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:
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.
Australian online magazine PC Authority have published a list of the top 10 most disappointing technologies that never changed the world. The list (in brief below) has many that I’m familiar with but some that I am not and I’d go along with much of the reasoning behind it.
10. Virtual Reality
9. Alternative search engines
8. Voice recognition
7. Apple Lisa
6. 10GB Ethernet
5. FireWire
4. Bluetooth
3. Itanium
2. Zune
1. Windows Vista
They even gave an honourable mention to Biometrics and Ubuntu, with the latter being somewhat contentious. That said, I have agree that while Ubuntu has come on a long, long way, it’s still not quite there in terms of mainstream desktop/laptop use.
The Irish national broadcaster RTÉ has launched its own TV Player allowing viewers (in Ireland) to watch programmes up to 21 days after they were broadcast. It is similar in concept to the BBC iPlayer (which was actually launched several years ago now) with the exception that it does not yet support Radio broadcasts. RTÉ have been broadcasting live TV from their website for some time now with limited availability of pre-broadcast programmes but this takes things a great deal further.
At first glance, I think it looks really well, seems pretty easy to use and plays well on my home broadband connection.
Source: RTÉ News
We use MRTG on a number of test servers and have a simple backup solution in place that uses tar to take a copy of the MRTG configuration files as well as the graph data files. However, of late we have noticed that tar has run into trouble when it coincides with a scheduled MRTG update.
In the main, one of two things happens:
by rateup are changed while tar is trying to add them to the archive, causing tar to fail with the error: file changed as we read it.Our solution to the first point was to add a --exclude=*.tmp to the tar command. However, the second issue was more interesting because it is not clear whether the .old files in question are actually something worth backing up or not.
As it turns out, they are not. Although not very well documented, our testing showed that these files are simply copies of the previous .log files and can also be excluded from the tar command without issues.
I’m delighted to see that FeedHenry (one of the start-up companies that I am heavily involved with) won an Emerging Technology Award at CTIA Wireless 2009. This is a great achievement by everyone at FeedHenry. The annoucement was also covered by Silicon Republic today.
Until recently I was of the opinion that, in Ireland, when the clocks change in Spring and Autumn to account for Daylight Savings Time, they always do so at 2am. Having never given it too much thought over the years, I was surprised to find out last weekend that the time they actually change differs depending on whether the clocks are going forward (Spring) or backward (Autumn).
In Ireland, the clocks go forward one hour at 1am (in Spring) but when they go back again in Autumn, they actually do so at 2am. You can confirm this for yourself on the Greenwich Meantime site for Ireland.
There is an important lesson in this too for administrators of the Unix operating system. Never schedule an import cron task between the hours of 1:00am and 2:00am because if you do, it will not run on the weekend when DST comes into effect and it may be run twice on the weekend where DST ends.
If you have ever installed of MySQL on a *nix system, you may have come across the mysql_secure_installation script. It takes you through a number of interactive questions/steps that help you to increase the security of your MySQL installation, and is quite a useful script.
As we have a high deree of automation in our server environment, we decided to break this script down to its raw MySQL command, and in a nut shell, here is what it actually does behind the scenes (assuming you want to answer Yes to all of the questions it asks in interactive mode):
UPDATE mysql.user SET Password=PASSWORD('XXXX') WHERE User='root';
DELETE FROM mysql.user WHERE User='';
DELETE FROM mysql.user WHERE User='root' AND Host!='localhost';
DROP DATABASE test;
DELETE FROM mysql.db WHERE Db='test' OR Db='test\\_%';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
Naturally, you should replace the XXXX in the first command with an appropriate password.
Skype have announced a new service based on the SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) that is aimed at getting more small businesses into Internet telephony. The service allows VoIP services to be created using standard PBX setups that support SIP, reducing the need for additional hardware (i.e. PC) that most current Skype users face.
One surprising downside though is that it requires you to create a new Skype ID to use it. This is a rather curious requirement in my opinion and one that is sure to puzzle many.
Source: Wired