I was facing an issue today: the old G4 Mac that I own has Photoshop on it. The new mac I use – an intel macbook pro cannot install the PPC version of Photoshop that I own. The old G4 died last week, so no using PS. I downloaded Photoshop Elements to demo it and get one image converted from a large size to a small size and then do some gradient work. PS Elements refused to install with various errors. I searched Google and came across an application called Pixelmator. It’s one of the best photo editing tools I’ve used in a long time at this price point. In fact it seems to have all of the same features and tools as my old version of Photoshop CS, and it’s only $59. I’ll continue to demo it for the 30 day trial. Great app. I highly recommend it if you don’t feel like spending hundreds on the competition.
Archive for category General
In praise of Pixelmator
Mar 21
Congrats to Pythian
Oct 31
Being DBAs and system engineers doesn’t make us immune to the needs of proper design and content display. That said, I was just looking at the Pythian site (http://www.pythian.com) and noticed that they have a new theme for their website. It’s quite a change in style and usability. The color choices, the clean lines, and the no-nonsense layout focuses on content instead of fluff and silly design items (like their previous music sheet logo and conflicting color pallet). So, congratulations to Pythian! I can now read their news and articles with the comfort of quality design surrounding their quality content.
Google has failed
Oct 31
Wow. Two days in a row now. I never thought I’d see the day when all of the following just plain don’t work. At first it was once every four page loads, the two, now nothing works at all. Tried from several computers at home and have also confirmed from several others on the internet. Some users have noticed that mobile devices work but not their usual computers. This is very odd. It also reminds me that I don’t like using Yahoo or other provider’s search engines.
Bust apps
- Gmail webmail
- Google search
- Google Adwords
- Gmail IMAP and POP services
- Basically anything else Google related
Speeding up webapps
Jul 5
Some quick notes on useful apps for speeding up webapps. I’ve been working on one application that was suffering some performance issues and needed immediate help. So, with a combination of the following three apps and some hours of configuration tuning, I have the page loads down from 10 seconds to 2 seconds. Not too bad. Still more tuning to go of course.
PHP Acceleration: http://eaccelerator.net
Memcached http://www.danga.com/memcached
XtraDB http://www.percona.com/docs/wiki/percona-xtradb:start
JFS and RHEL5
Jul 1
Quick one here; If you’re thinking to yourself “why can’t I make the MySQL data partition JFS on my RHEL5 server…” here’s a good how to: http://phaq.phunsites.net/2008/02/04/enabling-reiserfs-xfs-jfs-on-redhat-enterprise-linux/
In praise of Ohloh
Jun 18
I have some Google Alerts setup to notify me of certain tags that are found on a daily basis. One of them of course is Kontrollbase and the alert linked me over to http://ohloh.com and their pickup of the code commits from the Google subversion code repo. After looking at some stats I can say that I’m impressed with their automation of data gathering and code inspection. I like the reports and analytics. You can see for yourself here:
https://www.ohloh.net/p/kontrollbase/analyses/latest
https://www.ohloh.net/p/kontrollbase/contributors/1404918162307859
Is this RPM 32bit or 64bit?
Jun 11
Simple question with a simple answer. Let’s say you’re on Redhat 4 or 5 and you need to know if an installed RPM is 32bit or 64bit…
shell> rpm -q --qf '%{NAME}-%{VERSION}(%{ARCH})\n' libaio
libaio-0.3.107(x86_64)
Note to Oracle on MySQL
Apr 27
Simple and short: Please do not screw things up. We like MySQL, millions of people like MySQL. Keep it alive and healthy and we’ll love you for it. That is all.
RelationalNews.com is online
Sep 10
Good news fellow DBAs; adding to the already packed list of RSS/Atom aggregation sites out there on the internet, there is a new site catering to DBAs called Relationalnews. Feel free to add your feed(s) for aggregation, because what else do bloggers want but more visibility to search engines, right? This was basically a coding project to get familiar with CodeIgnitor as well as RSS and Atom xml feed processing in PHP. Pretty simple looking back on it, and it was generally a fun project.I’ll probably add more features to the site at a later time, with free time being what it is…So read the news! http://relationalnews.com
This is a basic heads up post, perhaps even blatant self marketing. So, please continue reading. 
If anyone recalls the website http://mysql-dba.com they would know that it’s based on the planet.py codebase that is written in python. I originally wrote a simple php script that utilized the lastRSS.php class for parsing feeds on the backend for archival purposes to be used at a later date. I say archival and later date because the site itself did not utilize any of the relational data storage to run the site. The site’s python code and cache was updated by cron scripts every 15 minutes and new data was scp’d from my dev server to my webhost’s servers. This process eventually was quite randomly run since my development server rack in the garage at home gets really hot during the summer months and I ended up taking the servers offline unless I was actively using them for other purposes. You could say the priority of the site came below an overheating Sun v40z server.
Things are a changin’ now. I’ve been working with Roy Lindauer on a newly designed layout with a CodeIgnitor backend that we will be porting to phpsyndicate.com, or rather the other way around since we initially designed and planned the code+layout for the phpsyndicate site but figured we could have multiple sites using the same code but with different markets. Expect more sites with this codebase in addition to mysql-dba and phpsyndicate.
In addition to the new MVC layout, I’ve written a brand new XML RSS/Atom parser and MySQL loader for the aggregation functions. It’s been tiring to cover the differences between the various feed formats, but also a good learning experience to write it all by hand.
As such, expect to see http://mysql-dba.com totally redesigned, up and running very soon!
