From the monthly archives: May 2008

Mutable class instance variables in Python act like they’re static

By On May 29, 2008 · Leave a Comment

There’s a weird behavior in Python when dealing with Mutable types such as dictionaries, that when you modify a variable defined as a class attribute, you’re actually modifying a shared dictionary amongst all the classes. This seemed weird to me. You can read the lovely discussion about it, if you want. Or, just follow [...]

Continue Reading →

MySQL ALTER table Progress Bar?

By On May 15, 2008 · 6 Comments

Altering a big table sucks, and to make it worse you have no idea what’s happening or how long it will take. I’d like a progress bar, or some status output, or something that gives me the feeling like my server didn’t die.

Continue Reading →

MySQL and Materialized Views

By On May 13, 2008 · 12 Comments

I was poking around the MySQL Worklog again over the weekend, and found a request for materialized views for MySQL. This feature has existed in Oracle for a while, in DB2 as a materialized query table, and appeared in MS SQL Server 2000 and 2005 as indexed views.

What is a [...]

Continue Reading →

VMWare, Losing Time, and Sessions

By On May 8, 2008 · Leave a Comment

I’ll keep it short. In the last few days, login on our dev server broke. We hadn’t changed anything related to it, and everything looked good code wise. What we finally figured out was that our session cookie was set to expire 2 days into the future, and our VMWare image had lost 2 days [...]

Continue Reading →

MySQL: Time Delayed Replication

By On May 7, 2008 · 7 Comments

I was cruising the MySQL Forge Worklog when I came across the idea of Time Delayed Replication. I had never considered the benefits of deliberately keeping a slave server behind a master.

Kristian Koehntopp gives a good example:

Kristian Koehntopp writes:

TDS: Time delayed SQL_THREAD (Have a replication slave that is always
[...]

Continue Reading →

How many lines of code?

By On May 5, 2008 · 1 Comment

I was curious how many lines of code were in PHPBB 3. I only wanted to know about the .php files.

find . -name ‘*.php’ -exec wc -l {} \; | awk ‘{ SUM += $1 } END {print SUM}’

The downside to this is that it includes whitespace and braces as lines, [...]

Continue Reading →

BBEdit + CTags = Awesome

By On May 1, 2008 · 2 Comments

I posted a complaint a while ago about BBEdit complaining about a few things. I moved onto TextMate for a few weeks, but it lacked some of the powerful BBEdit features I’ve gotten used to.

Then I discovered ctags. I set up a cron on my PHP dev site to rescan my dev folder [...]

Continue Reading →