Here are the slides from yesterday’s presentation about horizontal database scaling through sharding at the mySQL dev room at FOSDEM 2009.

I’ve got a ton of notes and remarks to these slides, which will become available here soon.

My last post was for all users, technical and non. This post is for the techies who know me, and are switching. Some are coming from Windows, some from Linux, some are designers who need to do some local development. So, I’ll try to keep this post as simple as possible, and perhaps more like a tutorial, where you can “copy and paste” commands and files.
If you’re going to be doing any kind of web development, chances are you’ll be deploying to a linux/unix server. I don’t know anything about Windows or IIS, so ignore this post if you’re looking for IIS help. I’m also assuming basic level of knowledge with how to find and edit files either via Finder, or via Terminal. For the non unix folks ~ for the rest of the article, means “Your home directory” . Your home directory is usually …

Yet Another Switch Page 2.0

It’s been 4 years since I switched to the Mac. A few years ago I made a page for other switchers. I’m making a new list, as a lot of my friends have finally switched themselves, or are thinking about it. Please share and add your favorite apps in the comments.

The List
Here is the software I use, in order of importance to myself.

1. QuickSilver: If you don’t like using the mouse, this is your friend. It’s not just an app launcher, with the power of chaining, I can create tasks in RTM , straight to iCal, Calculator, and send quick emails with text snippets
2. Terminal.App: This comes with OS X, and is still my prefered method of …

I found out the hashing algorithm used in PHP-Memcache is different from that of Python-Memcache. The keys went to different servers as the hash created by python and php were different.

I posted a question on the memcache groups and was lucky to find this wonderful reply.

import memcache
import binascii
m = memcache.Client(['192.168.28.7:11211', '192.168.28.8:11211
', '192.168.28.9:11211'])

def php_hash(key):
    return (binascii.crc32(key) >> 16) & 0x7fff

for i in range(30):
       key = 'key' + str(i)
       a = m.get((php_hash(key), key))
       print i, a

This is the only thing that has to be done on Python's end, change the way the hash is calculated. The coding on PHP end remains same. All you guys using PHP for web based front-end with MySQL and Python for back-end scripts shall find this helpful.

Thanks Brian Rue.

Reference: …

Mozilla, the global community behind the Firefox web browser, has an idea that we need your help with. We want you to help make openness, participation and distributed decision-making common experiences in Internet life.

To do this, millions of people around the world must understand, embrace and share these values. You, me, our families, our neighbor down the street, our political representatives – millions of us from every walk of life in every wired country can help to protect the Net and make it better.

As an experiment working towards this goal, I am coordinating a program that asks people to share short (very, very short – 3 to 12 second) video statements of how the Net has changed their life. We hope that thousands of videos are made by people all over the world and that, through …

« Post 3 | This is the 4th post in my MoFo Futures 2009 blog series

“When I was a child, my mother lectured me on the evils of ‘gossip.’ She held a feather pillow and said, ‘If I tear this open, the feathers will fly to the four winds, and I could never get them back in the pillow. That’s how it is when you spread mean things about people.’ For me, that pillow is a metaphor for Wikipedia.” — John Seigenthaler Sr.

So the future pulled up in her shiny big metaphor and we got in. In the beginning, our road trip made sense, all well-ordered highways and wholesome roadside attractions. Somewhere along the way, we hit bat country and the …

Dear Mac users,

There have been a number of issues with configuring XAMP on the Mac for use with NetBeans IDE, most significantly that XAMP sets the owners of MySQL databases to "nobody", blocking Apache access. Therefore I have changed the Mac OS setup tutorial to use MAMP instead of XAMP. In my opinion, the MAMP setup is more straightforward than the one for XAMP, anyway.

Support for Persistent Connections

ext/mysqli does not support persistent connections when built with libmysql. However ext/mysqli does support persistent connections when built with mysqlnd. To establish a persistent connection with the MySQL server using ext/mysqli and mysqlnd, prepend the database host with the string "p:" (p stands for persistent) as shown below.

$host="p:localhost";
$port=3306;
$socket="/tmp/mysql.sock";
$user="root";
$password="admin";
$dbname="test";

$cxn = new mysqli($host, $user, $password, $dbname, $port, $socket)
        or die ('Could not connect to the database server' . mysqli_connect_error());

ext/mysql, ext/mysqli and PDO_MySQL support persistent connections when built with mysqlnd.

The new API call mysqli_fetch_all()

mysqlnd extends the ext/mysqli API with one brand new method, …

Support for Persistent Connections

ext/mysqli does not support persistent connections when built with libmysql. However ext/mysqli does support persistent connections when built with mysqlnd. To establish a persistent connection with the MySQL server using ext/mysqli and mysqlnd, prepend the database host with the string "p:" (p stands for persistent) as shown below.

$host="p:localhost";
$port=3306;
$socket="/tmp/mysql.sock";
$user="root";
$password="admin";
$dbname="test";

$cxn = new mysqli($host, $user, $password, $dbname, $port, $socket)
        or die ('Could not connect to the database server' . mysqli_connect_error());

ext/mysql, ext/mysqli and PDO_MySQL support persistent connections when built with mysqlnd.

The new API call mysqli_fetch_all()

mysqlnd extends the ext/mysqli API with one brand new method, …

Support for Persistent Connections

ext/mysqli does not support persistent connections when built with libmysql. However ext/mysqli does support persistent connections when built with mysqlnd. To establish a persistent connection with the MySQL server using ext/mysqli and mysqlnd, prepend the database host with the string "p:" (p stands for persistent) as shown below.

$host="p:localhost";
$port=3306;
$socket="/tmp/mysql.sock";
$user="root";
$password="admin";
$dbname="test";

$cxn = new mysqli($host, $user, $password, $dbname, $port, $socket)
        or die ('Could not connect to the database server' . mysqli_connect_error());

ext/mysql, ext/mysqli and PDO_MySQL support persistent connections when built with mysqlnd.

The new API call mysqli_fetch_all()

mysqlnd extends the ext/mysqli API with one brand new method, …