Martello

You can say what you want about the Michael Jackson but for my money he was a musical genius and his death is a tragic loss to the world. I’m sure the debate about his many and varied character flaws will live on but not for anywhere near as long as his music will.

It’s a real shame that he didn’t get to perform the series of concerts he had scheduled for The O2 Arena in London. Who knows what other great music he might have written on the back of the renewed confidence he could have gained from them. I had the privilege of seeing him perform in Cork, Ireland in 1988 and to this day, I’ve yet to see anything quite like it.

On a related note, you can look at a collection of his finest work on the excellent MUZU TV.

Some clever one-liners that print a neatly organised version of your MySQL configuration file without all the comments:

Perl
$ perl -ne 'm/^([^#][^\s=]+)\s*(=.*|)/ && printf("%-35s%s\n", $1, $2)' /etc/my.cnf

Awk
$ awk '! /^#/ && ! /^$/ {if($1 ~ /^\[/ ){gsub("\[","\n[",$1) };printf("%-35s%s %s\n",$1, $2, $3)}' /etc/my.cnf

Grep
$ egrep -v '^$|^#' /etc/my.cnf

Source: MySQL Performance Blog

The wisdom and practicality of ISPs offering “unlimited” bandwidth in a fixed price plan has come under scrutiny again as British Telecom are beginning to feel the pinch as the popularity of BBC’s iPlayer continues to grow.

The most popular (and cheapest) broadband products offered by ISPs are usually limited in the amount of downloads that can occur, and this has been traditionally to prevent en mass downloading of illegal games and videos.

However, now that more and more TV channels are making content available legally (RTÉ Player being the most recent), the ISPs are finding it tough going to provide networks that can keep up with growing usage of such legal services.

Some of the BBC executives have suggested that the ISPs just didn’t see this coming and are themselves to blame for not planning for it. This is an arguable point alright and it will be interesting to see if they learn from this experience and prepare better for the adoption of full blown IPTV.

Source: SlashDot

I recently created an account on the Flickr photography website for a friend and uploaded a couple of their pictures (3 to be precise) to get them started. I tagged each picture appropriately but found that they were not coming through on the RSS feed for that tag (something which I use Flickr for quite extensively).

After some searching, I found out (via a Flickr Forum Article) that:

1. All new Flickr accounts must be reviewed before being accessible via the Flickr RSS feeds
2. In order for a new account to be reviewed, you must have uploaded at least 5 public photos.

Since I had only uploaded 3 photos initially, this looks like the chief suspect for the behaviour that I’m seeing. I’ve uploaded some more now so will post back if/when the issue is resolved.