Happy 29th February

Today is the 29th of February, a date that only comes around once every 4 years (excluding every 4 hundred years of course which isn’t a leap year). Anyway, the tradition in this part of the world (and in many others) is that today, and only today, it is formally permissible for a woman to ask for a man’s hand in marriage.

So, if you are a (young, free and) single male, then for God sake, keep your head down!

… of course today is also Carol-Anne’s birthday (she knows who she is) 🙂

Belkin get your act together

I borrowed a Belkin USB Bluetooth adapter from a colleague this morning and unfortunately, Windows XP was unable to locate a driver for it automatically. So, off I went to the Belkin website in search of a suitable driver, which I duly located.

Apart from having to give my name before being allowed to download the driver, I also discovered that the ZIP file containing the driver I wanted was a whopping 170MB in size, when all I really wanted was a tiny 67KB worth of .ini and .sys files.

I’m a big fan of Belkin products and find them very reliable but in this instance they didn’t impress me. Surely, a smaller download file could be accommodated?

Smaller C compiler package for Solaris

Over the course of recent months, I have deployed a number of Ruby applications onto Solaris, many of which use a handful of Gem packages. Most of the Gem packages are written in Ruby but a handful are not (e.g. Mongrel, FastThreads and Hpricot) and require native compilation on the host system (part of the installation process).

In order to complete the installation of these Gem packages, you need some form of C compiler. Ordinarily, I would choose GCC, but because the Ruby binaries (and most of the other supporting software packages) I use (i.e. Solaris Coolstack) were compiled using Sun Studio, using GCC is not really an option. So, instead I have to install Sun Studio.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve nothing against the Sun Studio product per say (actually, it’s a superb product). My problem is rather that, in order to install a basic C compiler on my system, I have to download, unzip, untar and then install from a now enormous 1GB (zipped) file (as of Sun Studio 12). This is a real pain and takes a very, very long time (unzip along takes over 15 minutes due to use of Bunzip2 compression). This is all the more painful (and wasteful) when you consider that the disk space consumed by the installation of just the C compiler is a mere 200MB from this 1GB monster.

What I would like (and have requested) is a reduce-size package that contains a basic C compiler only – one that would be used purely for native compilation of the likes of Ruby Gem packages.

Here’s hoping…

Converting Mobile Audio (AMR) to MP3

If you have a mobile phone that supports audio recording, then it most probably stores the recordings in Adaptive Multi-Rate format (AMR). If you want to convert these to other formats (e.g. MP3) then I found that Mobile Media Converter by MIKSOFT works quite well. It also supports conversion of 3GPP video files to other popular formats including WMV and MPEG.

It’s available for both Windows and Linux but no sign of a version for Mac (yet).

Purging MySQL Binary Logs

If you have binary logging enabled on your MySQL server (i.e. the log-bin parameter is set in your MySQL configuration file), then you may notice a buildup of rather large files in your MySQL data directory over time (e.g. mysql-bin.000013). Generally speaking, you only need to enable this binary logging if your server is acting as a Replication Master or if you need the ability to do point in time recovery from your latest backup.

In any case, here are some useful commands for purging your binary log files:

To delete all binary logs older than 7 days:

mysql> PURGE BINARY LOGS BEFORE DATE_SUB( NOW( ), INTERVAL 7 DAY);

To purge all logs before a specific date:

mysql> PURGE MASTER LOGS BEFORE '2008-01-01 00:00:00';

To purge logs automatically (every Monday at 3am) you could use a Unix cron job:

0 3 * * mon mysql -uroot -e "PURGE BINARY LOGS BEFORE DATE_SUB( NOW( ), INTERVAL 7 DAY);"

Bear With Me

I’m in the process of updating the software that drives this blog (moving to WordPress 2.3.3) and also going through the process of adding proper tags to each post (as well as re-categorising existing articles).

Due to this, you may receive some previously published posts again.

100 Ways to say I Love You

Thanks to Michele Neylon’s post on how to say I Love You in over 100 different languages (110 to be precise), you now have no excuse for not being able to find the right words to tell that someone special how much they mean to you this Valentine’s Day.

If you time it right, you might even get through them all over dinner … just before she falls asleep into her dessert 🙂

Have a good one!

Language Phrase
Afrikaans Ek het jou lief
Albanian Te dua
Arabic Ana behibak (to male)
Arabic Ana behibek (to female)
Armenian Yes kez sirumen
Bambara M’bi fe
Bangla Aamee tuma ke bhalo baashi
Belarusian Ya tabe kahayu
Bisaya Nahigugma ako kanimo
Bulgarian Obicham te
Cambodian Bung Srorlagn Oun (to female), Oun Srorlagn Bung (to male)
Cantonese/Chinese Ngo oiy ney a
Catalan T’estimo
Cheyenne Ne mohotatse
Chichewa Ndimakukonda
Corsican Ti tengu caru (to male)
Creol Mi aime jou
Croatian Volim te
Czech Miluji te
Danish Jeg Elsker Dig
Dutch Ik hou van jou
English I love you
Esperanto Mi amas vin
Estonian Ma armastan sind
Ethiopian Ewedishalehu (to female), Ewedihalehu (to male).
Faroese Eg elski teg
Farsi Doset daram
Filipino Mahal kita
Finnish Mina rakastan sinua
French Je t’aime, Je t’adore
Gaelic Ta gra agam ort
Georgian Mikvarhar
German Ich liebe dich
Greek S’agapo
Gujarati Hu tumney prem karu chu
Hiligaynon Palangga ko ikaw
Hawaiian Aloha wau ia oi
Hebrew Ani ohev otah (to female)
Hebrew Ani ohev et otha (to male)
Hiligaynon Guina higugma ko ikaw
Hindi Hum Tumhe Pyar Karte hai
Hmong Kuv hlub koj
Hopi Nu’ umi unangwa’ta
Hungarian Szeretlek
Icelandic Eg elska tig
Ilonggo Palangga ko ikaw
Indonesian Saya cinta padamu
Inuit Negligevapse
Irish Taim i’ ngra leat
Italian Ti amo
Japanese Aishiteru
Kannada Naa ninna preetisuve
Kapampangan Kaluguran daka
Kiswahili Nakupenda
Konkani Tu magel moga cho
Korean Sarang Heyo
Latin Te amo
Latvian Es tevi miilu
Lebanese Bahibak
Lithuanian Tave myliu
Macedonian Te Sakam
Malay Saya cintakan mu / Aku cinta padamu
Malayalam Njan Ninne Premikunnu
Maltese Inhobbok
Mandarin Chinese Wo ai ni
Marathi Me tula prem karto
Mohawk Kanbhik
Moroccan Ana moajaba bik
Nahuatl Ni mits neki
Navaho Ayor anosh’ni
Nepali Ma Timilai Maya Garchhu
Norwegian Jeg Elsker Deg
Pandacan Syota na kita!!
Pangasinan Inaru Taka
Papiamento Mi ta stimabo
Persian Doo-set daaram
Pig Latin Iay ovlay ouyay
Polish Kocham Cie
Portuguese Eu te amo
Romanian Te ubesc
Russian Ya tebya liubliu
Rwanda Ndagukunda
Scot Gaelic Tha gra\dh agam ort
Serbian Volim te
Setswana Ke a go rata
Sindhi Maa tokhe pyar kendo ahyan
Sioux Techihhila
Slovak Lu`bim ta
Slovenian Ljubim te
Spanish Te quiero / Te amo
Surinam Mi lobi joe
Swahili Ninapenda wewe
Swedish Jag alskar dig
Swiss-German Ich lieb Di
Tajik Man turo Dust Doram
Tagalog Mahal kita
Taiwanese Wa ga ei li
Tahitian Ua Here Vau Ia Oe
Tamil Naan unnai kathalikiraen
Telugu Nenu ninnu premistunnanu
Thai Chan rak khun (to male)
Thai Phom rak khun (to female)
Turkish Seni Seviyorum
Ukrainian Ya tebe kahayu
Urdu mai aap say pyaar karta hoo
Vietnamese Anh ye^u em (to female)
Vietnamese Em ye^u anh (to male)
Welsh ‘Rwy’n dy garu
Yiddish Ikh hob dikh
Yoruba Mo ni fe
Zimbabwe Ndinokuda

Source: Michele Neylon :: Pensieri

Martello Gets a Makeover

I finally got around to giving my site a new and more modern look and feel. As well as the new Glossy Blue theme, I’ve also added a few useful widgets to the sidebar, including a Tag Cloud which shows the more popular categories (or tags) from the site.

If you have any comments, good or bad, please don’t keep them to yourself.

World’s Longest Domain Name

On a recent visit to Wales, Joe Cashin took a great photograph of a Volvo Car Sales showroom in the town with the longest name in Britain

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch

Whilst I had heard of this town before, I did not realise that it holds the record for the longest Internet domain name in the world, which is:

http://www.llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogochuchaf.co.uk

Upon visiting this site I learned that the longest domain name supported by the Internet (excluding the suffix) is 63 characters and amazingly the above domain name has exactly this many letters. However, if you look closely you will see that the domain name above actually contains and additional 5 letters (uchaf). This is because the domain represents the upper/older part of the village and “uchaf” is the Welsh for “higher” or “upper”.

It’s just a shame that they didn’t put a little more effort into the website.