beer planet

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 …

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….

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";
}

This gets the job done without triggering any false positives (at least for the files/urls I've been dealing with so far). Am I missing any obvious types? Do you …

Updated: April 8th, 2008

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 know 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…

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.

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

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

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:

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:

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 …

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 …

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:

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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….

This is going to be epic.

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…and I'm not too upset about it. Down, home prices, down!! Read this article for a nice update on the current housing market conditions and the experts' opinions.

AP
Housing Market Spirals, No End in Sight
Thursday March 6, 5:30 pm ET
By J.W. Elphinstone, AP Business Writer
Low Home Equity, Record-High Foreclosures: a Limp Housing Market Looks Even Weaker

NEW YORK (AP) — Nervous homeowners and economic analysts have been wondering how much worse the housing market could get. On Thursday they got an answer: Plenty.

Foreclosures are at a record high. Home equity is at a record low. The housing market is spiraling down with no end in sight — and taking people's sense of economic security …

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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This is an HDR photo of the Golden Gate Bridge. Tell me it's not the best picture you've ever seen of it (click to zoom)!

Credit: http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/onblack.php?id=2176897085&size=large…

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