Who’s got the best power plug? Crave UK answers the question with their tongue somewhat in cheek. Could there be any bias with their #1 plug? I guess the writers don’t travel much and could care less about size. Also, perhaps anthropomorphism is a bit too highly ranked? More intelligent ways to be shocked. Permalink | Leave a comment »
Selected by cbiggins
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Holy Kaw!
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My plug is better than yours
7 Nov 2009 | 8:38 am -
25 wackiest NYC Marathon costumes
6 Nov 2009 | 11:01 pmRunning 26.2 miles while sucking down polluted urban air wasn’t quite difficult enough for some jogging fools competing in the New York City Marathon last week, so a handful of creative folks decided to extend Halloween an extra day and run the race while donning costumes. Photogs spotted clowns, super heroes, Uncle Sam, nuns and even an apparently alive Michael Jackson. Lucky for you, you didn’t have to travel all the way to the Big Apple to check out all the shenanigans because Buzz Feed has collected images of the 25 best costumes at the 2009 NYC marathon. Enjoy (and feel lazy… -
Tech that refuses to die
6 Nov 2009 | 10:26 pmCall them the Jason Vorhees of technology—gadgets that just won’t die, no matter how many times you kill ‘em with a chain saw. Tech moves fast,—remember, like 10 years ago you probably had a pager in your pocket—but why is it that some technology seems completely resistant to kicking the bucket? From cables that remain tangled under your desk to the hipsters’ audio format of choice, vinyl, CNet highlights eight tech items that refuse to meet the Grim Reaper. Even Twitter makes a surprise entry on the list. Check out the full list, including why the sans… -
How to change
6 Nov 2009 | 10:09 pmWant to change? Then, according to Peter Bregman, just change one thing. In his case he stopped consuming large amounts of sugar. For me, it would be carbohydrates. But the article isn’t really about dieting—it’s about how to become a better business person, so read it and reap. More Lifehacks. Permalink | Leave a comment » -
Guess who is a Glamour woman of the year?
6 Nov 2009 | 9:56 pmIt’s going to be a long time before I post about anything in Glamour, but this is a special occasion. The magazine named Google’s Marissa Mayer as one of the women of the year for 2009. Joining her is “refuse to use Bluetooth” Maria Shriver and others. The only reason Matt Cutts didn’t win is that he’s a man—despite the concerted efforts of SEO consultants around the world to game the voting.. More, albeit less glamourous, news about Google. Permalink | Leave a comment »
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Planet PHP
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Alternative Term Weighting - Ian Barber
6 Nov 2009 | 1:50 pmThe term weighting and ranking function is at the core of any information retrieval system. The vector space model with the cosine similarity is maybe the best known and most widely used, but there are plenty of alternatives. We're looking at two here, the BM25 function based around a probabilistic model, and a function based around language modeling. Just to get something to work with we'll we'll build a quick index on some strings which will stand in for our documents - for a real world usage this structure would be too simple, but it provides the bits the ranking functions need. We build a… -
Facebook, MySpace, and crossdomain.xml - Chris Shiflett
6 Nov 2009 | 8:29 amThanks to the recent recurrence of a vulnerability I wrote about a few years ago and a gentle prod from Simon, I decided it would be good to write about the dangers of cross-domain Ajax with Flash again. If you read about this story on TechCrunch, note that the "write up explaining all the details" is about an unrelated vulnerability. I'll try to briefly explain the problem and then show how it relates to Facebook and MySpace. For more background information, please refer to these prior posts: Cross-Domain Ajax Insecurity, which discusses why true cross-domain Ajax is a bad idea, despite many… -
The Joel Test Redux: web2project - Keith Casey
6 Nov 2009 | 8:05 amIn the last few months or so, it appears the PHP Community has finally found the Joel Test. Lorna Jane spoke about it last month at PHPNW 09 and this week Brandon Savage adapted it for web development. While I'd love to point out the fact that I've been writing about the Joel Test for years and even have the "Joel On Software" book on the required reading list for Blue Parabola staff... but I digress... While all the rules are important in some way, there's one we've taken to heart recently within web2project: Can you make a shippable version of your software in one step? Previously, to… -
Updated Optimizing PHP Article - John Lim (PHP Everywhere - By John Lim)
5 Nov 2009 | 11:52 pmI have just updated my popular Optimizing PHP article with additional information on caching. I discuss memcache and squid. I also updated the PHP Accelerators and changed the tone of some parts of the article. I quote: Perhaps the most significant change to PHP performance I have experienced since I first wrote this article is my use of Squid, a web accelerator that is able to take over the management of all static http files from Apache. You may be surprised to find that the overhead of using Apache to serve both dynamic PHP and static images, javascript, css, html is extremely high. From… -
Why Every Developer Should Write Their Own Framework - Brandon Savage
5 Nov 2009 | 10:00 pmLots of people have the itch to write their own frameworks. They think that they can do better than Zend, Cake, Symfony, or application-level frameworks like Drupal. They’re convinced that those designers and developers made fatal flaws, and they can improve upon them. They’re just itching to give it a shot. So for those of you wanting to write your own frameworks, feel free. But don’t even think about putting it in production until you’ve read this blog post. Lots of times new developers are shot down from writing their own frameworks by bosses or community members who insist that…
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PHPBuilder.com New Articles
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PHP Development: Getting Started
It's been a few years since I echo'd my first HELLO WORLD script. PHP has developed and evolved and ... -
A Look Into Web Services
When I first started working on the web and developing websites, the Web Service was a new concept t ... -
PHP Filters: An Important Security Feature
You may have noticed that I have mentioned in one of my previous articles that PHP's biggest weaknes ... -
Aptana Studio Professional 1.5, a Complete Developer's Toolbox
I'd read some articles and news items about Aptana Studio Pro, and after reading that it was not onl ... -
Session Security
Sessions are a very complicated part of PHP, and it is no surprise that the smarter website attacks ...
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Zend Developer Zone
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Brandon Savage's Blog: Why Every Developer Should Write Their Own Framework
6 Nov 2009 | 9:05 amIn his latest post Brandon Savage suggests that every developer should do one thing before they start working with PHP frameworks - write their own. -
ZendCon '09 Slides
5 Nov 2009 | 7:19 amMissed a session at ZendCon and wish you hadn’t? Forget some awesome tip or trick that a speaker talked about and your dog ate your notes? Fret no longer, the ZendCon 2009 slide decks are here. -
ZendCon 2009 is over
2 Nov 2009 | 8:44 amZendCon 2009 is over, it’s time to close things out, remember the fun, and start planning for ZendCon 2010! -
Ibuildings talks about Gmagick, PHP and "the cloud"
2 Nov 2009 | 6:23 amYes, there, I invoked the ‘C’ word so now you are interested. I can hear the question that is racing through your mind at this point. “What could ‘the cloud’ – the latest technical term to be appropriated by marketing departments worldwide and thus rendered useless – have to do with image processing?” -
Symfony Blog: Why will Symfony 2.0 finally use PHP 5.3?
29 Oct 2009 | 1:19 pmOn the Symfony blog today Fabien Potencier answers the question "will Symfony 2.0 finally use PHP 5.3?"
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CSS-Tricks
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Quickie CSS3 Tricks with Fallbacks
6 Nov 2009 | 3:45 amCSS3 can do some seriously neat stuff. Just check out some of the crazy 3D stuff you can do in WebKit. But as we all know, we need to be careful with what we choose to do with it. The most cutting edge techniques are fun to play with, but since since only a sliver of browsers support them fully, we can only use them in circumstances where they fall back to otherwise perfectly acceptable styling. Let’s look at a couple of quick, simple, cheezy examples. Growing Links Scaling an element is really fun any easy with CSS3. We don’t need CSS3 to do this, we could use relative… -
New Poll: How do you format your CSS?
4 Nov 2009 | 5:33 amThe poll is in the sidebar, so jump down there to vote. You can see examples of the different ways to format CSS here. I think that covers most of the popular ways to format CSS, but if you have your own unique way, feel free to post some code or a link to an example CSS file in the comments! I think it’s an interesting topic because us all the implications it may have on a site and the working life of the front end coder. We spend so much time in CSS that how we choose to format it affects how efficiently we can write it, how easily re-acquainted we are with old CSS, and even… -
Poll Results: When Do Jobs Get Done?
3 Nov 2009 | 11:00 amWhen this poll first kicked off, the “late” options were way ahead. Over time, things have evened off a bit, and the results are closer than I thought they might be. If you are in the on time or early crowd, congrats! That means you are really good at estimating project completion times. For the rest of us, that means we should start pushing those dates back a little further than we do now. Of course, meeting deadlines is reliant upon both our working speed and our clients ability to communicate, but we are the ones issuing the completion dates, so it’s our job to anticipate… -
Holy Sprites
2 Nov 2009 | 3:39 amLots of folks joined in on the fun with the Show Off Your Sprites! contest. I used the ol’ random number generator and came up with Lee Kowalkowski as the big winner, congrats Lee! Now let’s take a look at some of the submissions. Looking at sprites I find strangely fascinating. It’s like this strange secret language of the web that only us performance nerds really understand =) Some of these may have been cropped or resized. They aren’t meant to be taken and used, I just hope they serve as an inspirational spark! If you just look through all these and were like… -
Redesigned Personal Site
30 Oct 2009 | 4:46 amAs I do from time to time, I redesigned my personal site (redesign notes). I wanted to make the site a better vessel for writing, so the shell of the site has a much nicer structure for doing that. It’s 100% WordPress of course. I did break one major rule: the design is a complete overhaul of the previous site, rather than an evolutionary step. I just felt like evolution wasn’t going to cut it this time. And besides, this is a low-traffic, personal site, not major news portal or web app or anything where the “Who moved my cheese?” phenomenon is much stronger. In…
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CSS Drive News
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15 Creative Logos and How They Were Designed
7 Nov 2009 | 7:34 amA list of 15 awesome logos and how each designer came up with the concept then executed the concept. -
Google Closure Tools
6 Nov 2009 | 8:24 amGoogle has has released Closure Tools, a set of tools that include Closure Compiler, Closure Library, and Closure Templates to ease your JavaScript development. -
25 Amazing Photoshop Patterns
5 Nov 2009 | 3:12 pmI'm into Photoshop patterns and textures, who isn't? This collection is pretty slick, some of the coolest Photoshop pattern sets around for sure! -
Logo Design Research
4 Nov 2009 | 11:59 pmA detailed article on one Logo Designers personal research process for a Logo Design. A great way to build on your own process and get inspired. -
Dive Into HTML5
1 Nov 2009 | 7:46 amAn excellent, comprehensive guide to HTML 5. It seeks to elaborate on a hand-picked selection of features from the HTML5 specification and other fine Standards.
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Yahoo! User Interface Blog
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YUI Theater — Satyen Desai: “A Widget Walkthrough”
6 Nov 2009 | 12:41 pmSatyen Desai (@dezziness) leads development of the YUI 3 widget infrastructure, a system that is currently in beta and due for its first production-quality release in Q1 2010. At YUICONF 2009, Satyen provided a deep-dive on this emerging foundation in his session, “A Widget Walkthrough.” If you’re considering the development of YUI 3-based widgets to share on the new YUI 3 Gallery, or if you simply want to understand more deeply the inner workings of YUI 3 visual components, Satyen’s talk is a fantastic place to start. (Note: Satyen has an earlier YUI Theater session… -
YUI Theater — Chad Auld: “Introducing PHP Loader”
6 Nov 2009 | 8:44 amChad Auld (@chadauld) is a Yahoo! engineer best known for his work on MiaCMS and Sideline. Chad recently drove the open-source release of YUI’s PHP Loader (taking over from original developer Adam Moore [@admo]), and he came to YUICONF 2009 last week to talk about the project and provide an introduction to its core features. PHP Loader provides a generic, flexible loading mechanism for modular JavaScript/CSS projects, and while it ships with YUI 2 and YUI 3 metadata it can be used for any frontend project written in PHP. Chad’s talk gave the audience a unique opportunity to hear… -
YUI Theater — Matt Snider: “Introducing the YUI 2.8.0 Storage Utility”
5 Nov 2009 | 2:48 pmMatt Snider is the lead fronted engineer (and employee #1) at Mint.com, the popular personal-finance site that was recently acquired by Intuit. Matt has been a longtime user of YUI at Mint, and he’s documented his own additions to YUI extensively over the years on his blog. This year, Matt deepened his work with the library by authoring a major new component: the YUI 2.8.0 Storage Utility. Storage provides an HTML 5-like API for client-side storage, using native HTML 5 engines where available and falling back to SWF and Gears as alternatives when a native engine isn’t available. -
YUI Theater — Ron Adams: “Automated Integration Testing with YUI Test, Selenium and Hudson”
5 Nov 2009 | 8:49 amRon Adams is a Yahoo! engineer in Southern California who has worked on a variety of Yahoo!’s media products including OMG and who now works for Yahoo! Sports. Ron has been working with colleagues in QA to automate the exercise of JavaScript unit tests, and his YUICONF 2009 session was entitled “Automated Integration Testing with YUI Test, Selenium and Hudson.” As the title suggests, he outlines the process he’s developed using YUI Test for JavaScript unit tests, Hudson as a CI/build tool for tracking and monitoring results, and Selenium as the tool to exercise the JS… -
YUI Theater — Eric Ferraiuolo: “Web App Development with YUI 3″
5 Nov 2009 | 7:47 amEric Ferraiuolo (@ericf) of Boston-area startup Oddnut Software made the trip to YUICONF 2009 last week to give a talk on the deployment of YUI 3-based applications in the real world. The talk presents a lot of wisdom Eric and his team have acquired since beginning to build on YUI 3 about a year ago, and it was one of the best-received talks at the conference. If the video embed below doesn’t show up correctly in your RSS reader of choice, be sure to click through to watch the high-resolution version of the video on YUI Theater; the downloadable version is much smaller, optimized as it…
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AJAXIAN
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Mockingbird: Cappuccino-based visual mockup tool
6 Nov 2009 | 3:19 amMockingbird is a nice Cappuccino based tool that lets you quickly mockup a wire-frame on the Web. Fire it up, build out your “pages”, drag and drop your UI, and then share it with your clients! -
Clipperz and Zero-Knowledge Online Password Management
5 Nov 2009 | 3:17 pmThe latest in Jon Udell’s excellent podcast series is an interview with clipperz.com’s Marco Barulli about the tool and its use of zero-knowledge online password management (aka the host-proof hosting pattern). Direct MP3 link (from IT Conversations post) Jon speaks of translucent databases, which encrypt data that can only make sense at application level. Thanks to the dramatic increases we’ve seen in the performance of Javascript engines, that kind of encryption technology is now feasible in the browser. Marco also makes the point that Javascript implementations of raw… -
Google releases Closure, the tools behind the JS geniuses
5 Nov 2009 | 12:08 pmI remember when the whole Ajax thing kicked in and JavaScript developers looked at Gmail, Gmaps, and the like and thought “I wonder what powers that?” Well, the power comes from Closure a library and set of tools that the great JS hackers built over time as they created the applications at scale. As soon as I joined Google I wanted to check out this code, and talked to a bunch of folks who were interested in open sourcing it. Well, these things take time, but now we are fortunate enough to have everything out there (interestingly, a lot of the code was open due to it being used in… -
Riot.js: JavaScript port of the lean fast unit test framework
5 Nov 2009 | 3:12 amRiot started as a lean Ruby unit test framework with tests that have a style like this: PLAIN TEXT RUBY: context "a new user" do setup { User.new } asserts("that it is not yet created") { topic.new_record? } end Alex Young has now implemented Riot.js which brings you the lean framework in a format that can run stand-along via Rhino, or through the browser itself with tests that look like: PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT: Riot.run(function() { context('basic riot functionality', function() { given('some… -
MooTools Call to Upgrade
4 Nov 2009 | 12:51 pmA change in Firefox 3.6 has prompted a call to upgrade from the MooTools team. Earlier versions of the library used the document.getBoxObjectFor method for browser detection but as of Firefox 3.6, that method has been deprecated and no longer available: The reason we stress the upgrade to MooTools 1.2.4 and MooTools 1.1.2 is the removal of the document.getBoxObjectFor method in the upcoming Mozilla Firefox 3.6 release. Within the browser detection code of MooTools 1.1 and earlier versions of 1.2, MooTools attempts to identify the Gecko engine by checking for the existence of…
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Linux Journal - The Original Magazine of the Linux Community
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Package Management With Zypper
5 Nov 2009 | 7:05 amAs I've mentioned before I'm an openSUSE user, and as long as they don't make the "U" lower case again, I'll probably stick with it. When it comes to package management, OpenSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprice (and SuSE before them) are usually associated with YaST (and yes, I'm still waiting for them to upper case the "a"). YaST works well but it's a bit verbose for installing a single package, and of course that's just more fodder for the apt-getters with all their apt-get install this and their apt-get install thats. And you can't argue with them, but there are other options… -
Court Gets A Torrent-full About Linux
4 Nov 2009 | 6:28 pmBitTorrent is one of the most contentious technologies available. At least, that is, to the Old Order, those lovely suit-clad corporate types bent on holding technology forever in the days of the — manual — typewriter. The technology, and the suits' dreams of a world free of it, are on trial in Australia, where Linux made an appearance today — at the defense table. read more -
Forget Rasterbator, Posterazor!
4 Nov 2009 | 11:53 amDownload in .ogv format read more -
Who Needs Time Machine with "Back in Time"
3 Nov 2009 | 2:29 pmDownload in .ogv format read more -
Tech Tip: Restore Ctrl-Alt-Backspace in Ubuntu
3 Nov 2009 | 8:58 amIn the last release of Ubuntu (9.04) the Ctrl+Alt+Backspace key sequence normally used to kill the X server was disabled by default. Apparently many people like to kill their X server this way so a workaround "dontzap" package was used to enable it. With the latest Ubuntu release (9.10, aka Karmic) it's even simpler to enable it. read more
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Linux Journal blogs
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More on Poulsbo (GMA500), Intel, and the Community
28 Oct 2009 | 9:09 amI've never done a follow up post on a topic before, but I think this is a topic worth further discussion. Yesterday I posted a rather pointed article focused on Intel and what I consider to be a very poor business decision regarding the GMA500 GPU. read more -
Finally! SecDef signs Clarifying Guidance Regarding Open Source Software
27 Oct 2009 | 1:27 pmIt is official! As of the 16th of October 2009, the United States Department of Defense recognizes Open Source software at Commodity, Off the Shelf (COTS) software, eligible for purchase, read implementation, under the purchasing rules of the Department. read more -
A Bit of Licence
26 Oct 2009 | 8:49 amOne of the striking aspects of the free software community is its obsession with licences. It's as if within every hacker there's a lawyer struggling to get out. But maybe it's not so surprising; as Larry Lessig reminded us, “code is law”, and the reverse is also true in the sense that the licence adopted has a big impact on how the software is produced. That explains, in part, why recent discussions of Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun – and hence MySQL – have once more put free software licences under the microscope. read more -
Cloud Computing: Good or Bad for Open Source?
22 Oct 2009 | 3:10 amCloud computing: you may have heard of it. It seems to be everywhere these days, and if you believe the hype, there's a near-unanimous consensus that it's the future. Actually, a few of us have our doubts, but leaving that aside, I think it's important to ask where does open source stand if the cloud computing vision *does* come to fruition? Would that be a good or bad thing for free software? read more -
Is there a best distro?
19 Oct 2009 | 6:53 amYesterday, I had a good friend ask me What is the best Linux distribution to familiarize myself with Linux? This was not someone who is unfamiliar with technology, or UNIX for that matter, but someone who is one of us, which made the question difficult to answer. read more
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LinuxSecurity.com - Security Advisories
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Mandriva: Subject: [Security Announce] [ MDVA-2009:185 ] msec
6 Nov 2009 | 4:00 amLinuxSecurity.com: This update provides updated translation files for msec shipped with Mandriva Linux 2010.0 -
Mandriva: Subject: [Security Announce] [ MDVA-2009:184 ] mdkonline
6 Nov 2009 | 3:54 amLinuxSecurity.com: This update fixes an issue in mdkapplet where it offers to upgrade Mandriva 2010.0 to 2009.1 when the former is not listed on api.mdv.com (bug #55017) -
Gentoo: Horde Multiple vulnerabilities
6 Nov 2009 | 12:36 amLinuxSecurity.com: =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D Multiple vulnerabilities in the Horde Application Framework can allow for arbitrary files to be overwritten and cross-site scripting attacks. -
Mandriva: Subject: [Security Announce] [ MDVSA-2009:294 ] firefox
5 Nov 2009 | 11:54 amLinuxSecurity.com: Security issues were identified and fixed in firefox 3.5.x: Security researcher Alin Rad Pop of Secunia Research reported a heap-based buffer overflow in Mozilla's string to floating point number conversion routines. Using this vulnerability an attacker could craft some malicious JavaScript code containing a very long string to be converted to a floating point number which would result in improper memory allocation and the execution of an arbitrary memory location. This vulnerability could thus be leveraged by the attacker to run arbitrary code on a victim's computer… -
Debian: New Linux 2.6.18 packages fix several vulnerabilities
5 Nov 2009 | 11:52 amLinuxSecurity.com:
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Dzone
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Thank you, Rails
7 Nov 2009 | 6:29 amIt’s fashionable, or perhaps inevitable, for tech communities to trash their competition. The Emacs folks like to mock vi users; Windows folk look down on us Mac users (and Linux users mock us both); and everyone likes to mock PHP despite PHP’s dominance in the web world. We geeks make arguing over minor technical points into a kind of art. This is all pretty understandable: it’s easy to define community in terms of what we’re not. A common enemy focuses and drives us. Competition can take a positive form: when it’s friendly and constructive both communities benefit. -
Google Releases JavaScript Tools
7 Nov 2009 | 6:27 amIt can be frustrating to write complex JavaScript programs when they don't work the same way on different browsers. Google, who makes extensive use of JavaScript in programs like Gmail and Google Docs, understands the difficulties in writing, debugging, and optimizing sizable JavaScript apps. To make JavaScript programming easier, Google has released its set of Closure Tools for JavaScript. -
Fantastic JavaScript 3D Libraries
7 Nov 2009 | 6:27 amEver imagined if the tiny JavaScript code could render amazing out of the box 3D? Then be ready to enjoy wonderful 3D effects in simple JavaScript code. These JavaScript 3D Libraries let you render smooth yet attractive 3D effects with great ease. -
Creating A Wysiwyg HTML Editor In C#
7 Nov 2009 | 5:43 amThis tutorial will demonstrate how to create a wysiwyg (visual) HTML editor using IHTMLdocument2 class in mshtml. -
10 great Alternatives to phpMyAdmin
7 Nov 2009 | 2:29 amMost people in the web development world are under the impression that phpMyAdmin is the only MySQL client out there for websites. Going a step further, some users are aware of alternative however assume that phpMyAdmin is the best.
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Coding Horror
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Preserving Our Digital Pre-History
5 Nov 2009 | 4:33 amI've spent a significant part of my life online. Not just on the internet, I mean, but on modems and early, primitive online communities. Today's internet is everything we couldn't have possibly dared to imagine twenty-five years ago, but there is a real risk of these early, tentative digital artifacts -- and for some, the beginnings of our Hacker Odyssey -- being lost forever in the relentless deluge of online progress. Sure, every single thing that happened in 2004 is documented exhaustively online. But 1994? 1984? Not so much. That's where Jason Scott comes in. You may know Jason Scott… -
Stack Overflow Careers: Amplifying Your Awesome
3 Nov 2009 | 1:07 amThat Stack Overflow thing we launched a year ago? It's been going pretty well so far. Of course, everyone knows you could code Stack Overflow in a long weekend. It's trivial. Assembling a worldwide community of smart, engaged software developers? That's a whole different ball of wax. Stack Overflow is a site by programmers, for programmers; it's only as good as the programmers who choose to participate. Stack Overflow isn't about me. Or anybody else on the Stack Overflow team for that matter. Stack Overflow is you. This is the scary part, the great leap of faith that Stack Overflow is… -
Revisiting "The Fold"
26 Oct 2009 | 4:25 pmAfter I posted my blog entry on Treating User Myopia I got a lot of advice. Some useful, some not so useful. But the one bit of advice I hadn't anticipated was that we were not making good use of the area "above the fold". This surprised me. Does the fold still matter? The fold refers to the border at the bottom of the browser window at the user's default screen resolution. Like so: Way back in the dark ages of 1996, it was commonly thought that users didn't know how to scroll a web page. On the Web, the inverted pyramid becomes even more important since we know from several user studies that… -
Treating User Myopia
23 Oct 2009 | 12:59 amI try not to talk too much about the trilogy here, because there's a whole other blog for that stuff. But some of the lessons I've learned in the last year while working on them really put into bold relief some of my earlier blog entries on usability and user behavior. One entry in particular that I keep coming back to is Teaching Users to Read. That was specific to dialog boxes, which not only stop the proceedings with idiocy, but are their own delightful brand of user interface poison. Fortunately, you don't see dialogs in web apps much, but this sort of modal dialog lunacy is, sadly,… -
The Interview With The Programmer
18 Oct 2009 | 11:00 pmIf the internet has perfected anything, it's the art of the crappy, phoned-in, half-assed email "interview". For all those who have bemoaned the often pathetic state of internet journalism, when it comes to interviews, you're largely correct. The purpose of most of these interviews is quick and dirty content filler with semi-famous folk spouting off whatever random thoughts they happen to have in their head at that exact moment. The Nixon Interviews, it ain't. That's why I'm normally not a huge fan of interview books, because interviews take an enormous amount of time and an enormous amount…
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Planet MySQL
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New script speeds up Kontrollbase login by 50%
6 Nov 2009 | 5:13 pmThere’s a new script in kontrolbase that speeds up the login process by up to 50%. I highly recommend every user to upgrade to the latest version of the svn release. Otherwise you can grab the file here: http://code.google.com/p/kontrollbase/source/browse/trunk/bin/kontroll-query_cache_preload.pl Read more about the script and how it works here: http://kontrollsoft.com/forum/kontrollbase-issues-and-solutions/query-cache-preload-script-speeds-up-login-by-50#p22 PlanetMySQL Voting: Vote UP / Vote DOWN -
My MySQL Tool Chest
6 Nov 2009 | 3:34 pmEvery time I need to install or reconfigure a new workstation, I review the set of tools I use. It's an opportunity to refresh the list, reconsider the usefulness of old tools and review new ones. During my first week at Open Market I got one of these opportunities. Here is my short list of free (as in 'beer') OSS tools and why they have a place in my tool chest.Testing EnvironmentsVirtual BoxOf all the Virtual Machines out there, I consider Virtual Box to be the easiest to use. Since I first looking into it while I was still working at Sun/MySQL, this package has been improved constantly. -
FLIFO scheduling for InnoDB
6 Nov 2009 | 1:19 pmAt the end of this note I describe how InnoDB can be much faster (2.5X) for high-concurrency workloads. However, what we really did is improve the code to not get 2.5X slower. InnoDB uses innodb_thread_concurrency to limit the number of threads that run concurrently. Enforcement of this limit is imprecise to improve performance. By imprecise, I mean that there are usually fewer than innodb_thread_concurrency threads running within InnoDB even when there are many threads ready, willing and able to run there. In what follows assume that there is a 1:1 mapping between thread, session and… -
Oracle Express Edition first steps for MySQL DBAs
6 Nov 2009 | 11:01 amI have had a few MySQL DBAs ask about how to get started learning Oracle. I will admit that it has been on my to-do list for quite a while1. It never hurts to know more than one database system and a great deal of DBA help wanted ads mention Oracle. Someone once said that you must make sure your capabilities exceed your limitations2 and recently I have been feeling limited when others have started to talk about Oracle capabilities.So what does it take for a MySQL DBA to get their hands on their own Oracle instance? I used my Ubuntu box to go to Oracle's web site to get the free Oracle XE… -
Log Buffer #168: a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs
6 Nov 2009 | 9:47 amThis is the 168th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Let’s give the wheel a spin and see who comes first . . . MySQL Brian “Krow” Aker has something to say about Drizzle, InfiniDB, and column-oriented storage: “I have been asked a number of times ‘do you think there is a need for a column oriented database in the open source world?’ The answer has been yes! . . . I was very happy to see Calpont do their release of Infinidb last week.” Vadim of the MySQL Performance Blog said,…
