Scoble: I was wrong

August 22, 2006

It has already been said elsewhere, including by Scoble himself that the post yesterday on what blogs are, or aren't, was incorrect. I won't go into the discussion as the points have been well made elsewhere. I would just comment that this site is one of the most useful blogs out there. Mind you, it won't be to everybody else but it is to me and it is to those who use it.

How about some RSS

August 20, 2006

Dave Winer comments on the state of web news on the mainstream news sites. Hey Dave how about a RSS newsreader? :).

My NetNewsWire is filled with the other stories about what is going on elsewhere. Sure there are more JonBenet stories than there need to be. I'm probably more accepting of them since I lived near Boulder for more than a dozen years and the case is one from the old neighborhood.

There is a serious side to this too. Dave's commented a couple of times on the overload of JonBenet coverage. Since I get my news from the radio and the RSS feeds I read I've not seen an overload. Sure, there's a story each day, but there are plenty of other real news stories too. I found myself wondering if this story would have crossed my desk if it weren't for the current coverage.

Home again

August 20, 2006

I feel bad that I didnt get this note out sooner. I arrived back in the US on August 8th as part of the first group of soldiers to return. I was very glad to be "non-essential". I expect everyone else to arrive soon. It is good to be back. In many ways it is like I never left. Imagine someone hitting the "pause" button on your life for a year while everyone else continues on "play". That is close.

I dont know what the next several months will hold but I will continue to update everyone. Thank you all so very much for your support and emails and packages and letters and prayers during the deployment. You made the time much more bearable.

Help half.com

August 19, 2006

Having recently sold a book on Half.com I encountered a problem with their system. Something has gone awry and they are sending the notice once an hour. When one ventures to their help desk, however, it's anything but helpful. Eventually if the customer is persistent they find out that the customer goes through the help wizard to get to contact support. Mind you the help wizard has no canned questions that are remotely related to the question at hand. So for a problem with the order system one is reduced to submitting the question about I received an order, but cannot find the shipping address for the buyer.

How to create really annoying databases

August 16, 2006

Microsoft Access is at once great and the scourge of my existence. It has great power to create databases quickly and for small organizations it can be very handy. However, it also makes it easy to create databases even if it's something you really have no business doing.

I'm working on a couple of inherited projects now and there are two very annoying things. One of the annoying things is to create quasi-relational tables with no normalization. Put as many columns in as possible and repeat them in as many databases as possible. If that doesn't do enough for you copy the database a hundred times and create separate versions of it.

The other, almost more annoying practice, is to create one of these monster tables. Then instead of having your PHP script run queries on the table you create a query in Microsoft Access and run the PHP queries against the MS Access query. For annoying bonus points, rename three of the 40 fields so you have "Username" instead of "User". Repeat.

Oy.

Upgrading MySQL on Mac OS X Server

August 16, 2006

It is pretty straight forward to migrate an OS X Server's native MySQL 4.1 to a MySQL binary installation of MySQL 5.0. After backing up the databases and /usr/bin install the new binary. Once that is done link /usr/bin/mysql files to /usr/local/mysql/bin.

Two changes are necessary to get everything working. First /etc/my.cnf needs to look at /var/mysql instead of /usr/local/mysql/var for databases. Second since Apple sticks the socket file in /tmp/mysql.sock (come on Apple what are you thinking?) a symbolic link is necessary to have it work properly. The link should point to /var/mysql/mysql.sock (unless you've modified the default config).

The last step is an updatecheck and permissions check.

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