From time to time, I have found that companies are most interested in asking me the following questions when giving a job interview:

1. Oracle: Is it possible to recover data from cold and hot backups.
2. MySQL: When is it OK to use MyISAM table type?
3. When should one use InnoDB table type?
4. Linux: How can you find the exit status code of a program
5. Linux: What does the output of ipcs show?
6. What are the different MySQL table types? Comment on each one. [Also see: MySQL …

The MySQL Phrasebook, by Zak Greant and Chris Newman is now available from Amazon. Book Description: "The MySQL Phrasebook is a pocket guide that is jam-packed with useful and essential code "phrases" for the MySQL developer's everyday use. Packed with pr

Today I uploaded a batch of pictures into my gallery and I also re-arranged a number of albums into a separate Conferences and Events collection. The latest additions in there (yes, some should have been uploaded some time ago already!):

• EuroOSCON 2005 in Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Open Source Database Conference 2005 in Frankfurt, Germany
• FOSDEM 2006 Conference in Brussels, Belgium
• MySQL Developer Meeting 2006 in Sorrento, Italy …

MySQL AB today announced it has joined the Eclipse Foundation as an Add-In Provider. The company plans to contribute work to the Eclipse Data Tools Platform project and collaborate with Zend Technologies and others on the Eclipse PHP IDE project. The announcement was made in advance of the EclipseCon 2006 conference, being held in Santa Clara, California this week.

nipple chips and other such python fun.

I give up. The PHP users are right, I can't use perl anymore for writing "web applications".

About once a year I try to update my hideously programmed software, doekaki. It's a picture board with a java applet for the actual arting. The code sucks, since it's a pile of hacks upon hacks on a six year old codebase.

What's great about it is how most users who try a PHP based oekaki application and then try doekaki are floored at how easy it is to set up. That was the idea; you upload a small number of files, change permissions on two directories and two files, and then run it in your browser. The application installs itself and goes, no need for a mysql database.

Writing this code sucks. I'm denied from using any CPAN modules, and often a lot of standard perl libs don't work cross-site.

I can't do it anymore. There's a …

As the open source business ecosystem grows and matures, I'm finding it increasingly important for me to not only pitch my company's paid version, but also others'. Were I true Adam Smith, I'd argue that

...every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to …

adnarim_abroad: I know it’s controversial to say, but i’

I now want to be bumming around Melbourne city during the games. My house is 2mins walk from a  train station that’s less than 30mins to the middle of town. But never spend enough time there.

It’ll be good to get home.

Although i think the tired and hungover thing isn’t helping.

As I am writing and publishing more and more blog entries, it becomes important that I have good and reliable backups. I know that if something happens and I cannot recover my entries and comments, I would be terribly upset. So I want to share my process here. Please feel free to share your backup methods by commenting. Hopefully somebody will find it useful.

Backup comprises two parts:

1. File backup

On a Linux machine with Apache, the default web files and directories reside in /var/www/html. Yours may be different. This include all php files and sub-directories like wp-content, wp-include, etc.

The easiest way to do it is to use tar command with -z to compress them. My post here gives you a pointer on tar.

These files are fairly static, so you do not need to back them up …

I was trying to find an old article at Planet MySQL. One about a MySQL UDF to write to /var/log/messages. No luck.

Anyway, there is no search option on the site, and the latest addition of 10 entries per page makes it difficult to review pages. The RSS feed doesn’t give me a full option.

Anyway, it led me to look back in time to just how many articles are listed on Planet MySQL, and read some old stuff. I only came across it after I stumbled across the Brisbane MySQL Users Group back in Sep 2005.

Anyway the count was 2146. I’d like to see a stat on the home page of how many articles, and perhaps how many, last day, last week, last month.