News & Events

MySQL replication is fairly easy to set up, but in the real world many obstacles can get in the way of keeping it up and running smoothly. One problem that seems to bog down a lot of DBAs is the slaves getting out of sync with the master. If you're lucky you would be alerted with an error in your slave log file, and can then track down that problem. But sometimes it drifts out of sync silently.

AP - If you can't wait until the end of the month to hear Bruce Springsteen's new CD, just tune into NPR's music Web site just before midnight Monday.

Launched Penlets.com, for Pulse Pen Users

What do you think "great software" means?

Retrieve the favorite icon of any URL with a simple google hack.

How to automagically set up a rails developing environment with applescript

Here's a great cloud computing related project for the weekend. Explore the new Amazon EC2 console and Appistry's EAF product, and possibly win a MacBook Air. Great chances of winning and you'll know if the Air is yours on Monday!

Happy Friday to everyone, and welcome back to another Friday Q&A. This week I'll be taking Eren Halici's suggestion to discuss the various ways to do interprocess communication on OS X.

A simple example of using GWT to communicate with the server. Good tutorial for new GWT developers.

jGrowl is a jQuery plugin that raises unobtrusive messages within the browser, similar to the way that OS X's Growl Framework works.

A recent article in The Independent describes a fascinating study. Researchers found that forcing surgeons in a London hospital to implement a single new procedure caused the death rate after surgery to fall 47 percent. Complications likewise fell by 36 percent.

While there may be some confusion over the meaning of self-management in Agile, not to mention some contention as to whether or not it is a good idea, many of the Agile practices contribute to self-management without requiring the wholesale adoption of self-management. For simplicity, I will define “self-management” as anything that is done by a team member that would traditionally be done by a manager. The practices contribute to self-management either by reducing the amount of management required or by encouraging the delegation of management tasks to team members. Some practices do both. As a result, managers have more bandwidth for dealing with things which are a more leveraged use of their time.

The assertion of this post is that code comments are a smell. Creating obvious, readable code is more maintainable that unreadable code that is heavily commented.

So, time to release some code - this time it’s small library (one file) I wrote to do database migrations in python, it’s meant to be lightweight and pragmatic and thus does not use a custom format to describe the schema but normal SQL (which I think we’re all way to afraid of, SQL is an awesome tool) with the ability to create “macros” and “constants” (which basically are the same as macros and constants in the C++ preprocessor).