks. Funny thing is, if I go to find something again I’ll just Google it instead of searching my bookmarks. Why is that ? Who knows, I like collecting information, maybe someday I’ll open a library or an archive containing random bits of the internet. Maybe not.

About Me
Whilst writing this blog page, I’m thinking “who’s gonna read this anyway?”, and “what do I put in here without sounding like a douche”. So I’m not writin anythin, leaving it a mystery for now. Ok well I’ve been self employed most of my adult life, I prefer the idea of time freedom to money freedom, though the money would be great. Maybe I can have both if I apply myself. I’m not a fan of rigid schedules booked out weeks in advance. I consider myself creatively spontaneous, well maybe a little unorganised at times, but creatively spontaneous sounds better. More to come later, maybe. Yeah I say maybe a lot, nothing is certain in life, so maybe works well for me.

How will Bluetooth Marketing Evolve ?

Joe — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 14:08:04 +0000

I recently read an article that discusses how bluetooth marketing has been excluded from requiring Opt-In permission by ICO in the UK.

Article link: http://www.consumer-preference.com/2007/10/bluetooth-marketing-ico-removes.html

I’ve recently experimented with some bluetooth marketing, and whilst I am against spam via email etc, I do see some differences in the bluetooth approach.

Bluetooth vs Email or SMS Marketing
1. The message isn’t stored in the phone unless the consumer accepts it.

2. If they do nothing, the message disappears within 60-120 seconds on it’s own, as if it was never there, so it’s quite common they weren’t even aware of the message in the first place. I noticed most Nokia phones don’t vibrate or have an option to vibrate when a bluetooth request is received, so it’s not as intrusive as SMS as it behaves differently from what I have seen.

3. It is quite easy for anyone to either switch their bluetooth off or hide their phone from being ‘advertised’ via bluetooth to avoid any unsolicited messages, which I believe is quite adequate for managing whether people want to receive bluetooth marketing or not. I disagree with the analogy of having your phone number listed in the phonebook vs having bluetooth on to receive messages. You can’t disable your phone listing momentarily, though you can disable bluetooth as needed. People turn their mobiles off when going into hospitals, aeroplanes, and use silent mode in meetings, movies etc, why should bluetooth be any different? There’s no reason to have bluetooth on and discoverable unless you want to receive messages. There’s no detriment to the user experience if they still want to receive messages from friends which should be paired devices anyhow, so being hidden wouldn’t have a negative effect on that.

Though the only negative side I can see is if everyone was using bluetooth marketing, then it would become ineffective a walk in a shopping centre would illicit dozens of messages every few minutes as you approach more bluetooth marketing zones. Most phones haven’t been designed to handle multiple simultanoeus incoming connections (on the user interface side anyhow).

Some suggestions that may be useful though would be to have a code of conduct on how bluetooth marketing is used, such as maximum number of communication attempts per device, and minimum intervals between attempts to avoid bombardment etc. Alternatively, if the protocol was enhanced to allow the consumer to browse a list of ‘advertisers’ in their proximity, then they could opt to choose who to allow receieving messages from, which would be a once-off per advertiser/location. If they make no preference, then they don’t receive any advertisements. There are many possible applications for bluetooth, such as community announcements or location based instructions/guides etc. It would be a shame if it doesn’t reach it’s full potential due to overuse or ineffective protocols to deal with the growing list of possible uses.