Stimulating Pixels

Originally found this here after lots of searching. Making my own link to make sure I can find it again.

To use mysqldump on a Mac running OS X 10.5 (Leopard), run the following from the command line:


sudo ln -s /usr/local/mysql-5.0.67-osx10.5-x86/bin/mysqldump /usr/bin/mysqldump


(I think I had to manually install MySQL from the supplemental CDs that came with the Mac. I’m assuming this version of mysqldump was installed at the same time.)

Quick link that I saw today for tips for donating your old computers. More importantly, a search tool where you can find places to donate computers based on zip code. I’ve had problems finding places to donate gear to before, this should help a lot. If you’ve got old gear, this is something you should think about.

IBM has started releasing a new set of offerings they are calling “Skill kits” built on their Toolkit for Custom and Reusable Solution Information. The kits themselves are packages of reference information their developers have identified as being valuable to a given topic. This content is then assembled into a single package for easy consumption via a mini web server that runs locally on your machine.

When I’ve been working in a new language or dealing with part of a language I haven’t used in a long time, I go straight to the web and search for what I need. After years of doing this, I’m pretty good at getting to what I need quickly but the fact that I’m searching the open web has a few main drawbacks:

1. It’s not topic specific. Even keying in on terms to help limit the results, irrelevant information leaks in.
2. It’s not vetted. Most of the time answers you find will get solve the issue, but they may be a poor way to do it. The result could be as simply as a process running slower than it needs to, or something more severe like opening up a security hole.
3. It may not be up to date. Technology moves fast. The answer you find that worked for version 1.0 may not work or cause issues in the 1.1 release.
4. Only a partial solution may be presented. Problems in programming often involve multiple step solutions. It may take cross referencing several potential solutions and assembling various parts from each to get to the answer of a related but distinct problem.

The Skill Kits idea avoids the first two issues completely and if you have the proper version, the third issue dissolves as well. The last issue about only partial solutions being available will depend on the depth of the kit that is assembled. Once it hits a certain level, even if it doesn’t have specific answers, it will provide the framework for developing the answer.

Right now, there is only one kit listed: Project Zero WebSphere sMash skill kit, but I expect there will be at least a few more on the way. Of course, it wouldn’t have to be limited to programming. Just about any topic could be put into the framework.

Even though there is very little difference between these kits and a really good reference/tutorial site, I love the idea. Of course, this could also be the basis for building a system like Trinity used in The Matrix to learn how to fly a Huey by downloading flight skills directly into her brain. Just gotta figure out where to plug in the wires.

There are a few tools out there that let you take a long URL and turn it into a short one. One that I’ve used in the past is tinyurl.com, but I’ve recently found another service at http://tr.im/. For a shortening service, that’s about as short a name as you can get. Bonus for the fact that it makes sense and applies to what they do.

To use tr.im, all you have to do is copy a long URL from the address bar, paste it into the box on their home page and hit the “tr.im!” button. They’ll take your long URL like:

and turn it into something like this: http://tr.im/71mv. The trimmed URL is much easier to deal with in email messages and status updates.

The tr.im service provides an additional tracking services as well. Each time someone uses one of your trimmed URLs, the browser will bounce through their server momentarily while it figures out where to send them for the final page. The tr.im server uses this to capture stats on how your shortened URL is used.

Going to back to tr.im on the same browser that you used to create the shortened URLs will show you the stats. If you create an account, you can log in and see these stats from any browser (and you won’t loose the information if you clear the cookies on your machine).

There are a few concerns with the service. For one, you have to make sure you are okay with the fact that you are sending traffic through their servers. This shouldn’t be an issue for anything that’s not sensitive information, but it’s something to think about.

The other thing to think about is permanence. I’m not sure how tr.im makes money, but it surely costs them something to host the service. If you post all your links through them, but their company goes away, those links would stop working. Not a big deal in cases for things like old status messages that you’ll probably never look at again.

It is also possible at some point that they change the way their service works. For example, instead of immediately jumping to the destination URL, they could easily put an ad in between, or even launch a pop-up that you have no control over. It seems unlikely that they would be that aggressive, but as with any free service like this, it is worth keeping in mind that they can change the way things work at any time.

I mentioned that I do Skunk Works projects to a colleague who was unfamiliar with the term. Turning to the all-knowing Wikipedia I pulled the following:

Skunk Works is a term first coined in 1943 by Lockheed, currently trademarked by Lockheed Martin and widely used in business, engineering, and technical fields to describe a group within an organization given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, tasked with working on advanced or secret projects.

Reading further, I saw a reference to "Bootlegging". I didn’t know that there is a business world definition for the term. Apparently, there is:

In economics and business administration literature, Kenneth E. Knight introduced the notion bootlegging in 1967. Bootlegging is defined as research in which motivated individuals secretly organise the innovation process. It usually is a bottom-up, non-programmed activity, without the official authorisation of the responsible management, but for the benefit of the company. It is not in the department’s action plan nor are there any formal resources allocated towards it (Augsdorfer 1996).

I do that too. I’m close to winding up a project that has been pretty much all consuming since sometime around October of last year. Can’t wait to get back to the bootlegging stuff. It will come as a most welcome change of pace from the big ol’ formal project.

If you have a computer that you happen to leave on a lot when you aren’t using it, check out this article about using "S3" Standby. It’s for Windows, but there is probably something similar for Macs out there. Though, I wouldn’t be surprised if they do it by default.

It’s a little bit tech heavy, so if you aren’t up for it, buy some whiskey for you geek friend and get them to set it up for ya. The example cost listed in the article is about $35/month for an always on computer. Now most folks won’t have machines that take up quite that much juice, but you can probably save at least a few bucks.

At least not in my work e-mail’s spell check dictionary. A little sad, but not really surprising.

The email program I use at work doesn’t have an inline spell checker. If you want to do a spell check, you have to click on a button and wait for it to go thru the message and pull up individual words that it finds that it thinks are wrong. While it’s not THAT time consuming, the process probably takes a minute for short emails and two or a little more for longer ones.

Aside from the time, it also really disrupts the “flow” of working. So, I’m pretty much going to stop doing spell checks. By and large the message should be understandable even with a few typos.

This is mainly a note for me. If you run a bittorrent program like the open source Azureus and have a firewall like Comodo (which I highly recommend), you will need to open the port in the firewall to get the best use out of the bittorrent client.

First figure out which port you need to open up by looking under the Tools menu in the “Connection” setting. It’ll have the incoming/outgoing port number there. Then you need to go into the “Network Monitor” tab on the side of Comodo and create a new firewall rule with the following:

Action = Allow
Protocol = TCP or UDP
Direction = In
Source IP = Any
Remote IP = your IP adress (or “Any” )
Source port = Any
Remote port = the port your bittorent program uses for the TCP/UDP connections

To give credit where credit is due, I got this from this post. I just want to make sure if it disappears I don’t have to hunt down how to set it again.

For those of you have who ever done development work in a company this will be extremely funny: Project Cartoon. Further example of the scary transformation that started taking place when I first started my real job into someone that finds Dilbert funny way more often than not.