Updated: June 24th, 2020
Introduction
If you, like me, are building or thinking of implementing a MySQL-powered application that has any need for prioritizing selecting certain data over other data, this article is for you.
Example
As a real world example, consider a queue-like video processing system. Your application receives new videos and processes them. The volume of incoming videos can at times be higher than the processing rate because the process is CPU bound, so occasionally a pretty long queue may form. You will try to process them as fast as you can but…
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Updated: September 16th, 2012
Recently I read an article on the Six Revisions blog that discussed 10 seemingly simple improvements to the twitter interface. They included such things as nick autocomplete, mentions, groups, and more.
You could only dream about such twitter improvements… that is until you use the Troys Twitter script. Just perform the following steps and you will have the features I describe in this article. Here we go:
- Install Firefox (you already have that, right?)
- Install the Firefox greasemonkey extension
- Install the Troys Twitter script
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Updated: March 10th, 2009
I could not be more excited about the upcoming Starcraft 2. Announced in 2008, a whopping 10 years after the first Starcraft release, the news sent shockwaves through millions of Starcraft fans, myself included.
I’ve been watching and anxiously awaiting the release and, while the final release date is unknown at this point (I'll update the post when it is announced), I’ve assembled a list of current Starcraft 2 facts, summarized as bullet points.
But before I get into that, here’s the most important part you need to know to be able to get your hands on the game right after it’s released and play online ($49):
Updated: June 9th, 2009
Problem
While writing a 1093985th Perl script the other day I was facing the following dilemma:
- Let’s say there is a local library, called TheUberLib.pm. It is so uber that most of my scripts, located all over the machine, include it.
- Now, let’s also say that there’s an even more uberly important binary called run_me_now_or_you_will_die but the only way to find it is by using a relative path to the aforementioned TheUberLib.pm, for example ../bin (RELATIVE TO TheUberLib.pm).
- I don’t want to hardcode the path to run_me_now_or_you_will_die because it can be different on multiple machines and the code wouldn’t be robust enough – all I know is that the path is relative to an included library.
So …
IntenseDebate, a popular WordPress comment enhancer recently acquired by Automattic (the creator of WP), just announced plugin support. It’s a nice touch to the already useful commenting system that allows threading, easier comment moderation, reputation, voting, etc.
Let’s have a look at some of the announced plugins. Here’s what the comment block looks like with plugins enabled:
PollDaddy
This plugins allows you to add a poll to your comment. By the way, PollDaddy is also an Automattic brand.
Seesmic
Seesmic enables video comments that you can record right off your webcam.
YouTube
I think this one is self-explanatory – you can easily insert youtube videos into your comments.
Smileys
Adds smiley support.
You can activate the plugins by …
Random Questions and Thoughts. Password Protected Garage Door Remotes, Twitter Security, MUNI Drivers, Burgers, etc
Updated: July 1st, 2010
From time to time my, still curious, mind accumulates a variety of questions and concerns which it has to spill onto the pages of this blog. How random are these? Pretty damn random, and I need to see some answers, quick. Oh, and I’m deliberately not searching Google, as I want to facilitate discussion. What fun would it be if I just looked up all these?
Password Protected Garage Door Remotes
As a paranoid person and a recent homeowner, I started to wonder how safe I actually am in my house. Consider this likely scenario that nobody seems to be concerned with:
I park my car outside for one night and don’t take out my portable garage door remote, the
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beer planet is a blog about technology, programming, computers, and geek life. It is run by Artem Russakovskii - a local San Francisco geek who is currently pursuing his own projects and regularly enjoys hacking Android, PHP, CSS, Javascript, AJAX, Perl, and regular expressions, working on Wordpress plugins and tools, tweaking MySQL queries and server settings, administering Linux machines, blogging, learning new things, and other geeky stuff.
