Log

Many people may not now, but you can comment your MySQL schema:

SQL: good comments conventions

Maatkit is a suite of command-line tools for MySQL. It contains some rather nifty things for query analyses, replication, and other stuff. Some of the more interesting highlights:

• mk-deadlock-logger
  Extract and log MySQL deadlock information.
• mk-log-player
  Split and play MySQL slow logs.
• mk-error-log
  Find new and different MySQL error log entries.
• mk-index-usage
  Read queries from a log and analyze how they use indexes.
• And many more…

Found via databasejournal.com, which has two articles on Maatkit:

The Wonders of Maatkit for MySQL and
Even more Maatkit for MySQL.

Many online services allow, or even worse, require, the so called "Security Question". It is a question/answer you can enter in case you ever forget your password or can't access your account for some reason. In my opinion, security questions are an incredibly bad idea, from a security perspective.

The usual security questions are things like "What was your mother's maiden name", "What's your pet's name", etcetera. People won't understand that actually supplying a truthful answer to these kind of questions exposes them to an incredible weakness in their account's security. These are all questions to which the answer can be found relatively easy by googling a person or applying a little social engineering. "Hey, I am John, and I think I might be related to you on your mother's side. What's her maiden name"?

The worst part is that every site has basically the same questions from which you can choose. This means that people either have to pick the same question and answer every time, or pick a different one for each account. The first will make them vulnerable to repeated attacks on all their online profiles once an attacker has found the answer. The second will make it very hard for people to remember that they must never let anybody know about their favorite pet's name "Buddy". A lose/lose scenario at best.

As is often the case with security protocols, they must be followed to the letter to be safe. One flaw in the procedure, and the security collapses. Security questions could be a good idea, provided that:

• The user makes up his own question. No predefined questions should be supplied, and most importantly, different sites shouldn't all use the same questions.
• The user should never be told what his security question was. If they need to reset their password, they should chose both the security question and the answer. This will make it much harder for a potential attacker to gain accees.

Of course, taking the above in consideration, security questions are just as hard to remember as a password, which makes them kind of pointless. Pointless or insecure, make your pick.

New development builds, and apparently the Beta build of Chrome for the Mac, strip the 'http://' part from the URL input field. Since I run Chromium for Linux, which uses nightly builds of Chrome, I am already affected by this retarded decision.

For this reason I will no longer be using Chrome, nor will I recommend Chrome to anybody anymore. In fact, I will actively recommend using any browser other than Chrome, including Internet Explorer 6.

I could explain why such a 'trivial' change upsets me so much that I'd stop using an otherwise… promising.. product, but life is too short to argue with stupid people, so I'll just leave it at that.

I finally found a decent replacement for the MySQLcc database browser:

SQuirreL SQL

SQuirreL SQL Client is a graphical Java program that will allow you to view the structure of a JDBC compliant database, browse the data in tables, issue SQL commands etc

It's Java, so it's slow, but it does everything I want, and more:

1. Syntax highlighting
2. Multiple query tabs
3. Multiple queries in the same tab (select the query and press ctrl-enter to run it)
4. Export results

It has tons of options you can tweak, and it's got plugins if you want to extend it. It supports just about every relational (and some non-relational) database out there.

Awesome.

Preface

Read the rest of this entry »

In kind of a follow up to my previous post on using find and sed to search and replace multiple files, I found out something else.

I needed to find and replace something in every file, except for any files which had ".svn" in them. After struggling for a few fruitless minutes with -regex, I stumbled upon this example in the manual page:

find /sbin /usr/sbin -executable \! -readable -print

   Search for files which are executable but not readable.

The \! allows us to invert the tests after it. Perfect! All we need to do is use -regex to do our excluding:

find . -type f \! -regex ".*\.svn.*"

And we can now search and replace in all files except those that have ".svn" in them:

find . -type f \! -regex ".*\.svn.*" -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i "s/foo/bar/"

Neat. Note that, again, -regex is a GNU find only construct.

I've released Templum v0.4.0

Templum is an extremely lightweight, simple yet powerful and fast templating engine for PHP. It re-uses the power of PHP itself for rendering templates, but provides additional features making it easier to write templating code. Rendering templates using Templum is very fast; it approximates native PHP rendering speed for include() statements.

This release features:

• Some small bug fixes
• Documentation updates
• The ability to include other templates in a template

Download instructions here.

I always kept a small Python script around for searching and replacing in Linux. Turns out that GNU sed has an inline edit mode which I didn't know about:

       -i[SUFFIX], --in-place[=SUFFIX]

              edit files in place (makes backup if extension supplied)

This makes searching and replacing in files as simple as:

find . -name "*.txt" -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i "s/foo/bar/"

This replaces all occurences of "foo" with "bar" in all the .txt files in or below the current directory.

Unfortunately, -i appears to be a GNU extension, so it won't work on *BSD or Solaris, probably.

I have a laptop that travels with me to work as well as being used at home. I have a number of network CIFS mounts that I like to have available when I am at home, so I have them set to "auto" in /etc/fstab. [...] The problem is that when I shift locations, I need proper handling of those network mounts.

Handling network mounts on a very mobile laptop.