Psuedo Guru Blog by a wannabe guru with spelling issues.

Google Maps Suddenly Sucks

Why can't I print big maps anymore? That's my beef with Google right now. I made the switch to Google maps quite a while ago, and I did it for one reason...printing big maps. I am a map guy, not a text directions guy. Yahoo always gives a little tiny destination map that is all but useless, but with Google maps, I could easily get a highly detailed map that would fill a printed page.

Not any more. I typed in some directions today, and hit print from the file menu, and got no map at all, just text. I hit the little print button on the screen, which popped open another window with, guess what, a tiny map. It would print, but tiny maps are useless to me.

Get a clue Google. People use your map service because they can print good maps. Why have you taken this feature away?

MySQL Password Blooper

OH MY GOD! MY BLOG WAS DOWN FOR 4 HOURS TODAY!!!

[ wind whistles ]
[ tumbleweed rolls by ... ]

Ok, maybe nobody noticed. Before leaving for my workout, I installed a bug tracking system on my server. Part of that process involved setting permissions for its database in MySQL. I figured I would use the same user and password that I use for roller, so I issued something like the following (real user and password removed):

grant all on bugdb.* to 'sameuser'@'localhost.localdomain' identified by 'samepassword' with grant option;

I tried out the bug system, and it worked, so I restarted the server and left to go work out, without waiting for the server to come back up.

When I returned, my wife said that her blog was down. I checked, and it was down. So was my blog. So were a lot of things that used JDBC. Something was going on here. I quick look through the logs shows stuff like the following:

java.sql.SQLException
MESSAGE: Access denied for user 'sameuser'@'localhost.localdomain' (using password: YES)

...and the ever popular

Attempted reconnect 3 times. Giving up.

After about an hour of pulling my hair out, rummaging through the mysql user and permissions tables, and blaming everyone but myself, I finally decided to look at my Tomcat server.xml. I had not changed the server.xml file while installing the bug tracking software (it is PHP based), but I figured I might as well take a glance to convince myself that I wasn't insane. The problem jumped right out at me.

The password in the server.xml file was not "samepassword", but "same_password". What I didn't realize was that the SQL statement I had issued to assign permissions to the bugdb table had globally reset the password for "sameuser".

I few grant statements later, and everything was back in business.