Posts

I’ve never been entirely happy with CocoaMySQL, and after a mishap last night our relationship is at an end. Like most database clients, CocoaMySQL enables you to run queries, browse tables, and view the structure of your database. It has its problems (like hanging and locking the database when I run custom queries that return a lot of data), but for the most part, they’re avoidable. Last night, however, I found that it just puts too much power in the hands of its users to be safe for everyday use. When you’re viewing the structure of a table in CocoaMySQL, you can modify the schema as well as view it. In fact, it makes modifying the schema really easy. You can just click on the data type for a column and change it from, say, varchar(255) to tinyint. In fact, it’s rather easy to make such a change accidentally. Needless to say, doing something like that results in losing every bit of the data in that column. Any sane person writing a database tool would ask for confirmation before applying such a page, perhaps even two or three times, especially when a schema change will result in data loss. CocoaMySQL doesn’t. ...

My MacBook Pro showed up today. I have the 2.0ghz model, and I am overwhelmed by the speed difference over my 17" Powerbook G4. I haven’t run any benchmarks, but for everyday use, the speed difference is astounding. The key, of course, is to use Universal applications. Applications that run through Rosetta work, but they’re slow. I’d say that they’re somewhat slower than they were on the old Powerbook G4, but they are absurdly slow when compared to their Universal equivalents on the MacBook. The biggest difference is between Firefox (not Universal) and Camino (Universal). As some others have noted, when you’re using Camino, Gmail feels like a desktop application. The applications built into the OS open almost instantly, iTunes opens in a blink. ...

I happened to catch a new game show on TV last night called Deal or No Deal after seeing an incredibly long line of people queueing on the sidewalk for open auditions to be contestants on my way home from dinner. The show itself is incredibly boring, but the mechanics of the game are kind of interesting. The game starts with 26 briefcases, each of which represents a dollar amount, running from one cent to one million dollars (or in the case of last night’s show, two million dollars). The game begins when the contestant picks one of the briefcases, which contains the amount of money they’re playing for. The contestant then chooses other briefcases to open, revealing amounts of money that they didn’t pick. Periodically the “banker” calls then and offers them money to stop playing, based on the amount of money still in play. ...

Someone needs to come up with an algebraic formula that includes the number of posts in a weblog’s RSS feed, the number of days in a row that all of the old posts in it show up as new, and the amount of mental effort it takes to unsubscribe from the feed to calculate how long a feed can stay broken before users unsubscribe en masse. I wonder if other people are like me – I generally unsubscibe without letting the person know that there was even a problem. ...

There’s a new trend in Web development tools that seems to have arrived first for Mac users, but that I suspect will find its way to Windows and perhaps even Linux as well at some point. When you deploy Web applications, they generally rely upon system level services like a Web server, a relational database, and perhaps an application server. On computers running some Unix-like operating system, this means that the files all live in system directories like /usr, /var, and /etc. On Windows machines, you find yourself installing applications like MySQL and Apache as Services. ...

My experiment with using Camino as my everyday browser has ended. It was nice, but while it was different than FIrefox, it didn’t seem better. Teaching my brain all new keyboard shortcuts turned out not to be worth it, especially since I still use Firefox whenever I use my PC.

I’ve created a link blog for your feed consuming pleasure. For lack of a better name, it’s called Of Interest. You can read it in your browser, but it’s really meant to be read in your RSS/Atom reader of choice. You can subscribe to an Atom feed or an RSS feed. I also have a del.icio.us account that I use, but that’s mainly for bookmarking. I feel like regular Movable Type entries are kind of heavy, and I wanted a place to just be able to quickly toss up links with minimal commentary. One thing I want to write more about is how different kinds of writing environments encourage different kinds of writing. I feel like everything change I’ve made to rc3.org since the beginning has encouraged longer entries. The link blog sort of goes back to the original spirit of the site, which was more about quick links to things other people wrote. We’ll see how it works out. ...

So I read the other day that World of Warcraft is the new golf. Are you playing? I thought it might be fun for people to post the servers where they play. I’ve spent time playing Alliance on Dalaran, Horde on Lightbringer, Horde on Emerald Dream, and I have both Horde and Alliance characters I recently moved to Eitrigg. Right now, when I have time to play, I play my tauren druid on Emerald Dream or my dwarven hunter on Eitrigg. ...

One of the most interesting things and trying things about running my own server has been dealing with email issues. It seems like there are more options when it comes to email than there are with anything else. You have to pick a mail transfer agent and a POP/IMAP server, and you have to configure everything. Then there’s spam and viruses. Postfix was the obvious choice when it came to choosing an MTA. It’s well documented, it’s easy to install, and is known for being secure. The other popular options there are Sendmail, which is monolithic, hard to configure, and used to be very insecure, and qmail, which I don’t know much about. I honestly didn’t give this decision much thought – I installed Postfix and moved on to other things. ...

Tim Bray says of PHP: If you want your ears bent back, have a listen to Zend CEO Doron Gerstel; he’ll tell you that half the websites in the world are powered by PHP and that there are 2½ million developers and that the war is over and PHP won. So here’s my problem, based on my limited experience with PHP (deploying a couple of free apps to do this and that, and debugging a site for a non-technical friend here and there): all the PHP code I’ve seen in that experience has been messy, unmaintainable crap. ...