While working on a recent support issue as a Percona Support Engineer, I got one question from a customer asking how to monitor ALTER TABLE progress. Actually, for MySQL 5.5 and prior versions, it’s quite difficult to ALTER the table in a running…
The latest news from Google on open source releases, major projects, events, and student outreach programs.
I sometimes describe OSTree as being even more rigorous than traditional dpkg/rpm type package systems. Now, there are some of you out there who probably can’t imagine how that’s possible. You found packaging so tedious and painful that you gave up, and…
szczys writes "Gregory Charvat has been playing with and teaching others about entry-level radar concepts for a long time. Now he's sat down and explained how you can do it yourself inexpensively. He says, 'One enabling technology for Radar was the…
In my previous post I pointed out that the existing ARCHIVE storage engine in MySQL may not be the one that will satisfy your needs when it comes to effectively storing large and/or old data. But are there any good alternatives? As the primary purpose of…
tl;dr 36 For some time now, I've been running an experiment where I analyze how many different domains any website depends on. For example, you might have Google Analytics on your site (that's www.google-analytics.com) and you might have a Facebook Like…
When starting to work on a new project I start from an empty git repository right away so I can try out different ideas, revert easily, can diff against old versions (to check if I missed something) and have a commit history to record fixmes and todos.…
January 22 I gave a presentation on “How to Avoid Common (but Deadly) MySQL Operations Mistakes” for Percona MySQL Webinars. If you missed it, you can still register to view the recording and my slides. Thanks to everyone who attended, and especially to…
I came across this by pure accident but did you know that all of your iOS Keyboard Shortcuts that you create are then stored to iCloud Keychain and can be used in OS X 10.9? I was in iMessage when I accidentally typed "eag" which is a shortcut I have…
This site is now 100% read-only, and retired. Posted by Steve on Mon 10 Feb 2014 at 09:07 Prosody is a Lua-powered chat-server, which has been around for a few years now. Prosody is very straight-forward to install and configure, and the reliability…
Printopia is a great tool for exposing non-Air Print printers on a local network so that you can print to them from any iOS device. But even better is that it can expose <emany PDF Workflow to do your bidding. In my case, I wanted to do n-up printing (n…
We just published results with improvements in Thread Pool in Percona Server: Percona Server: Thread Pool Improvements for Transactional Workloads Percona Server: Improve Scalability with Thread Pool What I am happy to see is that Percona Server is able to…
This is the first in a series of posts highlighting a few of the seldom-used but still handy Percona Toolkit tools. Have you ever had a problem understanding the EXPLAIN statement output? And are you the type of person who would rather use the command line…
When we are hired for a MySQL performance audit, we are expected to review the MySQL configuration and to suggest improvements. Many people are surprised because in most cases, we only suggest to change a few settings even though hundreds of options are…
The other day I was working on an issue where one of the slaves was showing unexpected lag. Interestingly with only the IO thread running the slave was doing significantly more IO as compared to the rate at which the IO thread was fetching the binary log…
I recently had a problem with one of my mail accounts (and before you ask, no, it wasn’t Gmail under Mavericks). The issue was that the account, which is provided by Dreamhost, is located on a mail server named one thing (mail.doombot.com), but is secured…
Often during the holidays people begin to think about updating their home, their furniture, or just rearranging. MyFourWalls (U.S. $29.99) for Mac may be just the ticket to help you visualize those changes. The app contains some intuitive tools to set your…
Developer Saied Ghaffari and his company It's About Time have been busy digging through the details of OS X Mavericks to find a bunch of tips and tricks for the new Mac operating system. In the new iBook 90 OS X Mavericks and Legacy Tips, Tricks & Secrets…
It's always fun to find out what all the new hidden features that an operating system upgrade provides, and OS X Mavericks is chock-full of goodies. The folks over at Lifehacker put together a quick video that shows off a number of features that you may…
[Editor's note: This article is part of our series of articles on installing and upgrading to Mavericks.] [Note: We’ve updated this article with a third—and faster—method (using the createinstallmedia command in Terminal) now that we’ve had a chance to…
In a piece called Objectively Stylish, the New York Times announced that it has codified Objective-C-style conventions and posted a style guide to GitHub. They write, "The iOS team has been working on our style guide for over a year and we finally decided…
Since I’m always interested in hearing what other teams use to work together and ship their software, I figure I should list what we use to work together on Vesper. MERCURIAL To swim with the current these days is to use git. But I like Mercurial better —…
On Friday I gave a presentation on “MySQL Query Patterns, Optimized” for Percona MySQL Webinars. If you missed it, you can still register to view the recording and my slides. Thanks to everyone who attended, and especially to folks who asked the great…
Copyright © 2019 - K Harrison Privacy and Cookies Terms of Use, To finish up this recent series of posts on state preservation and restoration I wanted to deal with the situation where you want to prevent previously saved state data from being restored.…
There are many times that you want to write background processes and queue up the tasks so that they can be handled in sequential order. There are any number of queues available for software developers, and one that I’ve really taken a liking to is…
A site-specific browser (SSB) is a great way to "package" a web app you use every day into a dockable, clickable app that maintains its own cookies, settings and preferences versus your everyday web browser config. On the Mac, the easiest way to make an…
Back in ancient times—throughout much of the 1980s and 1990s when just 1000 or so fonts were available for desktop computers—designers had a tongue-in-cheek saying among themselves: The one who dies with the most fonts wins! It made sense at the time…
On May 19, 2001, the first two Apple retail store opened up for business. One was located in McLean, Va., while the other was situated in Glendale, Calif. At the time, there were no shortage of critics who expressed serious doubt as to Apple's effort to…
Have a need to attach more monitors to your USB 3.0-equipped Mac, but don't want to use a Thunderbolt, Mini DisplayPort, or HDMI port? Kensington may have just the thing for you -- the Universal Multi-Display Adapter (US$79.99 MSRP), AKA the USB 3.0…
Apple is making headlines with rumors of a record-sized bond sale. According to reports, Cupertino is likely taking advantage of historically dirt-cheap interest rates on corporate debt by raising about $17 billion from a series of six types of bond…
Swapping has always been something bad for MySQL performance but it is even more important for HA systems. It is so important to avoid swapping with HA that NDB cluster basically forbids calling malloc after the startup phase and hence its rather complex…
Panic's new iPad app Status Board is great for keeping track of your email, tweets and the weather. We liked it a lot. Status Board comes ready to use, but its highly customizable nature is proving to be one of the app's greatest strengths. Here are five…
If your widescreen ambitions can't be contained by a mere 1920x1080 HD screenscape, the fine folks at Matrox have a solution for you. The DualHead2Go Digital Mac Edition display adapter, priced around US$160, is built and marketed specifically for the…
There are so many incredible things you can do with a Raspberry Pi. You could build a robot. Invent a new kind of musical instrument. Or send the tiny computer nearly into outer space on a picture-taking balloon adventure. Sadly, I have no idea how to do…
Some Xcode challenges seem to crop up repeatedly. Today, I thought I'd share a few solutions that you might find helpful to integrate into your workflow. Challenge: When you move an Xcode project to a new folder, all your file references die. Solution:…
Copyright © 2019 - K Harrison Privacy and Cookies Terms of Use, Sharing this bug report (rdar://13438788 duplicate of #12156999) for anybody attempting to get iOS 6 state preservation and restoration working for a table view embedded in a navigation…
Amazon has introduced file syncing to its Cloud Drive app for OS X, which essentially makes Cloud Drive Amazon's version of Dropbox. Mac users can install the app on OS X 10.6, OS X 10.7 or OS X 10.8, and drag files in and out of the Cloud Drive folder.…
The latest news from Google on open source releases, major projects, events, and student outreach programs.
Shortly after the first 50 episodes of the Macworld Podcast, I was tasked with producing (though hosting just every other week) these weekly spoken-audio efforts. While I have made adjustments to some of the tools I use, my workflow has changed very…
Apple is beefing up the security of its Apple ID by adding two-factor authentication to the account login process. Customers concerned about unauthorized access to their Apple ID can login to their account at Apple's My Apple ID webpage and turn on the…
wiredmikey writes "Google on Tuesday announced that it now fully supports DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) validation on its Google Public DNS resolvers. Previously, the search giant accepted and forwarded DNSSEC-formatted messages but…
Help you and your team benefit from new perspectives on cutting-edge quality engineering techniques and tools through the Qafoo team weblog. Download our free e-book "Crafting Quality Software" with a selection of the finest blog posts as PDF or EPub. …
This post is followup to Peter’s recent post, “Investigating MySQL Replication Latency in Percona XtraDB Cluster,” in which a question was raised as to whether we can measure latency to all nodes at the same time. It is an interesting question: If we have…
A few years ago, xkcd created a crowd-sourced color survey to collected real-world hue descriptions. You'll find the hilarious results here. I've been working on updating my UIColor utilities as part of building a color-sampling app. Stumbling across this…
Andy Ihnatko kicked off a multi-part series for TechHive that talks about why he has switched from the iPhone 4S to the Galaxy S III. It wasn't a trivial move as he gave up an unlimited data plan, grandfathered from his first-generation iPhone purchase, in…
I recorded some videos for Azure Mobile Services. Mobile Services is a relatively new component of Azure — a high-level component. The idea is to make it easy to put together back-end services for your iOS app. It has a Cocoa SDK on GitHub. You write…
Copyright © 2019 - K Harrison Privacy and Cookies Terms of Use, Xcode 4.6 introduced a number of additional compiler warnings that are enabled by default for new projects. Unfortunately the release notes are none too clear about the new options: LLVM:…
Most of us have evolved our own way of managing files. Some are obsessive about folders and folder hierarchies. Others are more free-form, relying on search to find the files we need. There’s a new free document-management tool for the Mac, called Doo,…
Warning: command line geekiness ahead. When writing shell scripts, I often send interactive output to the user via echo to give feedback or information. But if the shell script is called on a schedule via OS X's behind-the-scenes process launcher launchd,…
On to Why adding compositing and blending to CSS is harder than it looks At Mozilla we value the Web having content that works across multiple browsers. This allows competition between browsers, which leads to better results for users of the Web. …
In this post I will describe a non-trivial way to authenticate users in Percona Sever for MySQL. Percona Server comes with PAM authentication plugin, which allows you to do a lot of cool things, such as: OS authentication, LDAP authentication, even RSA…
Mail, by default, provides a preview of attachments in can read, such as graphics and PDF files. However, you can run a command in Terminal to turn this off. Run the following:defaults write com.apple.mail DisableInlineAttachmentViewing -bool yes Quit Mail…
The very best basketball free throw shooters can sink the ball about 90 percent of the time. What would it take to get to 95 percent? WIRED's Robbie Gonzalez steps up to the foul line with top shooter Steve Nash to find out.
Steve Jobs' "One More Thing" pronouncements made for some of the most memorable and fun moments of the various Apple events he hosted over the years. Near the end of each show, he would usually pull out a "I've got one more thing to share with you"…
Hugh Pickens writes "The rules for papal elections are steeped in tradition. John Paul II last codified them in 1996, and Benedict XVI left the rules largely untouched. The 'Universi Dominici Gregis on the Vacancy of the Apostolic See and the Election of…
Copyright © 2019 - K Harrison Privacy and Cookies Terms of Use, Mobile Safari allows you to add an icon to the home screen of a device for any web page you visit using the share button. The screen shot below shows the icon that is used if you do this…
Developers in PHP have a wide array of useful tools for object oriented development. From a full visibility model to concepts like abstract classes and interfaces, the PHP developer can make use of each tool in its own way and offer up an array of…
Nerval's Lobster writes "Software developer Jeff Cogswell, who matched up Java and C# and peeked under the hood of Facebook's Graph Search, is back with a new tale: why his team decided to go with Amazon's DynamoDB over MongoDB when it came to building a…
alphadogg writes "Microsoft Azure's cloud outperformed Amazon Web Services in a series of rigorous tests conducted by Nasuni, a storage vendor that annually benchmarks cloud service providers (CSPs). Nasuni uses public cloud resources in its enterprise…
Jailbreaking—the process that enables you to install unauthorized-by-Apple third-party apps and additional features on your iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad—has been in a largely dormant state since the release of iOS 6. In that version of the mobile operating…
A lot of people, especially when starting out in PHP, ask me “what blogs should I read?” There are a lot of great PHP blogs (you can see a nearly complete list of them at Planet PHP) but there are a few that I read on a regular basis and I feel are…
Recently there was a bit of a rant on the Selenium users mailing list about how there were a few bugs irritating the person and, because they are only testers with not enough development experience, didnt feel that they could help with fixing these issues.…
I was inspired when I first saw Addy Osmani's original ShineTime blog post. The hover sheen effect is simple but awesome. When I started my blog redesign, I really wanted to use a sheen effect with my logo. Using two HTML elements and a CSS transition,…
The other day I was working on some blog posts, and when I pulled up an image in Preview to edit it, I noticed something odd. It looked like the Preview window was transparent, and that I was seeing a window through it. I thought nothing of it until a few…
Manton Reece just announced Searchpath: > It’s search for your web site or blog with an innovative “popover” UI. Simple, fast. With better control of your search results, and no need to link to Google or show ads to your readers. Sounds cool.
LinkedIn is most known for being a website that helps users get jobs, but it turns out working there is probably pretty nice as well: The CEO of the company today handed out 3,500 iPad minis, to every one of the company's employees. That's right: If you…
This post is co-written with Rob Hawkes, and as a follow-up to The WebKit culture & web rendering engine diversity. This article is also available in Chinese. We would like to, in a factual manner, break down what the possible outcomes of having a…
Celarent Darii writes "Slashdot readers have undoubtedly heard of Google Docs and the many other online word processing solutions that run in the browser. However, as a long-time user of TeX and LaTeX, these solutions are not my favorite way of doing…
Jailbreak provider FireCore announced yesterday that it has released an update to the Seas0nPass jailbreak tool and aTV Flash (black) Apple TV software. The update supports the 5.2 Apple TV software released by Apple on January 28, 2013, which is…
Mozilla teams recently wrote tons of new API in a very short period of time, mostly for Firefox OS, but not only. As Firefox Desktop, Firefox Mobile and Firefox OS are based on the same source code, some of these API can easily be enabled on Desktop and…
I blogged about ita few weeks ago: in my opinion, we're moving to an ecosystem where our web applications are built of JSON web services and of Javascript applications that use those services to fetch data and display them. In other words, server-side…
Opera, the web browser available for Mac, iOS, PC and Andriod, has reached 300 million monthly users, the company has announced in a press release. Opera Software ASA also notes that the Opera web browser will be transitioning to the WebKit engine in…
The latest news from Google on open source releases, major projects, events, and student outreach programs.
Apple recently released firmware version 7.6.3 for its line of Airport Extreme Wi-Fi base stations. Assuming the release notes are accurate, the update barely warrants a bump after the second decimal point. The update adds the ability to extend a guest…
I’m starting to type this up as EdgeConf draws to a close. I spoke on the performance panel, with Shane O’Sullivan, Rowan Beentje and Pavel Feldman, moderated by Matt Delaney, and tried to bring a platform perspective to the affair. I found the panel very…
There are plenty of awesome new attributes we've gotten during the HTML5 revolution: placeholder, download, hidden, and more. Each of these attributes provides us a different level of control over an element on the page, but there's a new element…
Being able to easily specify what to post with XMLHttpRequest is quite a powerful way of sending things to the server, using key/value pairs and FormData. However, many seem to have missed this gem, so I thought I’d outline it here. The general approach…
To say that I love Github would be a bit of an understatement. I more than recommend it when describing code review processes. At Mozilla, the web development team uses Github for our code reviews, since line notes and pull requests work perfectly with our…
Want to know one of the secrets why Firefox OS is so incredibly awesome? If you've created your website correctly, i.e. using CSS media queries (responsive design) and JavaScript feature detection, you can simply add an app.manifest file at the root of…
Most people doing websites from time to time should already know the wonderful CSS Framework Bootstrap by now. Neverland, the theme project we use on a lot of KDE sites these days is also based on it, and i really like it a lot. It makes use of Less CSS,…
An ode to my OS X development workstation setup [1] I am big on setting up my development environment, and enjoying the environment I work in. And I'm very thankful to the folks who make my life easier, including the authors of: * Python: Python Core…
If you develop with Node.js and you want to be sure to have the latest stable version, luckly there is a PPA for it. All you need is to follow these instructions: sudo apt-get install python-software-properties python g++ make sudo add-apt-repository…
Years ago, when Jane and I launched our consulting business elektronauten, we came across an Australia based business which was essentially taking a similar approach to building companies as we did: Pollenizer. I have no idea how we found them or how I…
The MOApp weblog: > It may work most of the time. Until it doesn’t. Without any chance to understand why. Your users will blame you and I don’t blame them. (Via halfliterate.) With this issue I used to just worry about my friends shipping their apps. Now…
Could CSS 3, while is a great thing for the Internet and for web developers, be making websites that are extremely hard to automate? As most of you know, in Selenium WebDriver we try an emulate what elements that a user can interact with. This means that…
Recently I've been discussing the question of "What is the Essence of Leadership" with friends. For me it boils down to: 1. Develop the vision and long-term goals (this might be done just by you or preferably with your team). 2. Put the outcome into…
One operation that seems to be more difficult than it should be in every programming language is removing a value from an array. It's such an easy concept mentally that it skews our programmatic view of the task. In JavaScript the splice method is of…
On Friday, February 15, 2013 10:00am Pacific Standard Time, I will be delivering a webinar entitled “Building a highly scaleable distributed row, document or column store with MySQL and Shard-Query” The first part of this webinar will focus on why…
Too many developers struggle with their object oriented programming skills. Concepts like abstraction, single responsibility principle, unit testing, refactoring, architecture and SOLID seem out of reach. You wonder how you can grasp the concepts. You buy…
I no longer work on Glassboard, and don’t get any benefit at all if you use it. So I feel totally comfortable telling you that I use it all the time. I do. I have a few projects going with other people. Some are software projects and some aren’t. Here’s…
Recently some of my fellow Perconians and I have noticed a bit of an uptick in customer cases featuring the following error message: The canonical solution to this issue, if you do a bit of Googling, is to increase the number of processes / threads…
For Retina display MacBook Pro owners, the Henge Horizontal Dock will be the best investment you can make in your system beyond the computer itself, especially if you utilize multiple displays. Originally unveiled at CES, the US$249 system nabbed a Best…
Remember mincss from a couple of days ago? Now it supports downloading the HTML, to analyze, using PhantomJS. That's pretty exciting because PhantomJS actually supports Javascript. It's a headless (a web browser without a graphical user interface) Webkit…
The very best basketball free throw shooters can sink the ball about 90 percent of the time. What would it take to get to 95 percent? WIRED's Robbie Gonzalez steps up to the foul line with top shooter Steve Nash to find out.
Mark Bernstein: How Software Is Built Today: > I spent about a day this week polishing a detail of Tinderbox Six. I’d like to walk you through some of the design because it’s interesting and accessible, and because I think it demonstrates why our…