WordPress Shouldn’t Use nofollow
In my random wandering across the internet today, I discovered that, by default, WordPress adds the rel="nofollow" attribute to links in comments. Now, we all know the original purpose of nofollow, to try and discourage comment spam. This isn’t really relevant to Wordpress anymore, though. Akismet has been supported in WordPress for quite some time. Indeed, I noticed that 2.7 comes with it installed by default. I can attest to the quality of the Akismet plugin: out of thousands of spam comments, it has let exactly one through, and I’ve had one false positive.
To that end, I strongly recommend all Wordpress users install Akismet, and the DoFollow plugin. All it does is disable the nofollow attribute on external links in the comments. With the help of Akismet, you can safely do this without providing assistance to spammers.
And to everyone who has contributed to my blog in the past, my apologies for giving you your proper due. That has now been remedied.
Open Database Alliance = Awesome
The big news coming from the MySQL Community today is that Monty Widenius and Percona have founded the Open Database Alliance, a group focused on ”unifing all MySQL-related development and services, providing a solution to the fragmentation and uncertainty facing the communities, businesses and technical experts involved with MySQL”.
I, for one, am 100% behind this. I’ve always been a big fan of community foundations being a focus point for development efforts, they work well to bring everyone together, and to provide a sensible foundation to help avoid much of the uncertainty that seems to spring up around MySQL. I certainly hope that the ODA is able to do the same.
Though I do have one question, how does the ODA plan on handling competing members? If you have two companies offering the same service in the same market, which one will the ODA recommend? Monty specifically says that “all companies that are joining the Alliance should bring something to the table”, but it’s a bit difficult to bring something new when there are already several large players in the MySQL market.
I shall certainly be watching the progress of this alliance with great interest, it has the potential to turn the MySQL Community into a large driving force for development and change.
The press release is available here, Monty has written some interesting thoughts about it here.
Don’t Forget to Alter your Federated Tables!
If you’re using the Federated engine, here’s something important to remember (apart from the usual advice of “please don’t”). If you need to change the structure of the remote table, always remember to update the Federated table. If not, when you try to use the table, you’ll get this error:
mysql> SELECT * FROM foo; ERROR 1030 (HY000): Got error 1 from storage engine
This error isn’t really helpful. The problem is, the Federated engine only checks that the remote table structure is correct when it initially connects. Once it has connected, no more checks. When you restart the server, you get a much more helpful message:
mysql SELECT * FROM foo; ERROR 1431 (HY000): The foreign data source you are trying to reference does not exist. Data source error: error: 1054 'Unknown column 'b' in 'field list''
Also, keep your eye on the FederatedX project. It’s still under development, but will hopefully upgrade the Federated engine to being useful again.
MySQL is People!
I went skydiving yesterday. Here’s a short video of me voluntarily leaving an airborne and perfectly sound aeroplane:
What does this have to do with MySQL? Well, over the past few weeks there have been a bunch of conspiracy theories bouncing around. There are various topics, but the two favourite at the moment happen to be Oracle’s plans for MySQL, and the licensing of the MySQL documentation. There has been a long history of conspiracies surrounding MySQL, from Oracle’s original purchase of InnoDB, to our decision to create the Enterprise edition of the server, through to our long and bumpy release cycle.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not making any calls to stifle discussion, I’m a big fan of community input. I was a member of the community before I joined MySQL, and I like to think that I still am. But I would like it if we could at least think about conspiracy theories before posting about them. We’re all people here at MySQL, we have evenings and weekends and lives just like you. Some of us are crazy enough to do silly things like jumping out of aeroplanes. We’re not out to get you, and we’re certainly not planning on turning into some sort of faceless corporate stereotype. We’re here to do what we love, creating and supporting a really good product.
Oh, and how do you know this isn’t some corporate play to make us seem human? Well, it’s 9:30pm on a Sunday night here, I’m yet to find a company who could pay me well enough to be shilling for them. But MySQL happens to be a group of people I like enough to defend them on my own time.
MySQL Workbench: My Impressions
I’ve been using the MySQL Workbench 5.1 beta for the past few days now, and I’m wondering how I designed databases without it.
Okay, so that’s a pretty strong statement, but I’m genuinely happy with it. 5.1 has fixed my main problem with 5.0, in that the EER diagram mode was horribly slow to render, now it’s all nice and smooth. The ability to easily visualise tables and their relationships makes design very simple.
In fact, I really only have one (minor) complaint, the ability to export without foreign keys would be nice. Sometimes you just don’t want to deal with the performance hit.
That’s about it. Go and download the OSS edition for free now, have a play around. Make it your Friday afternoon experiment. I promise you’ll like it.
Extracting a Database From a mysqldump File
Restoring a single database from a full dump is pretty easy, using the mysql command line client’s --one-database option:
mysql> mysql -u root -p --one-database db_to_restore < fulldump.sql
But what if you don’t want to restore the database, you just want to extract it out of the dump file? Well, that happens to be easy as well, thanks to the magic of sed:
shell> sed -n '/^-- Current Database: `test`/,/^-- Current Database: `/p' fulldump.sql > test.sql
You just need to change “test” to be the name of the database you want extracted.
Embed YouTube videos with XHTML 1.0 Strict code
Being a bit of a web geek, I like to keep my sites running in Strict mode for whatever HTML/XHTML version I happen to be working in. So, I was saddened to discover that the Embed code that YouTube gives doesn’t pass XHTML 1.0 Strict, due to their use of the now deprecated embed tag. Happily, there’s a way to fix this. As a bonus, the code required is much nicer than the code YouTube gives you:
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" style="width:480px; height:385px;" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/p1QMoQ3jbjc">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/p1QMoQ3jbjc" />
</object>You just need to replace the two URLs with the one for your video, and set the appropriate width/height. YouTube’s defaults are 320×265, 425×344, 480×385 and 640×505.
There you have it! It’s a simple as that. And to prove it works, here’s the same code from above:
Yohosie at The Tote, with Boom Pretty
This makes the second show of Yohosie’s May residency at The Tote, and they’re rocking it.
First band up was Innerspace, with their rather loud wakeup for the neighbours. Sadly, they were a bit too loud for the small venue, I couldn’t really hear their music. Going by the recordings available on their MySpace, I would like to hear them again, but with slightly more favourable mixing. They’ll be playing next at Manchester Lane on the 7th of May.
Then came Boom Pretty. They’ve been absent from the Melbourne gig scene for a few months now, working on recording their new EP. That said, they haven’t lost any of their stage presence. With the addition of Dave on bass, and Nic taking on backing vocals, they’re producing a richer sound than we’ve previously heard.
As mentioned, Boom Pretty do have a new EP that they’ve been working on, and it’s sounding pretty good. The launch is on the 30th of May at The Evelyn, but those of you who are really keen can buy it already on iTunes.
Finally, the headline act, Yohosie. They’ve been a regular on the Melbourne scene for a year and a half now, and have earned themselves a loyal following. With quirky lyrics and an almost manic energy coming from Xani, the co-lead vocalist and electric violin virtuoso, they provide a very entertaining show.
Yohosie are also launching a pile of new material, on the 22nd of May, at The Evelyn. Keep an eye on their MySpace for more details. In the mean time, they still have three more shows at The Tote for this month’s residency. If you haven’t already been, go!
Finally, 2 shakycam videos from the gig!
Boom Pretty, performing their new single Winter Bend:
Yohosie, performing their single Train Song:
More gig pics available here.
Links
Yohosie
Boom Pretty
Innerspace
Don’t put a NULL in the IN clause in 5.1
There seems to be an optimizer problem in 5.1, if you put a NULL in the IN clause of a SELECT. For example, given the following table:
CREATE TABLE foo ( a INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, PRIMARY KEY (a) );
Compare these two EXPLAINs:
mysql> EXPLAIN * FROM foo WHERE a IN (160000, 160001, 160002)\G *************************** 1. row *************************** id: 1 select_type: SIMPLE table: foo type: range possible_keys: PRIMARY key: PRIMARY key_len: 4 ref: NULL rows: 3 Extra: Using where 1 row in set (0.06 sec) mysql> EXPLAIN SELECT * FROM foo WHERE a IN (NULL, 160000, 160001, 160002)\G *************************** 1. row *************************** id: 1 select_type: SIMPLE table: foo type: ALL possible_keys: PRIMARY key: NULL key_len: NULL ref: NULL rows: 327680 Extra: Using where 1 row in set (0.00 sec)
In the query with the NULL, it does a full table scan. So, if you’ve run into this problem under MySQL 5.1, the workaround is to remove the NULL. This doesn’t affect MySQL 4.x or 5.0.
You can also follow along with Bug #33139.
V Festival
While not as popular as its bigger cousin Big Day Out, V Festival always manages to sign on the big names, this year being no exception. While the day didn’t start out spectacularly (it seems one of the promoters forgot to pass the door list I was on over to Ticketek), the show itself went off with nary a hitch.
The day started with the winner of the Garage2V competition, Villains of Wilhelm. They proved themselves quite the entertainers, the lead singer winning over the small crowd quickly with his forays off the stage and down to the audience. Their music rocked, I shall certainly be keeping an eye out for them in the future.
Unfortunately, the next couple of acts weren’t so great. Tame Impala spent more time guitar soloing than singing. This is okay if you’re John Butler or Slash, but it doesn’t work so well on a crowd that doesn’t know your music. Duffy was small. And squeaky. She reminded me of the character Annabeth Schott, from The West Wing. She did have one cute gimmick, her backing singers were identical twins.
Fortunately, we had Louis XIV to move onto. They rocked the main stage with great success, the crowd were certainly into it.
Next up, Elbow. Unfortunately, I only managed to see half of their set, but what I saw convinced me that I need to see them again.
Elbow were interrupted to see The Temper Trap. If you’re after an up and coming Australian band to keep an eye on, these 4 guys from Melbourne are it. Their previous single Sweet Disposition got a fair bit of airplay on alternative stations last year (and sent the crowd off), and their new single Science of Fear is sounding good, too.
As it turns out, Vanilla Ice was quite popular. I had the good fortune to not see him, but not for lack of trying on the part of the rest of the crowd. He was on immediately after The Temper Trap, a lot of people wanted to see him, and it seems the Wisdom of Crowds doesn’t extend to the Laws of Physics. Two solid bodies cannot pass through each other, no matter how hard they push in opposite directions. Luckily, I did manage to escape, though I’m not sure which is worse: that people still like Vanilla Ice, or that they might like him ironically.
I don’t know what sort of unholy fire it is that keeps Madness rocking, but rock they did. One of the driving forces between Ska’s second wave, they still have what it takes today. A combination of talented musicians (who doesn’t love a rockin’ brass section?) and brilliant stage showmanship easily made Madness the non-headline performance of the day.
Speaking of, we come to the first of the two headlines I got to see, Kaiser Chiefs. There’s no doubt that we were watching Kaiser Chiefs. Definitely Kaiser Chiefs. Frontman, Ricky Wilson, took the opportunity to remind us at just about every possible moment. And to buy their new album. Did you know they have a new album out? Everyone should buy their new album, even if they already have it. Lame banter aside, they put on a brilliant performance, with Ricky stretching the boundaries of stage to include climbing nearby scaffolding in order to serenade himself on the big screen, and climbing on top of trucks parked beside the stage.
For the final act, there was no way anyone could surpass The Killers. You may be able to take the band out of Vegas, but there’s no way to take Vegas out of the band. Thank you to everyone who participated in Earth Hour last week, you successfully negated the power usage of The Killer’s light show. They were definitely a class above the rest of the acts, with an impressive light and pyrotechnic show. Sadly, their popularity meant I had to miss out on Snow Patrol in order to get a good spot, whom I’m reliably told were also very good.
Bonus: “Shakycam” video of The Killers performing Read My Mind.
Interestingly, V Festival didn’t sell out, making it about the only major festival in the country that doesn’t. It has some stiff competition from Big Day Out, I suspect that people just don’t see it as great value for money. To compare, BDO cost $130, V cost $140. BDO went from 11am-11pm, V went from 1pm-10pm. BDO has 6 stages, V has 4. While I still found it to be great value, it just isn’t able to compete with Big Day Out at this point in time. But, I’m all for more festivals, so I’m happy to encourage them to keep bringing out big name bands.
More V Festival pics available here.
Links
Villains of Wilhelm
Tame Impala
Duffy
Louis XIV
Elbow
The Temper Trap
Madness
Kaiser Chiefs
The Killers
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Gary Pendergast, noun: Gamer, developer, MySQL, WordPress, web and music geek. Currently taking a leave of absence from life as a MySQL Support Engineer for Oracle to tour around Europe. Can be observed in his natural habit at pento.net, or usually in Bologna, Italy.
