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Over in Maatkit-land, Daniel Nichter and I practice test-first programming, AKA test-driven development. That is, we write tests for each new feature or to catch regressions on each bug we fix. And — this is crucial — we write the tests before we write the code.* The tests should initially fail, which is a validation that the new code actually works and the tests actually verify this. If we don’t first write a failing testcase, then our code lacks a very important guarantee: “if you break this code, then the test case will tell you so.” (A test that doesn’t fail when the code fails isn’t worth writing.)

Most of the time when I do this, I write a test, it fails because I haven’t written any code yet, and I then go do some kind of …

A classic Morecambe and Wise comedy sketch from the 1970s sees Andre Previn criticizing Eric for playing all the wrong notes while attempting the Greig Piano Concerto. Morecambe responds that he is in fact “playing all the right notes. But not necessarily in the right order.”

I was reminded of the sketch this morning while reading BusinessWeek’s article on the potential perils facing open source vendors today. It seems to ask all the right questions, but not necessarily in the right way.

The report suggests that while industry giants such as IBM, HP, Oracle and Intel stand to benefit from open source software, investor impatience could spell trouble for open source …

Just to remind you that Packt Publishing is running their Open Source CMS Award again:

The Packt Open Source Content Management System Award is designed to encourage, support, recognize and reward Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS) that have been selected by a panel of judges and visitors to www.PacktPub.com. Now entering its third year, the Award has established itself as an important measure for quality and the popularity of Open Source Content Management Systems.

You have two more weeks to submit your favourite CMS in the following categories:

• Overall Winner
• …

While SQL-Injection is one of the most discussed security problems in web applications other possible problems for SQL queries like overlong input are usually ignored although they can lead to all kinds of security problems.

This might be caused by the fact that security problems that are the result of overlong input are often buffer overflows and buffer overflows are something many web application security experts know nothing about and choose to ignore.

There are however several security problems for SQL queries that are caused by overlong input and no one talks about.

max_packet_size

In MySQL there exists a configuration option called max_packet_size which is set to one megabyte by default and controls the maximum size of a packet sent between the SQL client and server. When queries or result rows do not fit into a single packet a error is raised. This means an overlong SQL query is never sent to the server …

Over in Maatkit-land, Daniel Nichter and I practice test-first programming, AKA test-driven development. That is, we write tests for each new feature or to catch regressions on each bug we fix. And – this is crucial – we write the tests before we write the code.* The tests should initially fail, which is a validation that the new code actually works and the tests actually verify this. If we don’t first write a failing testcase, then our code lacks a very important guarantee: “if you break this code, then the test case will tell you so.” (A test that doesn’t fail when the code fails isn’t worth writing.)

This is the second post in the weekly series "Last Week in Drizzle" where we summarize the efforts of various folks in the Drizzle community over the past week. This edition encapsulates the work and conversations taking place over the past two weeks as both a vacation and procrastination took their toll on getting the weekly edition done. As with the week before, a number of developers and community advocates continue to refactor the code base, come together in discussions on the mailing list, and brainstorm on how to solve the tough problems that Drizzle is trying to address. Mark Schoonover and myself are now collaborating on the Last Week in Drizzle series. Thanks Mark!

Growth in the Drizzle Community

The week before last, we had 148 subscribers to the …

If your blog is anything like mine, the vast majority of comments are spam. Most blogs have at least a 50% ratio of spam-to-valid comments, and Pablowe has a 99.4% ratio (which is probably why there are so many Anti-Spam plugins for WordPress). One of the most oft-executed queries (based on the [...]

For those that have been using Planet MySQL to follow the progress of Drizzle, we now have our own Planet Drizzle.

You can also get a RSS feed directly from http://feeds.feedburner.com/drizzle

Well, after I talked about the Blue Screen of Death during the Olympics, arstechnica mentioned it.
































The more important point though, is the discussion in the comments.
Here are the theories as to why the BSOD happened:
1) Hard disk failure
2) Pirated copy of Windows with not all the right updates
3) …