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!

This article is a quick pointer on MySQL's three available tools for UPSERT (update/insert) or MERGE queries.

There were recently number of posts about MyISAM, for example Arjen wrote pretty nice article about MyISAM features so I thought I would share my own view on using MyISAM in production.

For me it is not only about table locks. Table locks is only one of MyISAM limitations you need to consider using it in production.
Especially if you're comming from "traditional" databases you're likely to be shocked by MyISAM behavior (and default MySQL behavior due to this) - it will be corrupted by unproper shutdown, it will fail with partial statement execution if certain errors are discovered etc.

You should not think about this however as about bugs, as many MySQL features it is designed for particular load cases when it shines and it might not be good choice for others.

In 1999 for my production application (storing billions of rows in tens of …

Groggy mentions trying to draw sequence diagrams with pic. I recommend using Spinellis excellent UMLGraph toolset that he developed while writing Code Reading. That book was wonderfully inspiring to me, and helped cement my desire to work on open source software.

From what I remember, the sequence diagram stuff was a clever set of pic macros, so that you could just describe a sequence diagram and then generate the picture. I love having pictures to use during a discussion because they help avoid confusion, but I absolutely hate drawing pictures or using drawing tools - I prefer to keep the diagrams in plain-text, source code, in a revision control system. Using pic for the sequence diagrams fits the bill perfectly. Code is …

I’ve never been much of a video game player, but I do remember Quake having this really excellent console for entering commands.

As a programmer, I find myself flipping back and forth between iTerm and applications like email and web browser very frequently. On linux, I use multiple desktops to accomplish this, on OS X I just use quicksilver and try to not be irritated that I have to readjust my windows all the time.

Hosted on the same site as the excellent quicksilver is an incredible application named visor which lets you assign a hotkey to make a terminal window appear out of nowhere, and then disappear again when you hit the hotkey. Best of all, it even maintains context. I can even run screen to get multiple windows, so bye bye iTerm.

This is going to make coding on MySQL on the mac so much easier!
Here is the link for visor:
…

There is a bug in MySQL that causes an UPDATE to fail with a unique index violation, even though the statement doesn't create duplicate values. In this article I'll explain when this bug can happen, and how to work around it.