… at least not until after you’ve watched this video. What the hell was he thinking when he made it? It’s atrocious! However, dare I admit it, it’s quite a catchy tune, especially the “Ooga chakka hooga hooga, ooga chakka” bit. Yes, those really are some of the lyrics in the song. Enjoy!
Same task as before, different database. I have been doing some development over the last few days with Rails and MySQL. To cut a long story short I wanted to have a look at what queries were being sent to the database. This post describes one way of turning on logging for MySQL. I did all of this on Mac OS X so your mileage may vary.
> su
> cd /var/log
> touch mysqld.log
> chown mysql mysqld.log
/etc/my.cnf
[mysqld]
log = /var/log/mysqld.log
If you installed the MySQL Startup Item then you can restart the server simply by running:
sudo /Library/StartupItems/MySQLCOM/MySQLCOM restartJob done!
In a previous post I mentioned that after Google’s purchase of Writely all they needed now was a spreadsheet program and something for creating presentations before we see an online competitor to Microsoft’s desktop-bound Office product. Well here’s the spreadsheet. I’m off to the bookies to put a bet on the presentation software appearing in the not-so-distant future 🙂
I have just finished reading an article about the limits of Google’s limitless business model. I got to the bottom of the first page and clicked on “Please continue reading part two”. Suddenly I was taken to a different site – there appeared to be continuity with what I had just read so I continued reading. Same thing as before: I got to the bottom of the page and clicked on “continue reading”. Bang! Different site again! At first I was confused but then at the bottom of the final page was this little snippet:
[This is an experimental publishing format, a distributed column across different web sites. The first part is here. The second part is here. The first part leads you through all three sections.]
Oh. The article really was distributed across several web sites! First of all, why? Could it be they did this so that by having different parts of the article on different websites the reader is exposed to advertisements from both sites?
My initial impression is that it doesn’t work; because it is an unfamiliar way of reading a multi-page article spread I wasn’t sure if I was actually reading the same article. The navigation is broken too. If I do a search on Google for example and I end up on page two of the article there is no way to get to page one from page two – this because there are only links to each part of the article on page one.
It will be interesting to see what other publishing formats these media companies come up with in the future. Then again, if they are anything like the distributed method I have just mentioned, maybe it won’t be that interesting after all.
Andrew Grumet makes an interesting point about using CSS in blog posts. I often find myself make style declarations inline when I want to position images etc in my blog posts. I like his idea.
On a related theme, I often see broken images when viewing RSS feeds in news readers — once upon a time I had the very same problem in my feed. The reason: relative URLs.
For example, let’s take the image of myself. If you looked at the HTML for this particular image you would see something like this: <img src=”/images/me.jpg”/>. Works fine in a browser but try it in a news reader and … broken image. To view the image in a news reader the link should be: <img src=”http://simonbuckle.com/images/me.jpg”/>; notice the inclusion of the (full) domain name. Perhaps that’s another idea for a WordPress plugin: for each blog post add the domain name to any relative URLs to avoid things like broken image links.
In summary: check how your feed looks in a news reader! Your readers will thank you or, at the very least, you won’t look like a dumbass.
For no other reason other than to fill in 5 minutes while I take a break from what I was doing, I thought I’d list the RSS feeds that are curently in my toolbar:
Right. Back to what I was doing previously.
I just logged in to Hotmail — or as Microsoft now calls it, Windows Live Mail — to check what spams I have received recently and I got this error.
Yet one more reason why I own a Mac.
Last night I attended a talk given by Jeff Barr, Amazon’s web service evangelist. He talked mostly about Amazon’s web service offerings, as you would expect from a web services evangelist, such as the Mechanical Turk, Alexa and S3, which stands for simple storage service — I had wondered what it meant.
He gave several examples of businesses that use Amazon’s web services to make money: CastingWords being the most interesting example. They transcribe podcasts but use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to get the work done. Interesting idea. Probably cheaper than outsourcing to India!
At the end of the presentation somebody in the audience asked him what proportion of web service requests were made via SOAP versus REST. Apparently 80% of Amazon’s web service requests are made using REST! I was quite surprised by this. I thought SOAP would have been used a lot more. Then again perhaps it’s not so surprising if you have ever tried to read the SOAP specification. I have mentioned this before. From a development point of view, making a request via REST is certainly much less work!
Overall the talk was interesting, especially some of the ways in which people are using Amazon’s web services. You can read more about Amazon’s web services on their blog.
Not me! This blog. It is exactly one year ago today that I made my first post on this blog.
As for what’s next, I shall continue in a similar vane posting random thoughts and ramblings about nothing in particular. Enjoy!
While doing a search on Google for the word fuckwit I was amused to find out what came top of the list. I believe this is a good example of a Google bomb.
If you are unsure what the word fuckwit means, then check out the definition.
By the way, the title of this post was something I heard Charles Barkley say on TV during an interview many many years ago. At least I am pretty sure it was him. Kind of ironic coming from a professional sportsman and profound too!
