Sam’s random musings

Tools | MySQL Performance Blog

This page contains links to various tools we found helpful to use in practice. Some tools are written by us, others by third parties, yet another ones may be shipped with your operating system you just need to find they are there.

nice little collection of reminders

EXPLAIN Cheatsheet

At the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo, The Pythian Group gave away EXPLAIN cheatsheets. They were very nice, printed in full color and laminated to ensure you can spill your coffee* on it and it will survive.

If you are thinking of hunting for some query speedups in mysql this might help (now don’t be premature

(Via Planet MySQL.)

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p>Bandwidth throttling in OS X

“Advanced OS X users know that Darwin comes with ipfw, which can be used to set up a custom firewall. This same service however can be used to also limit bandwidth on specific ports.

Not too hard but good for testing web services code and other things under bandwidth constrained environments.

(Via Mac OS X Hints.)

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p>DTerm: give your Mac a little shell love”

DTerm is a utility just released by Decimus Software Inc. It’s a Leopard-only app that provides a hotkey-triggered HUD which allows shell commands to be run from anywhere in OS X. In case you’re wondering why, just imagine what less window switching and screen clutter could mean for productivity on jobs that require both Finder and Terminal. Yes, you can do a lot with Quicksilver, but DTerm provides bash name completion with a dropdown, context sensitivity to your current path and full output with clipboard features. You can also type ⌘-↩ in the HUD to run the command in the Terminal, which will open up to your current path.

This is a very addictive application for the geekiest around you. Well not totally the geekiest, because they might not know what a ui is other then a terminal window….

(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)

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p>Bingodisk and Strongspace: What Happened?

The past 10 days have not been the best days at Joyent. Bingodisk and Strongspace went off-line 12 Saturday. Bingodisk service was restored eight days later on 19 January. Strongspace limped back into service late 21 January, nearly ten days after it went off-line. Customers of these services are rightly outraged by the outage. While Strongspace and Bingodisk represent a very small fraction of Joyent’s entire infrastructure, we understand how critical it is to many of you, and have been working and investing many, many hours to bring these services back on-line as expeditiously as possible. I apologize for the outages.

This is an important read on a couple of fronts.

• it really helps one to understand the dangers of putting all your backup plans in a single ‘cool’ technology
• that the really hard part about a problem that requires restoration from a back up is the restoration
• that this kind of transparency about a problem will probably go a long way for Joyeur.

It should be noted that I am the owner of a couple of lifetime plans with Joyeur and really like most of their services.

(Via Joyeur.)

How to Construct the Perfect Email Subject Line · The Cranking Widgets Blog

How many times have you received an email with a subject line that said something like “Question” or “FYI”? Or, worse yet, had no subject at all? For all the millions of email messages that traverse the Internet every day, the ability to effectively formulate an indicative subject message seems to be fairly unimportant to most people. A quick skim of the last 100 or so email messages you’ve received will likely support my claims.

The minimum: * Use keywords like Question, Response, FYI or he says ’spam’ why the heck would I send spam? and why would I read your email if you tell me it’s spam, I’m not some kind of Spam junkie, my sister in law is… * Briefly describe the subject * Never leave the subject blank

Now these are good, worth linking to in your .sig but really, why do people need to be told this, it is maddening, why do people not at least describe in the subject.

how do I know it bugs me… I wrote about it before http://blog.samdevore.com/archives/2007/09/16/email-subjects-welcome-to-my-pet-peeve/

(Via Sandy’s Blog.)

Upgrading to WordPress 2.3 Dexter:

• The WordPress Development Blog has a good article on Preparing for 2.3
  • I particularly like the list of compatible and incompatible plugins
  • I also like the idea of switching your WordPress install to use Subversion for quick and painless updates
• Blog Security has an article on 5-step Failsafe upgrade to Wordpress
  • This is slower but it is much safer (and less service affecting) to create a local copy of your remote WordPress install and use the local copy to check for the problems
• First hand advice from rawiri (I love his theme) on upgrading a live blog to 2.3

(Via Weblog Tools Collection.)

Hazel:

Hazel is a great app, works so well you don’t even know it’s running. There’s a new version on the horizon and let me tell you the beta is really good!

See http://blog.samdevore.com/archives/2007/06/26/a-kinkless-desktop/ for more insight into what it can do for you

(Via Noodlings.)