Updated: May 23rd, 2009

In this tutorial, I'll show you how to parse JSON using Perl. As a fun example, I'll use the new SouthParkStudios.com site released earlier this week, which contains full legal episodes of South Park. I guess the TV companies are finally getting a clue about what users want.

I will parse the first season's JSON and pull out information about individual episodes (like title, description, air date, etc) from http://www.southparkstudios.com/includes/utils/proxy_feed.php?html=season_json.jhtml%3fseason=1. Feel free to replace '1' with any valid season number.

Here's a short snippet of the JSON:

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11

Getting The Most Out Of The MySQL Conference


Posted by Artem Russakovskii on March 26th, 2008 in Databases, Personal

As half of the world population already knows, the MySQL conference is coming in less than 3 weeks. Since this event only happens once a year, lasts only 4 days, and costs more than a Russian mail-order bride, I'd really like to get the most out of it. Considering that the schedule is completely packed, with 8 (!!) events going on in parallel, I imagine things can get a little frantic. Additionally, I've never been to a conference of such size before and I'm not sure what to expect.

So… I'm contemplating:

  • printing out the event schedule and drawing a zig-zagging "map" of exactly where I'll be jumping to next, once the previous presentation ends. I'm actually wondering
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26

Setting Up A MySQL Cluster


Posted by Artem Russakovskii on March 26th, 2008 in Databases, Linux, Programming, Technology

Updated: January 4th, 2009

Attention: Apparently since the release of 5.1.25, cluster is packaged separately. I need to do some reading and research first and then update the tutorial with the latest info.

Here are some quick links for now: http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2008/05/23/mysql-clusters-improved-release-model/, http://johanandersson.blogspot.com/2008/05/mysql-cluster-62-officially-released.html, http://blogs.sun.com/theaquarium/entry/improved_release_model_for_mysql.

This article contains my notes and detailed instructions on setting up a MySQL cluster. After reading it, you should have a good understanding of what a MySQL cluster is capable of, how and why it works, and how to set one of these bad boys up. Note that I'm primarily a developer, with an interest in systems administration but I think that every developer should be able to understand and set up a MySQL cluster, at least to …

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4

MySQL Conference 2008


Posted by Artem Russakovskii on March 24th, 2008 in Awesomeness, Databases, Linux, Personal, Programming, Technology

Updated: March 26th, 2008

April 14-17th is going to be an exciting time. Why? Because the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo is going to be held in Santa Clara, CA. Who would want to miss out on a chance to lurk around, let alone talk to, some of the smartest people in the MySQL world? Well, those who don't have at least $1000+, of course. A 3 day pass to the conference without tutorials costs a whopping $1199. A full pass would dry up your pockets $1499.

Well, "good news everyone". Thanks to Sheeri Cabral of The Pythian Group, PlanetMySQL.org, Jeremy, and, most importantly, LinuxQuestions.org, I am now in possession of a 3-day conference pass!! I'm incredibly excited that I …

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3

How To Delete All Messages From A Folder In Pine


Posted by Artem Russakovskii on March 23rd, 2008 in Linux

Pine is a UNIX command line mail application. So how do you delete all messages in a folder?

The combination is

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; A A D

If after pressing ; you see

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[Command ";" not defined for this screen. Use ? for help]

then you don't have a check in the "Enable aggregate command set" settings checkbox. To enable it, go to the main menu (M) -> Setup (S) -> Config (C) and scroll down to "Enable aggregate command set". Then press X (to check it), E (Exit). Now repeat the above….

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2

Quick Perl Snippet: Finding If A File Has A Media Extension Using Regex


Posted by Artem Russakovskii on March 21st, 2008 in Programming

Updated: May 1st, 2008

Sometimes in my line of work, I need to figure out if a url or filename point to a media file by checking for the file extension. If it's a url, however, it may be followed by various parameters. Not to overcomplicate things, I came up with the following Perl code:

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#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my $name = "some_file.flv"; # or http://example.com/file.mp4?foo=bar
my $is_media_type = ($name =~ /\.(wmv|avi|flv|mov|mkv|mp..?|swf|ra.?|rm|as.|m4[av]|smi.?)\b/i);
if($is_media_type){
  print "media extension found\n";
}
else{
  print "not a media file\n";
}

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0

Must-Know People In The MySQL Field


Posted by Artem Russakovskii on March 18th, 2008 in Databases, Programming

Updated: June 24th, 2020

If you're serious about MySQL, it doesn't hurt to know the people closely tied to its development and maintenance as well as famous bloggers. Here's my ongoing list of people I consider important:

Peter Zaitsev – MySQL Performance Blog, former head of MySQL AB High Performance Group. His company Percona is available for consulting. He's a co-author of High Performance MySQL 2nd edition (great book).

Baron Schwartz – also known as Xaprb, Baron a co-author of High Performance MySQL 2nd edition and creator of innotop and Maatkit. Maatkit is simply brilliant, and so is Baron. Baron recently joined Peter Zaitsev at Percona.

Jeremy Zawodny – MySQL guru, works for Yahoo, and is considered a legend. He wrote mytop

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0

Programming Comic: Lisp, Perl, And God


Posted by Artem Russakovskii on March 17th, 2008 in Humor, Programming

Computer Science majors out there that went through tedious hours of studying Lisp – this is for you from xkcd. If you know Perl, it will make even more sense.

image

Source: http://xkcd.com/224/

See Also: Best Programming Comic Ever: Code Quality In WTFs/Minute

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2

Central Room of Potatoes


Posted by Artem Russakovskii on March 13th, 2008 in Humor, WTF?

Today Travis was messing around with a Chinese site blinkx has indexed a short while ago http://www.tudou.com and saw a cryptic error message that started coming up on all pages. The message looked something like this:

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各位土豆
为了给大家提供更好的服务,我们正在搬迁扩建土豆的中心机房。
3月14日凌晨0:00 ~ 夜间24:00,我们的服务暂停24小时。
3月15日凌晨0:00 新机房就搬迁完成了,土豆会准时回家。

Now, neither Travis nor I know the language of Chinese, so what do we do? Go to Google Translate, of course. Here's what Google Translate produced:

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That's:

Members potatoes:
In order to provide you with better service, we are expanding the relocation of the central room of potatoes.
March 14 at 0:00 to 24:00 at night, our services will be suspended for 24 hours.
March 15 at 0:00 new room on the relocation is …

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84

Mass Renaming Directories And Files Using Total Commander


Posted by Artem Russakovskii on March 12th, 2008 in Programming, Technology

Updated: September 16th, 2012

If you're like me, you constantly move and rename files and directories. You are also an extremely productive person with evangelical ideals of making every task as efficient as it can be. In this tutorial, I will use my favorite must-have file manager called Total Commander (formerly, Windows Commander) and its brilliant Multi-Rename Tool.

You can download a shareware version of Total Commander at www.ghisler.com. I encourage you to buy it after you try it as it'll soon become an integral part of your life. I've been using it for more than 10 years now and seriously can't imagine my computer without it.

Now for some quick tasks I'd like to accomplish using the Multi-Rename Tool in under a …

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1

Best Programming Comic Ever: Code Quality In WTFs/Minute


Posted by Artem Russakovskii on March 12th, 2008 in Awesomeness, Humor, Programming, WTF?

Courtesy of OSnews. This comic still cracks me up, weeks after I saw it. It's one of those comics that your CS teacher would print out and slap on his door, so that in the moments of doom students would at least have something humorous to look at. Here it is:

image

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0

MySQL Falcon Storage Engine Enters Beta Stage.


Posted by Artem Russakovskii on March 11th, 2008 in Databases, Linux, Programming

Updated: March 18th, 2008

Today Robin Schumacher, MySQL's Director of Product Management, announced that the mysql Falcon storage engine has moved into a beta release stage. Falcon, a new transactional storage engine introduced in mysql 6 (aka 5.2), has been in alpha for years. Other popular storage engines include MyISAM, InnoDB, which Falcon is supposed to challenge (successfully? :-/), and the upcoming Maria.

Falcon features:

  • ACID transaction compliant
  • Crash recovery
  • User-defined tablespaces
  • High-speed data caches
  • Advanced B-Tree indexes
  • Performance/diagnostic monitoring tables
  • Simplified configuration

You can download mysql 6 with Falcon here: http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/6.0.html….

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[VIDEO] First Look At Zerg In StarCraft 2


Posted by Artem Russakovskii on March 10th, 2008 in Awesomeness, My Favorites

This is going to be epic.

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Why You Do Not Want To Use Hotel Drinking Glasses. Ever.


Posted by Artem Russakovskii on March 5th, 2008 in Stuff, WTF?

Take a look at the hidden camera videos of what hotel cleaning staff does to your drinking glasses. Watch and fear! And never use them again.

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2

Swear Jar – Budweiser


Posted by Artem Russakovskii on March 5th, 2008 in Awesomeness, Humor

Would be cool to have a workplace like this.

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