1. Phantom of the Flopera (YouTube) -- Bach's Tocata and Fugue in D Minor (BWV 565) as performed by floppy drives. Creative intimacy with one's tools is a sign of mastery. (via Andy Baio)
2. Save Entire BBC Archive (Ben Goldacre) -- I pointed earlier to the questionable BBC closure of scores of websites in the name of cost-cutting. It's a torrent of an archive of spidered BBC websites. (via Andy Baio)
3. Android Hidden NFC Capabilities Unlocked -- Gibraltar Software Factory, based in Argentina, …

Some time ago Stephen O'Grady and Brian Aker had an interesting Blogo-dialogue about what they call the "Cambrian Explosion" of open source development. The Cambrian Explosion means that we increasingly see forks of projects being developed in different directions, where traditionally we are used to open source development happening in relatively hierarchical and easy to follow upstream and downstream relationships. This is exactly what happens in the MySQL community currently, where in total there is more progress than ever before, but that progress is divided among several competing forks, none of which is strictly in an upstream-downstream hierarchy with …

I’ve always been a big fan of having a customized .bashrc file. The one I distribute to all of my servers has aliases for quick commands to save me time on the command line, functions that get work done when aliases are too simplistic, reporting for the server for each cli login, and of course a formatted and colored prompt (for terms that support colors). I also change certain aspects and commands based on the operating system since I’m not always on a redhat box or linux at all. Here’s my bashrc file – maybe you have some fun additions that you’d like to share. What saves you time on the command line?

This month is a special month. It’s not because of Valentines day or even the exciting day where we see groundhogs. No, this month is special because I’m have a book contest where you, the reader, get to win something free for doing absolutely nothing more than posting a comment saying that you want one of the several books I have available in the contest.

So without getting into boring details I’ll keep this short. I’ve been reviewing a lot of books lately and I think it’s time to get some books into people’s hands to enjoy themselves. This month the giveaways are all Python oriented.

So, all you have to do is take a look at the following titles and post a comment here saying that you want one of them. At the end of the month two readers will be chosen via a random list sorting python script I’ve whipped up for just this purpose. You will then get an email from the publisher who will send a brand new e-copy of the …

I’ve been playing around with some quick system automation scripts that are handy to use when you don’t want / need to setup a chef or puppet action. I like to keep all of my hostnames and login details in a MySQL database (a cmdb actually) but for this example we’ll just use a couple of nested lists. This script executes commands in parallel across the hosts you choose in the menu system via the “pdsh” command, so make sure you have that installed before running. Alternately you can change the command call to use ssh instead of pdsh for a serialized execution, but that’s not as fun or fast. With some customizations here and there you can expand this to operate parallelized jobs for simplifying daily work in database administration, usage reporting, log file parsing, or other system automation as you see fit. Here’s the code. Comments welcome as always!

#!/usr/bin/env python
## NAME: menu_parallel_execution.py
## DATE: …

A special extended edition of Tech Messages for 2011-01-27 through 2011-02-02:

• NetApp File Copy | A NetApp Technical Diary
  There's a lot of ways to copy files on a NetApp Filer.
• NoSQL at Netflix
• Netflix Performance on Top ISP Networks

…

Packt Publishing recently sent me a copy of MySQL for Python to review and after reading through the book I must say that I’m rather impressed at the variety of topics that the book covers.

It starts off with the basics of setting up MySQL for your testing/development needs by going over several of the common installation and configuration methods. After that it’s a quick intro for connection methods and simple error reporting for connections. The author gives a quick intro to CRUD and how it relates to databases and python before heading into the common tasks of simple queries. I was surprised to see some database profiling discussion; which is rather handy for a new coder or a person new to MySQL. Once the basics of …

Every so often you need to use a queue to manage operations in an application. Python makes this very simple. Python also, as I’ve written about before, makes threading very easy to work with. So in this quick program I’ll describe via comments, how to make a simple queue where each job is processed by a thread. Integrating this code to read jobs from a mysql database would be trivial as well; simply replace the “jobs = [..." code with a database call to a row select query.

#!/usr/bin/env python
## DATE: 2011-01-20
## FILE: queue.py
## AUTHOR: Matt Reid
## WEBSITE: http://themattreid.com
from Queue import *
from threading import Thread, Lock

'''this function will process the items in the queue, in serial'''
def processor():
    if queue.empty() == True:
        print "the Queue is empty!"
        sys.exit(1)
    try:
        job = queue.get()
        print "I'm operating on job item: %s"%(job)
        queue.task_done()
    except:
        print …

A special extended edition of Tech Messages for 2011-01-12 through 2011-01-15:

• Hg Init: a Mercurial tutorial by Joel Spolsky
  An introduction to Mercurial (hg) by Joel Spolsky. Includes a special introductory chapter for Subversion users.
• lessfs | Open source data de-duplication
  Open source filesystem with de-duplication.
• UCS B-Series and C-Series Servers Log Memory Errors due to Intel 5600 Erratum Issue
  On a subset of Intel Xeon 5600 series processors, during packet C6 transitions, CPU circuit marginality or internal signaling noise in the may lead to an invalid memory DRAM state, system hang, reboot, memory ECC errors or unpredictable system behavior. This could …

A special extended edition of Tech Messages for 2011-01-07 through 2011-01-08:

• The Services Used By Y Combinator Startups [Infographic] – ReadWriteCloud
  "The results show that the majority of Y Combinator startups depend on cloud services instead of self-hosted servers, traditional web hosting or co-location services."
• Tom Limoncelli on Time Management | O'Reilly Time Management for System Administrators | Sysadmins
  Video companions to to Time Management for System Administrators by Thomas A. Limoncelli.
• Guidelines …