GOODBYE QUICKSILVER, HELLO LAUNCHBAR
It’s unfortunate that I’ve reached this point, since I thought quicksilver was a really awesome piece of software. Unfortunately, it’s just gotten to be completely unstable. Beach balls became all too common. So common, that I was willing to cough up $20 for LaunchBar after only trying it out for 10 minutes. I never was a power user of quicksilver - I did like a lot of things in...
TURNING TO THE DARK SIDE FOR A BIT....
For better or worse, I’ll be doing c# development for a while. I’ve never been particularly fond of Windows, so we’ll see how things go. I can say that I did manage to blue screen my box on day #2. If anyone has any good c# tutorials or books they’d recommend, I’d appreciate it.
MYSQL: ERROR 1267 (HY000): ILLEGAL MIX OF COLLATIONS (UTF8_UNICODE_CI,IMPLICIT)
I have never, ever seen this before. I don’t even know how the table was created with a different collation. However, I had all my other tables created with the character set utf8, no collation specified. I had to convert the second table to match the character set. This probably wouldn’t have been a problem if I wasn’t joining on a character field. alter table exclusion CONVERT...
EXECUTING MYSQL QUERIES WITHIN VIM
I haven’t been using vim for very long, but I’ve gotten over the initial learning curve of getting used to the different editing modes. With some help from the guys in #vim on irc.freenode.net, I managed to get this gem: ` map :call SwitchDB() :function SwitchDB() : let g:current_db = input(“Database > “) :endfunction map :call Doquery() :function Doquery() : if...
COMPILING LIBJPEG ON 64 BIT CENTOS
I ran into an issue just now compiling libjpeg on 64 bit CentOS. I found this very helpful post that gives a workaround using a config.guess file from libtool. For some reason, I didn’t have the folder he suggested, but I did have the alternative (automake). cp /usr/share/automake-1.9/config.guess . cp /usr/share/automake-1.9/config.sub . I copied the above files into my jpeg-6b directory,...
ENABLING MOD DEFLATE IN APACHE
I got an error while compiling Apache today: “./configure” “–enable-auth-digest” “–enable-deflate” “–enable-rewrite” “–enable-so” “–enable-vhost-alias” “–disable-userdir” “–enable-mime-magic” \ configure: error: mod_deflate has been requested but can not be...
MUTABLE CLASS INSTANCE VARIABLES IN PYTHON ACT LIKE THEY'RE STATIC
There’s a weird behavior in Python when dealing with Mutable types such as dictionaries, that when you modify a variable defined as a class attribute, you’re actually modifying a shared dictionary amongst all the classes. This seemed weird to me. You can read the lovely discussion about it, if you want. Or, just follow my code for a demo on how to deal with the issue. I just started...
MYSQL ALTER TABLE PROGRESS BAR?
Altering a big table sucks, and to make it worse you have no idea what’s happening or how long it will take. I’d like a progress bar, or some status output, or something that gives me the feeling like my server didn’t die.
MYSQL AND MATERIALIZED VIEWS
I was poking around the MySQL Worklog again over the weekend, and found a request for materialized views for MySQL. This feature has existed in Oracle for a while, in DB2 as a materialized query table, and appeared in MS SQL Server 2000 and 2005 as indexed views. What is a materialized view? A materialized view is a database object that contains the results of a query. The FROM clause of the query...
VMWARE, LOSING TIME, AND SESSIONS
I’ll keep it short. In the last few days, login on our dev server broke. We hadn’t changed anything related to it, and everything looked good code wise. What we finally figured out was that our session cookie was set to expire 2 days into the future, and our VMWare image had lost 2 days of time. Fix by doing the following: ntpdate ntp.nasa.gov > /dev/null