Tag Archives | MySQL

Wind River Systems presenting at Dartmouth-Lake Sunapee Linux User Group, Thursday August 3rd

From the DLSLUG announcement list:

The next regular monthly meeting of the DLSLUG will be held Thursday, August 3rd, 7-9PM at Dartmouth College, Carson Hall, Room L02. All are welcome, free of charge.

Agenda

7:00 Sign-in, networking

7:15 Introductory remarks

7:20 “Taking Open Source, Enterprise-Class applications off the desktop and into the Field” presented by Thomas Hall, Technical Account Manager, Wind River Systems

“There are many compelling reasons to adopt Open Source applications for the desktop; one asks… Why stop there? Well, turns out there are significant technical hurdles to overcome minimal resources – successfully scaling powerful Open Source applications like Apache and MySQL into a handheld device requires Linux development and testing
tools well beyond printf.”

“However, while the groundswell of interest in the Linux OS has resulted in highly stable, mature kernels, this interest has not yet translated into commercial-quality Public Domain development tools. While it is comforting to have a ubiquitous technology like GDB available, one wants to further draw on best-in-class tools and paradigms that have been developed in the commercial software development space.”

“Wind River Systems will present on this topic and demonstrate the Eclipse-based Workbench IDE and Platform for Consumer Device, Linux Edition. As time permits, several commercially available products will be demonstrated running Wind River Linux.”

8:30 Roundtable Exchange – where the attendees can make announcements or ask a linux question of the group.

XAMPP

I've been involved for a couple of years in developing Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP/Perl/Python apps for various clients. During most of that time, I've used in-house Linux servers for prototype, development and testing, and Linux servers deployed at the client site or a hosting provider for production work. Recently, I wanted to spin off a second copy of an application on a local Windows laptop to test some radical changes while the rest of the development team continued to work away on the dev server. Ideally, I wanted to install the entire LAMP set on my local workstation without a lot of work, configuration, downloads, HowTos, and so forth. XAMPP offers free, prepackaged installation modules for Linux, Windows, OS X and Solaris, bundled with a dozen handy utilities like PEAR and phpMyAdmin. Installation was a click, click, click, done! process. Reading a few READMEs got a few non-standard settings like enabling InnoDB data storage. Slick!

If you need a quickly set up XAMPP stack, you'll want to check this out.

Hacking WordPress with Visual FoxPro

My first attempt at importing blog postings from Radio Userland to WordPress resulted in over seventy categories. Every post with a different combination of categories like “MySQL; LAMP; Technology; Security” created a new category with that exact name, rather than a one-to-many post-to-categories representation. WordPress supports this, as does Radio. The communication breakdown occured between the two, in an export routine I used that created MT-compatible text files.

I could have kept experimenting with different imports, but I’d rather just plow ahead with what I’ve got, so I took a look at the WordPress schema and figured out what I’d need to hack. I used Visual FoxPro to read in the category table, figure out which (multiple) category posts I should have instead of the single, multi-category category, and rewrote the many-to-many file that joins the posts to the categories.

That narrowed it down to 15 categories. I added a new one, “Personal” for notes about politics and personal goings-on. I hope to squash the four, now three “My” categories, which are the old example categories left over from the original Radio install. Stay tuned!

I noted the counts of the number of posts per category was showing zero for several categories. There’s a (denormalized) category_count field in the category table. I popped open phpMyAdmin on the server to poke around and finally issued a “update wp_categories set category_count = (select count(*) from wp_post2cat where category_id = cat_ID)” to get the counts to update. Thirteen rows updated in 0.0635 sec. Darn near as fast as Rushmore.

About Ted Roche

A picture named tedr.jpg

Last good picture, 1997-ish

An independent consultant specializing in web site development and database-centric software development, co-author of 4 books, contributor/editor to another six. Work web is http://www.tedroche.com .

Currently, working on Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL and MySQL databases, jQuery and occasionally a bit of PHP. Certified MySQL Developer (CMDEV) for MySQL 5.x (2008), Core Certified in MySQL 4.x. Former Microsoft Most Valuable Professional, 1994-2002, Microsoft Certified System Engineer and Microsoft Certified Solution Developer, first certified in Windows 3.1. Passed 17 exams, 1994-2000.

Senior Member of the Association of Computing Machinery, Member,  Electronic Frontier Foundation, American Civil Liberties Union and many other organizations.

Former member of Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group, New Hampshire Ruby Group, Alphaloft Community Supporter, Python Special Interest Group, Seacoast WordPress Developers GroupNational Writer’s Union, Boston Computer Society, Foxboro Area Common Users Group and many other organizations.

Books:

Contributing Editor to FoxPro Advisor magazine. Fifty columns of “Ask Advisor” or “Advisor Answers” published 1995 – 2000, along with a dozen feature articles.

Currently an independent consultant and head of Ted Roche & Associates, LLC – http://www.tedroche.com. We develop Visual FoxPro solutions, and work with clients as mentors, trainers and developers. Other tools include Microsoft SQL Server and Visual SourceSafe, the Oracle family of databases and Free/Open Source Software like Linux, Apache, MySQL, PostGreSQL, Python, Subversion, Twiki and Zope.

2000-2001: Worked at http://www.bugcentral.com before its parent did the Chapter 11 thing.

1995-2000: Worked at Blackstone Data Systems, who also managed to tank during the dot-com bomb. A great group, a great learning experience.

1995: New Hampshire Health & Human Services as a support technician while finishing “Hacker’s Guide to Visual FoxPro 3.0”

1992-1995: A brief employment at Brickstone Square in Andover, MA., followed by independent consulting, including Kronos and New England Computer Sales (NECX, since purchased by VerticalNet).

1989-1992: Software Developer for AINetwork and New Hampshire Insurance, part of AIG. Worked on a mailing label system for tracking attendees to the golf tourney that eventually turned into the most powerful and accurate P&L in the entire company. Scope creep. PCs and Fox had a tendency to do that kind of thing. Eventually wrote the report that proved the company would never make money, and they closed. Sure hope I was right. I was among the hundreds laid off.

1987- 1989: Worked for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, Division of Food and Drugs. Moonlighted evenings and weekends at “The Memory Location,” Washington Street, Wellesley, MA, selling Commodore 64, 128 and Amiga computers, peripherals and software. What a blast! Great fun, cool stuff, great bosses – Don Towne and Roy Lee.

Also volunteered for the Foxboro Area Commodore User Group as President, BBS SysOp and newsletter editor. BBS was a blast: 300 baud modem, Commodore 64, an SFD-1001 IEEE-488-interfaced One-Megabyte! 5-1/4″ floppy disk. Beta-tester for GEOS Software. First public-domain (pre-Open Source) software release was a quad-density Epson printer driver hand-coded in 6502 assembler. Owner of Commodore Amiga 500, 1000 and 2000. So much for future visions!

Ten year member of the Boston Computer Society. RIP.

Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics, 1984, from the Regent’s Program of the University of the State of New York, renamed Regent’s College and now Excelsior College. Associate of Arts degree in Liberal Arts and Sciences from Mohegan Community College, now Three Rivers Community College Norwich, Connecticut. Both degrees earned while serving in the U.S. Navy full-time.

626patch.gifUSS Daniel Webster.jpg1979-1987: Served as an Electrician’s Mate First Class, EM1/SS, Submarine Service. Ten deterrent patrols aboard the USS Daniel Webster, SSBN-626, Blue Crew, 1981-1987.

NPTU Ballston Spa, New York, winter of 1980-81.

Naval Nuclear Power School, Orlando Florida, 1980. Top electrician in my graduating class, 3.94 GPA.

Boot camp, Basic Electricity and Electronics, Electrician’s Mate “A” School, Great Lakes Training Center, Chicago, Illinois, 1979-1980.

Crosbro, Inc., 1978-1978: shipped my first commercial applications (order processing, inventory control, work-in-process tracking) written in BASIC on WANG 2200-A, T and VP computer systems. 16 kB RAM, BASIC in ROM, Key File Access Method (KFAM) as an ISAM database.

Bates College, 1976 – 1978. Teletype terminals, PDP-8 and 11, time-sharing with Dartmouth College. BASIC and beta-tested SBASIC – structured basic, without line numbers! – on the Dartmouth system.

Brockton High School, 1972-1976. Swim team, 3 letters, National Honor Society. Learned BASIC on a PDP-4.

A New Bubble or Continuing Evolution?

InfoWorld: Top News reports Open source goes big time with Red Hat-JBoss Deal.

(InfoWorld) – “Red Hat’s surprise announcement that it’s acquiring JBoss could upend accepted wisdom about both the size and function of open source software companies. Still, some customers are taking a wait-and-see attitude toward the deal.”

I wonder if this is a new bubble of irrational exuberance, or the ongoing business as usual. Red Hat’s not the only one making news…

Slashdot post: MySQL to Adopt Solid Storage Engine. hmart writes “As seen on ZDNet’s Open Source Blog MySQL is taking another step to defend from Oracle’s recent acquisitions of InnoBase and Sleepycat. From the article: ‘MySQL responds by getting Solid Information Technology, a proprietary database vendor, to take its solidDB Storage Engine for MySQL open source, under the GPL, starting in June.’

Dabo Runtime Engine For Windows 0.6.2 released

Ed Leafe announced today: “The Dabo Runtime Engine for Windows is a self-contained environment that allows you to run Dabo on Windows without having to first install all of the requirements. It comes with its own version of Python 2.4.2, wxPython 2.6.3.0, MySQLdb 1.2.0, kinterbasdb 3.2.0a1, ReportLab v.2463, and several other modules used in Dabo.”

Check out dabo at http://www.dabodev.com. Dabo is a rich-client application framework for data-centric applications. Written in Python, it provides multiple database support, WinTel, MacOSX, Linux front ends, and some remarkable capabilities. While the entire dabo projects is at version 0.6.2, Ed says that the visual tools are around 0.5 while the actual framework is 1.0+.

McAfee quarantines files incorrectly

From Slashdot: McAfee Anti-Virus Causes Widespread File Damage. AJ Mexico writes, “[Friday] McAfee released an anti-virus update that contained an anomaly in the DAT file that caused many important files to be deleted from affected systems. At my company, tens of thousands of files were deleted from dozens of servers and around 2000 user machines. Affected applications included MS Office, and products from IBM (Rational), GreenHills, MS Office, Ansys, Adobe, Autocad, Hyperion, Win MPM, MS Shared, MapInfo, Macromedia, MySQL, CA, Cold Fusion, ATI, FTP Voyager, Visual Studio, PTC, ADS, FEMAP, STAT, Rational.Apparently the DAT file targeted mostly, if not exclusively, DLLs and EXE files.” An anonymous reader added, “Already, the SANS Internet Storm Center received a number of notes from distressed sysadmins reporting thousands of deleted or quarantined files. McAfee in response released advice to restore the files. Users who configured McAfee to delete files are left with using backups (we all got good backups… or?) or System restore.”

News.com: McAfee update exterminates Excel

SANS Internet Storm Center

MySQL OLEDB driver

I’ve been doing a lot of work with MySQL lately, developing in-house LAMP applications for clients to do data entry as well as internet-facing sites for data retrieval and processing. A couple of clients are querying their in-house MySQL database for mail merge, form fill-in and analysis. I’ve used the MyODBC driver available from the MySQL AB web site. They offer a number of connectors, including ODBC, JDBC, a C interface. I was surprised to see they did not offer an OLEDB interface. In a recent conversation on Ed Leafe’s OpenTech forum, Sam Thorton pointed out that an OLEDB provider is available at SourceForge.net. Cool! I’ll have to check it out.

Oracle, MySQL, Interbase, Firebird, Ashton-Tate and XENIX, oh my!

I’ll try to put together a more comprehensive post later, but wanted to log a series of links I want to revisit. This is a WeB Log after all:

Firebird News: MySQL to adopt Firebird Architecture
http://www.firebirdnews.org/?p=129

Database Journal: “Oracle’s purchase of InnoDB, their release of Oracle Express, and the effect on MySQL” 9 Nov 2005, By Ian Gilfillan
http://www.databasejournal.com/features/mysql/article.php/3561731

“MySQL’s response to Oracle’s moves:” http://www.greenman.co.za/b2evolution/blogs/index.php?title=mysql_s_response_to_oracle_s_moves&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

“Pressure on MySQL increases as Oracle purchases Sleepycat, with more to come” 15 Fwbruary 2006, By Ian Gilfillan
http://www.databasejournal.com/features/mysql/article.php/3585266

Slashdot’s reaction: http://it.slashdot.org/it/06/02/20/1337227.shtml

Wikipedia’s notes on Jim Starkey, InterBase, and Firebird

Exciting times.

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