Documentation is a vital part of any application, proprietary or free software, as it is often the first way to communicate with users about the application or software and how it should be used. I also think it tends to be one of the areas most taken for granted; most users expect it to be there and often forget just how much effort goes into producing it.

Many users also complain about the documentation itself. Often this is because it?s been written by programmers and, as a rule, they really aren?t that great at writing documentation that is particularly human readable.

read more

I have begun work on the next set of features for MDB2. I just implemented a feature inspired by the popular ADODB abstraction layer. John calls it smart transactions, while I am currently planning on calling it nested transactions. However I will wait until Lorenzo has some time to look at things to see if we can fit native nested transactions in there or not. Interbase/Firedbird really shines in this department.

I have written up a little script to show the current implementation available in CVS:

<?php

$mdb2 =& MDB2::singleton($dsn);

$mdb2->setOption('debug', true);

$query = "DELETE FROM autoinc";
$result = $mdb2->exec($query);

$query = "SELECT id FROM autoinc";
$result = $mdb2->queryCol($query);
var_dump($result);

$query = "INSERT INTO autoinc (id) VALUES (?)";
$stmt = $mdb2->prepare($query);

$mdb2->beginNestedTransaction(); …

Every time I'm travelling (for a conference, or teaching a training course), I wonder how the hotel operators envisage the use of the iron and ironing board.

The problem is of course that one actually needs to plug in the iron. But finding a socket in a place near where you can sensibly place the ironing board.... it's just one of those very curious things.

We are very pleased to announce the release of the MySQL Virtual Appliance. Literally the easiest and fastest way to get MySQL running. The MySQL Virtual Appliance is just 22MB to download, and is running MySQL and PHPMyAdmin right out of the box with no configuration.

Today, will go down in my professional history as quite possibly the lowest I would ever think of a software developer. I’ve carefully avoided the term “fellow coder”, speaking of a IT industry sticking by fellow IT people, but not today.

I presently support an existing production system, some 1000+ users that’s been in place around 3 years in which I’ve had no prior involvement until recently. Integration with other external parties within the system have provided an esclation in errors being reported in this external communication, and lack of adequate feedback to the user is another topic. Email is the means of reporting administratively of user errors, again another topic of issue. Within these emails, which are almost impossible to manage due to the limited internal GUI only toolset and lack of access to actual email account files to automate scripting (yet another topic? Do you see a trend here), is some relevent information …

Many maintenance procedures need to generate SQL as strings, and then need to execute that string as SQL. Use PREPARE for this.

CODE:CREATE DATABASE `admin`;
USE admin

CREATE PROCEDURE `execute`(in cmd text)
SQL SECURITY INVOKER
begin
  set @x = cmd; 
  prepare x from @x;   
  execute x;   
  drop prepare x; 
end

(as requested on Freenode:#mysql)

Interesting... Slidy by Dave Raggett.

Despite it being a pest, PowerPoint is of course still "the standard". Yes, Apple's Keynote is very nice. OpenOffice.org just clones PowerPoint and thus suffers from the same problems... the main issues I have: maintenance, collaboration, and reusing components.

With a decent system that uses XHTML as its format, distributed revision control would sort out the maintenance and collaboration, and as one would be able to chop things up, that deals with re-use (and single source for one component that exists in multiple presentations). Nice. Haven't (yet) looked at this in detail, but it seems more sensible than some other frameworks that have been created earlier.
Simple is good!