Blog

What is a BLOB?

If your answer was Binary Large Object, then you would be wrong. Check out Mike’s comments on History of Database Blobs from the man that created the BLOB, Mr Jim Starkey.

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Mercurial Version Control Software

I got asked (being a Java developer) about what was involved in creating an Eclipse Plugin for Mercurial. Well in true Google style, why invent when somebody probably already has. A quick check finds Mercurial Eclipse by VecTrace.

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What is software quality?

Greg Lehey wrote today Is MySQL getting buggier?. The underlying question of his comments is a more fundamental and passionate topic, and especially for me. That is “Software Quality”. The quintessential question is this.

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Generating an internal SSL Certificate (for tomcat)

How to Generate an internal SSL certificate Create the self-signed keystore $ su - $ URL="your.url.here";export URL $ cd /opt/tomcat/conf $ keytool -genkey -alias ${URL} -keyalg RSA -keystore ${URL}.keystore Enter keystore password: changeit What is your first and last name?

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Differences in syntax between mysql and mysqltest

As I wrote earlier in Using the MySQL Test Suite I found an issue with using the current MySQL Sakila Sample Database as a test with mysqltest. I was running an older version of 5.

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Using PBXT 0.9.5

Paul has released Version 0.95 of his PBXT MySQL Transactional Storage Engine. Here is what I did to get it operational under CentOS 4.3. su - useradd pbxt su - pbxt wget http://www.

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Using the MySQL Test Suite

MySQL provides two different tools to test the MySQL Server with SQL statements. One is mysqltest and in 5.1 mysqlslap. Both of these tools have quite different purposes. This is a quick review of the usage of mysqltest.

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QMail Admin

For some reason my vqadmin failed to create a new mail domain?? I know I had some /home permissions problems, but that was quite some time ago, perhaps I haven’t added a domain for mail in that time.

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Using Cascade in Foreign Keys

For those that are using a Referential Integrity based Storage Engine in MySQL, the use of Foreign Keys can provide an extra level of data integrity within your application. There are of course caveats to this statement, such as correct design, proper transactional use etc, but that’s a topic for another time.

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Guidelines for managing embedded external project dependencies

I’ve yet to find any Java project that doesn’t have dependancies on some other Open Source external libraries. I’ve yet to find a Java project that manages these external dependencies appropiately for support and integration at an enterprise level.

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What constitutes a good error message to the user?

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.

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Open Office Spell Checker

I don’t know why it just isn’t installed by default, but Open Office 2 didn’t install any dictionaries. What’s more depressing, is you go to do a spell check, and it simply states Spelling is Complete.

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FireFox’s Live Bookmarks

I’m just about to launch a new project I’ve been working on in the past week. It has a RSS feed, and I wanted to ensure that within FireFox, this could be picked up as a live bookmark.

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The 100 Best Products of 2005

I just created a seperate Gmail account for a new project I started yesterday. One of the default emails, points to Gmail being named the number 2 Best Product of 2005.

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