Gojira est mort... Vive Gojira.

Yesterday morning, I discovered that the machine this site used to run on had quietly gone belly-up sometime during the night - it seems that the system drive and the disk controller ate themselves, or ate each other, or some such thing. Fortunately, the drive that all the site files and databases lived on survived. So after shuffling some bits around and a fun-filled day installing the operating system, Apache, MySQL, PHP, etc. and recreating all the lost configs, Gojira lives again. The old Gojira was an 800 MHz Celeron with 384 MB memory, and the new one is only a 433 MHz Pentium-3, but it's got 768 MB RAM, and actually runs loads faster. I've also got my eye on a couple of machines at the local hockshop that are faster, and with the spare RAM from the Gojira That Was, I could come close to matching my deaktop (a 2.8 GHz P-4 with a gig of memory) for less than AU$500, I think. In any case, I've come to the …

The Linux Format magazine is having it’s annual reader awards in a number of categories.

These include (I’ve include my picks after each category):

• Best Desktop Application (Gnome)
• Best Distro (CentOS 4.2)
• Best Development Tool (Eclipse 3.1)
• Best Hardware Support (NVidia for my Dell Laptop)
• Free Software Project of the Year (Gaim)
• Embedded Linux Award
• Best Server Software (MySQL 5.0)
• Best Office Software (Open Office …

Well, time to get back to work at MySQL. Here are the latest reno photos for those of you following my renovations:

BTW the post has its name because of a comment by my coworker Jon Stephens:

gee, i'm totally outclassed - you post photos of sludge, and my latest blog entry is about hacking a MySQL build script

Personally last year was very interesting. Not necessarily successful, but enlightening on so many levels, that I am sure 2006 can only be a success. Now over the last few days I afforded myself the luxury (or torture) to look at other peoples code, besides pushing out one RC after another on MDB2 and related packages. Specifically I looked at some of the latest ActiveRecord, CRUD in no time, hyped up frameworks: QCodo, Cake and Symfony.

Now the first thing to do is to setup the given framework and to get some decent output. The only one that I was able to setup in a reasonable time was Cake. However even Cake failed some basics in the "how does the first wiff smell" test. Here goes a list of the issues I found to smell the worst.

1. Use of short open tags, sorry thats …

Well, things are rolling right along on the new house, now on day 10. I have five days of vacation left, then back to work for MySQL. Click below for progress photos:

I just wanted to show case some of the new features in MDB2. I especially wanted to demo some PHP5 specific features. The following example just creates a table with an autoincrementing primary key column 'id', inserts some values, fetches the last inserted id and finally, after selecting those values and outputs them using an iterator, drops the table again ..

I quickly hacked up this example after releasing MDB2 2.0.0RC2 and a number of driver updates. It should work fine with mysql and pgsql. It will not work with sqlite, because automagically determining the types from a result set is not supported by the sqlite API. I have not tried another backend.

<?php

/**************************************/
/* a nice PHP5 only show case of MDB2 */
/**************************************/

require 'MDB2.php';

$dsn = array(
    'phptype'  => 'mysql',
    'username' => 'root',
    'password' => '',
    'hostspec' => …

I just wanted to show case some of the new features in MDB2. I especially wanted to demo some PHP5 specific features. The following example just creates a table with an autoincrementing primary key column 'id', inserts some values, fetches the last inserted id and finally, after selecting those values and outputs them using an iterator, drops the table again ..

I quickly hacked up this example after releasing MDB2 2.0.0RC2 and a number of driver updates. It should work fine with mysql and pgsql. It will not work with sqlite, because automagically determining the types from a result set is not supported by the sqlite API. I have not tried another backend.

<?php

/**************************************/
/* a nice PHP5 only show case of MDB2 */
/**************************************/

require 'MDB2.php';

$dsn = array(
    'phptype'  => 'mysql',
    'username' => 'root',
    'password' => '',
    'hostspec' => …

I took the chance today to order some books from Amazon today to add to the library. Of course I’m still reading 2 current books Spring in Action and the MySQL Certification Study Guide in order to site the second MySQL Professional Certification Exam.

As with most things, you start off looking or reading on the web for something and you end up completely somewhere else. In this case, it was looking at Linux Software Labs (Australia) at the price of their Linux Distribution CD’s, which lead me to the book Beyond Java listed on their site. …

Well, I'm into day three of my vacation and so far the destruction of the new house is proceeding nicely:

I get the feeling by the time January 3 rolls around I'll be happy to just sit and work on the MySQL docs, a nice vacation from my vacation.

I’ve been accepted to present at the MySQL Users Conference 2006 held in Santa Clara, California next year. My paper will be particularly targeting Oracle Developers, and will be combined with another presentation targeting Oracle DBA’s.

I’ll also be developing demonstrations with the upcoming MySQL Sakila Test Database by Mike Hillyer from MySQL AB.