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 …

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:
…

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.

…

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 …