What this cliché expression doesn’t add is “if you haven’t got a lifejacket, you learn to make one fast or drown”

Oh the fun of metaphoric rainy days. This week just about everything to do with databases, servers, operating systems and hard disks went a bit squirly. Luckily, it all being digital stuff, I wasn’t prone to panic

This is what I learned by fighting digital fires all frickin week.

• 1GB of RAM isn’t really enough for a million hits plus website if there are tens of thousands of complex mysql statements happening every day.
• Ubuntu can crash too.
• Linux may be more powerful but that just means the crashes are even more spectacular.
• UKFast have really awesome tech support who can answer your call in two rings and be all geeky with your server and do fantastic things while they talk to you on the phone like you called to chat about the weather.
• Crisis makes you code better.
• An external hard drive isn’t a ‘safe’ place to store important data if you let other people use it to “just copy some mp3′s”
• Having another partition for your my documents folder is a really really good idea.
• Life without tweetdeck on my work pc is a bit pants
• Tweetdeck on Ubuntu is also a bit pants when you can’t unlock your default keyring
• It feels like a genius stroke to send a copy of my menu.lst from /boot/grub/ to my gmail address
• Blogging about it makes it better.
• Coding stuff because you need it, makes it worth more when it works.
• If I didn’t have my missus to ground me, I would have stabbed at least 3 people this week. seriously, with a spoon! (because it hurts more)
• It’s bloody hot in summer when you can’t go out.

What have you learned this week?