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:
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I decided to go with a bump of the minor version for the next release of MDB2 because there are a number significant changes and additions. One of the big changes is dropping array_key_exists() whereever possible. I kind of got bitten by isset() in the past a lot. Just stupid little mistakes. However I somehow felt more confident with replacing things with empty() calls. The same change was made across all drivers which were released as 1.1.0 versions (except for the Frontbase driver that needs a maintainer and the beta drivers for Oracle and Querysim).

Aside from that the two main features are custom datatypes and query rewriting via the debugging infrastructure. The custom datatypes were already explained in a previous blog post, so I will not go into detail on them again here. However the debugging …

I was just reading a text on effective communications, and there was something interesting I noted. With different values and backgrounds all over the world, a lot of things happen (use of colloquisms, etc.) with regards to people understanding each other. When there’s face-to-face meetings, there’s also non-verbal communication to keep note of.

It turns out in South Africa, they call it Ubuntu (we’re much more familiar with its “humanity for others” meaning by now, for sure). They value collective efforts in solving issues that impact the members of the community. And if you’re ever face-to-face with a South African, limited eye contact often shows respect and humility (this is similar with Japan, its polite). In the Western world though, we need eye-contact for confidence purposes, and to show that we’re sincere.

Its also worthy to note (yes, this post had a point) that on the …

Wouldn't it be cool if the open source RDBMS of the world got together to define a common protocol for debugging stored procedures? This opens up the possibility to share GUI tools and more importantly expertise in making it work to begin with.

This idea dawn on me after reading a thread on stored procedure debugging on the pgsql-hackers list. The other day I was talking to Derick and he mentioned that MySQL also have had an interest in his DBGp debugging protocol. Avid readers of my blog know how fond I am of the idea of using common standards in this area.

So maybe we can get a brought alliance of open source RDBMS developers to work on a common standard? I have been hoping for some solid cooperation materializing …

Seems I have over time, thought of many ideas, jotted some notes on some, and even done some work, but everybody knows that “home projects” can take a long time.

Here are a few that have resurfaced over the past month, and I doubt I’ll ever get to them, or perhaps some other enterprising person has already done a similar thing. Of course most are for my own personal/professional gratification, but input from others of “great idea, when do we see it” could sway my interests.

INFORMATION_SCHEMA for MySQL Version 4

Why?

Well, quering the INFORMATION_SCHEMA is very cool, and long overdue for information gathering including statistics, schema definitions, schema version comparision tools etc. Of course there are concerns regarding the performance of using the INFORMATION_SCHEMA, and any design should significantly …

ERROR: The requested URL could not be retrieved (yeah, site didn’t work when i clicked on it from RSS).

Matt uses this bit of ruby code to demonstrate that here you can’t ever not close the file handle:

File.open('something.txt') do |fd|
# Manipulate the file through 'fd'
end
# File handle is now closed

Which seems pretty cool. However, a good C++ programmer can also acheive the same (or better) things!

For example, in NDB (well, in the portability library we use inside NDB) we have a class called Guard. The constructor for Guard pthread_mutex_locks a mutex. The destructor unlocks it. So, for when you’ve got some simple mutual exclusion you need doing, you can have bits of code like this:

{
Guard g(m_config_mutex);

…

I’ve been working on BUG#17928, which is all about “testBackup fails in error handling testcases” which appeared after we merged in some work to the 5.1 tree (which is okay in 5.0) that changes some things in the way that online backups are done in NDB to better support recovery in the event of various types of failures and various times in the process.

Anyway, not all systems are affected by this bug… I’m at least reproducing some of the failures on my laptop and have spent the past while in the depths of the BACKUP and NDBFS blocks trying to work out what’s going on and why we’re hitting this assert.

NDBFS is an interesting block as it’s the file system interaction for NDB - so we’re doing things that could take an arbitrary amount of time. We don’t like waiting for those sorts of things in cluster, so we go on and do other work.

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I’ve decided to affectionally call the MySQL Workbench Product “The Anaconda”. It’s been a wrestle so far to get all the features and functionality I wanted in this product. Of course I’d much rather have seen this product at say version 0.5, or 0.6, as I would not feel as guilty towards my comments of a 1.0 product when I’m having issues. I also have great respect for Mike Zinner and this small team of GUI developers that are developing and supporting the MySQL GUI products. Nevertheless, here is my latest round of analysis of the product across various platforms.

Hardware

Machines

1. Dell Inspiron 5150 P4 3.2GHz 1GB RAM, 80GB & 120GB HDD
2. Generic Desktop PIII 866MHz
3. Dell Inspiron 500 PIII 600MHz

Operating Systems

For the purposes of these tests I’m going to run multiple OS’s installed on seperate drives to attempt to isolate and reproduce …

My work life is really fragmented at present, so I’ve decided a split approach in answer to Dave Rosenberg’s How I Work–what I have learned so far .

CentOS 4.3
FireFox 1.5, ThunderBird 1.5, Gaim, SSH, Skype, Open Office 2.
Maybe not all of these every day, but some combination of each day –> MySQL 4.1, MySQL 5.0, MySQL 5.1, MySQL Workbench, Eclipse 3.1, J2DK 1.4.2, J2DK 5.0, Apache Tomcat 5.0.28, Apache Httpd 2.0.53, JMeter.

Presently also configuring a new laptop drive running …

I’ve been using VNCViewer from RealVNC under Linux to remote connect to an older machine running windows. Two reasons, I don’t need yet another screen on my desk, and I need windows to adequately test and use the MySQL GUI products, in particular MySQL Workbench.

I never realised there was a better way, particularly over a local network, a command called rdesktop which is capable of natively speaking Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).

$ su -
$ yum install rdesktop

This did only give me version 1.3.1. The current version 1.4.1 available from the rdesktop Website does provide greater commands including the syntax I use.

su -
cd /src
wget http://optusnet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/rdesktop/rdesktop-1.4.1.tar.gz
tar xvfz rdesktop-1.4.1.tar.gz
cd rdesktop-1.4.1
./configure
make
make install …