I’ve been using Google Reader since it was created. I really love the *idea* of Google Reader. I like that scrolling through the posts marks them as read. I like that you can toggle between list and expanded views of the posts. I like that you can search within a feed or across all feeds (though selecting multiple specific feeds would be great).

All of that said, I’d like to explore other avenues, because I don’t like that there’s, like, zero flexibility in how the Google Reader interface is configured. My problem starts with large fonts…

I use relatively large fonts. If you increase the font twice up from the default size in firefox on a mac (using the cmd-+ keystroke, twice), and you have more than just a couple of feeds, you wind up with this really horrible side pane with the bottom half of it requiring a scroll bar, and the text wraps, and it just looks terrible. What makes this really REALLY REALLY …

I was able to attend OpenSQLCamp 2008, even while under the influence of DayQuil, jetlag (spent the week in Santa Clara), 3 hours of sleep and a 2 hour drive. Then there’s folks like Arjen who flew across 15 times zones and was still coherent - I guess I’m just not cut out for lots of travel in short time spans. Oh well.

The un-conference was great. You didn’t have the distractions of vendors with big obnoxious displays promising the sun/stars/moon, sales droids trying to peddle wares, marketing puppets who still think vendor lockin is a great strategy - just some really smart folks getting together, sharing what they’ve learned and collaborating. People from MySQL, Drizzle, Postgres and SQLite were there.

Brian Aker’s keynote was insightful. I liked the sticker on his laptop: “My other computer is a data center.” Vadim’s session on the Percona patchset helped illustrate what patches they include in MySQL and why. …

One of the new features in the new release of MySQL Enterprise Monitor is Query Analyzer. As the name suggests, the Query Analyzer provides information about the queries that are running on your server, the response times and row and byte statistics. The information provided is great, and it doesn’t take very long to see from the query data supplied that there are places where you could improve the the query, or even reduce the number of queries that you submit.

The system works by using the functionality of the MySQL Proxy to monitor the queries being executed and then provide that information up to the MySQL Enterprise Service Manager so that the information can be displayed within the Query Analyzer page. To get the queries monitored, you have to send the queries through the agent which both monitors their execution and sends the information on up to the Manager, along with all the other data being monitored.

The team, …

MySQL Connector/Net 5.2.4, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released.  This release is of GA quality and is suitable for  use in production environments.  We strongly urge you to  review the change log that is shipped with the product for a thorough review of the changes.

We have a ton of fixes in this release so please review the changelog and see if your favorite bug has been fixed.  Version 5.2.4 works with all versions of MySQL including MySQL-4.1,  MySQL-5.0, MySQL-5.1, and the MySQL-6.0 beta.

It is now available in source and binary form from [http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/5.2.html] and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point of time - if you can't find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download …

Update: If you are interested in automating this task with a simple Perl script, I created one here.

Say, you had a MySQL database that stores texts in languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hebrew, Arabic, and so on, and recently there was a server move or upgrade, and all of sudden text in the above mentioned languages didn’t display properly. What do we do to fix it then?

That was what happened to me recently. My hosting company migrated this site to a new LAMP server, and managed to screw up the character set so my Chinese entries looked like gibberish. I spent some time researching, and was able to convert my WordPress database character set to utf8 successfully. Below is the notes for my own consumption. If it helps you, dear reader, all the better!

Please follow the procedures below step by …

I’m not someone who wakes up every day and looks at how my blog is ranked by all of the various services. I check out my WordPress stats, but that’s really about it. However, someone went and did some of the work for me, and they’ve decided that, of the blogs that they read or that were suggested to them, this blog ranks #20 in a listing of 25.

I’m really flattered, but wonder if it’s an indicator that this is a quality blog, or that they should aim higher in their blog reading ;-P  Either way, listing 25 bloggers in a flattering way is a fantastic marketing technique, because most of us are probably egomaniacal enough to say “Hey! Look!” and link back to the list on *your* blog, resulting in lots of traffic. Kudos, and thanks Mobile Maven!

The Idea.

For the past month I have been exploring options and building a perfect Home Theater PC for my 50” Vizio plasma. Besides the obvious, it has to play movies, youtube videos, etc, I had a few concrete goals in mind. Here they are:

• it absolutely had to handle 1080P h264, specifically movies encoded using x264. An average movie size for this format is between 8.5 and 13 GB. There were 2 problems to overcome: the CPU had to be able to handle the decoding (my desktop dual core Conroe barely kept up) and the network had to be fast enough to stream in real time from my storage PC a floor away.
• I needed to have the easiest control over the whole thing. VNC wasn’t good enough, because I don’t always have a laptop lying around.
• It had to support 7.1 sound.
• It had to have excellent picture quality on the TV, preferably during both movies and regular browsing/reading, etc. HDMI/DVI was …

This past Tuesday I was doing more than just voting.  I was giving a live webinar on using MySQL with the Entity Framework.  We had a terrific time (demo machine crash included!) and had a great turnout.  I have been informed that we set records for most number of registrations and attendees.  I’m truly honored and hope that at least some of you got something out of it.

I’ve had a lot of people ask me for the materials from the session so I’ve made them available from my personal server.  You can get the slides, sample projects, and db script here.  The webinar was also recorded and will appear on this page eventually.

Thanks again to all who attended.  I’m hoping to give an expanded version of this session at our users conference …

Karim Lakhani has put together a business case study on Wikipedia. It is worth noting that Wikipedia uses MySQL as its database engine. 

Note that I’m talking about using these tools in some kind of professional way, and more specifically, I’m talking about using Excel as a database, and using VPS hosting to host “professional” web sites. By “professional”, I mean something other than your personal blog, picture gallery, or other relatively inconsequential site.

Excel is not a database

Here’s the thing: Excel isn’t a database. Most people who don’t work in IT don’t seem to understand this, and they’re deathly afraid to actually communicate with anyone in IT, so they take matters into their own hands, and create problems so big that IT is forced to get involved, because at some point this spreadsheet becomes “critical” to some business function. Then IT gets even more bitter toward the non-IT folk, validating some of the reasons the non-IT folk went that route in the first place, and virtually guaranteeing that they won’t come to the IT …