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Twitter Updates for 2009-05-22

  • TGIF; last chance to get work done before the weekend! #
  • OK, now I regret not buying the toner in advance, as I’ll have to wait until tuesday or wednesday before I can print something out #
  • Cool – my BBCT (http://bit.ly/Prg8M) membership pack has arrived! Tweeple, support your local Bumblebee! #
  • New #moleskine included in the Mori Art Museum and Contemporary Art (MAMC) membership http://bit.ly/WtJl9 #
  • Constructing efficient, but complex, regular expressions seems to be so much more complicated than it should be #
  • @Gemmaboyle They’re after you – run!!! :)) in reply to Gemmaboyle #
  • US credit card reform reaches the UK press http://bit.ly/Qo99h we need something similar here now #
  • Time for the lunchtime exercise regime… #
  • Cool – the new EA Active for Wii just arrived http://bit.ly/pd5bn – not sure about the ‘UGLY’ product code though #
  • Now I’m intrigued – the EA Active Personal Trainer manual includes EA’s cheat code number; should I be allowed to cheat on exercise? #
  • OK, #eaactive gets 10/10 for effort required, result score will have to wait 🙂 #
  • @riley_easports Aha – I shall use the correct hashtag in future! in reply to riley_easports #
  • OK, I think I’ve finally cooled down from the first #EASActive workout; at 20 minutes it was tougher than Wii fit #
  • #EASActive likes: having a nice sequence of exercises to work through (instead of constant selection), music, voiceover #
  • #EASActive dislikes: would like a simpler way to skip an exercise – er, that’s it :)) #
  • @Gemmaboyle Look into my eyes – you are getting very sleeeeeppppy…. in reply to Gemmaboyle #
  • Watching the end of Two and Half Men series 1 and about to start Series 2 #
  • @Gemmaboyle I just bought Season 1 & 2 box sets; We are having way too much fun, so I can feel a season 3 and 4 purchase coming :)) in reply to Gemmaboyle #
  • Just registered for EA Sports Active #EASActive #
  • Big brother is watching you http://bit.ly/oTkv7 #
  • Time for bed with the latest copy of Fortean Times #
  • @Gemmaboyle Ow! Cold knickers! I prefer to put mine in the airing cupboard! in reply to Gemmaboyle #
  • A good decision on tobacco companies http://bit.ly/iLFk7 #

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Twitter Updates for 2009-05-21

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Twitter Updates for 2009-05-20

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Twitter Updates for 2009-05-19

  • OK, the new Sherlock Holmes trailer is actually making me think it might be a good film #
  • Hmmm – the is just off to A&E after an accident on the bus this morning, and her phone is switched off #
  • And of course that should say ‘the wife’ #
  • @Gemmaboyle Thanks – if only the hospital would let her switch her phone on, I might find out! #
  • A watched mobile phone never rings 🙁 #
  • Good news – she’s coming home; bad news – sprained ankle, sprained elbow, bruised hand. And all within just 2 hours #
  • Off to pick up Sharon from station with walking stick and umbrella in hand! #
  • Wife home, tucked up on sofa with ice packs, cat, camomile tea, and Neighbours; thanks to all for their best wishes! #
  • @JenLant On the whole I agree with you, and I am one! in reply to JenLant #
  • @dups you must be looking forward to peace and quiet at last 🙂 #
  • Why is it every time I see a new Moleskine blog post I am tempted to buy yet more notebooks for my collection? #
  • @julesdc Now that would add an interesting dimensions to matches 🙂 #
  • Support your Bumblebees folks – new newsletter out today: http://bit.ly/Prg8M #
  • Just started watching the Summerhill series about http://bit.ly/Fpr1r, why haven’t I heard about this before? #
  • Just found Molecover (http://bit.ly/dwHSB), which might just sort out my problem of how to distinguish all my various notebooks #
  • @molecover For colors I’d love a dark green, dark blue, and a bright yellow; I’d also love to see suede 🙂 #
  • And this is why we need more research http://bit.ly/G8Pic #
  • Cool; @jeffdunham is now tweeting #
  • And a $10 voucher on Audible.com – time to go shopping 😉 #
  • RT @Gemmaboyle: UNEP will plant one tree for every twitterer who follows UNEP & You until June 5! Read more Treehugger: http://tinyurl.c … #
  • Just upped my BBCT membership to Fellow status; contribute before the bumblebees have gone! http://bit.ly/gKQov #
  • When will we get something like the credit card reform bill (http://bit.ly/79O1x ) in the UK? #
  • OK, I’m missing tweets from people through the API that I can see through the website, and follows seem to be taking ages to actually enable #
  • And now Facebook chat has stopped working for me #
  • Another £200 of our tax money wasted http://bit.ly/1fNIT #
  • @datacharmer Have a good flight! #
  • @datacharmer secured and ready to accept boarders! #
  • OK, three new Psych titles in the Audible download queue, which I will leave running while I read the latest Dilbert book; g’night all #
  • RT @amazingamanda: haha change your socks mid-way through the work day for more energy? http://bit.ly/OjSPP; it works! #
  • Finger trouble – the sock thing, it works! #
  • @edwardclarke an endless but worthy cause! in reply to edwardclarke #

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Twitter Updates for 2009-05-18

  • @joedevon How would we limit it to one commit a day with 5 team members, and thousands of pages? Commits != pages != changes 🙁 #
  • I am in the rather common position of having so many things to sort out today, I have no idea which one to do #
  • Oh damn. I thought the Little Boots album release was today, when in fact I have another 3 weeks to wait. #
  • @jenIETLoc @ sends a public message a specific twitter user (like this!); DM is a direct (private) message #
  • XBox Live – wouldn’t it be much more convenient if you gave me a link to update my CC details, instead of an empty, useless, email? #
  • @dimdim I can’t seem to reach you or even resolve your DNS – a problem you know about? #
  • @richi Want 🙂 #
  • @dimdim DNS issue seems resolved – I can reach you again now, and a meeting has been scheduled! #
  • @Indexportfolios Hi, yes, DimDim DNS is working again now in reply to Indexportfolios #
  • @JenLant You want to say something controversial – that will get you noticed 🙂 #
  • @BeateVeronica Cool post! – And you’re right, you didn’t miss anything after all 🙂 #
  • I’m glad Kathryn liked her present! Big hugs for the afternoon #
  • @rebekah_king I hope you and family are safe! #
  • @JenLant Well you see that’s just an opportunity to get a newer, better one 🙂 in reply to JenLant #
  • OK, so preparation for #communityone over #
  • @kajarno let us know how you get on, although I really struggle with MobileMe, iPhone and iCal 😉 #

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Twitter Updates for 2009-05-17

  • time for a bed without a depressing #eurovision feeling #
  • Ahhhh http://bit.ly/u3ahk #
  • Writing up the diary from the 07 Amsterdam business trip – such happy memories #
  • @sheenalisa We *all* wonder about this twitter thing, and yet stay here anyway 🙂 #
  • Trying Tweetdeck….cool interface, but I also like the new functionality in Adium 1.4… #
  • OK, so I can’t stretch the Tweetdeck window across the width of my two monitors – why can’t I open a second window? #
  • #tweetdeck is growing on me, but I need to try it on the laptop #
  • I thought Graham Norton was pretty good last night too: http://bit.ly/2bQBe #
  • @tweetdeck Can we have keyboard shortcuts for things like status updates, and switching on/off Twitter/Facebook updates? #
  • @tweetdeck and while I think about it, can the scroll keys scroll by panel, rather than just a few pixels, when going left and right? #
  • Nothing like Miss Marple on a sunday afternoon #
  • @Gemmaboyle why can’t all your tweets be faves if you like them that much? #
  • @lilyallen we all wish we were there, believe me #
  • @lilyroseallen we all wish we were there, believe me in reply to lilyroseallen #
  • OK, so I’m now trying #DestroyTwitter, it’s close, but still no candy cigar #
  • And #Skimmer keeps crashing on me, but the interface seems a little wasteful on screen real estate #
  • @datacharmer Thanks – looking at many 🙂 in reply to datacharmer #
  • OK, now I’ve looked at so many I’ve exceeded my API count #
  • I thought I’d set up my blog to post to Twitter months ago – and now I notice its not doing anything #
  • Oh, and before I forget, double cheers to #Norway on the special day and result! #
  • Grrr – now it’s posting once from coalface and the other from planet #
  • Watching #lilyroseallen Not Fair on T4 On Sunday :)) #
  • Can anybody confirm if Prince Caspian is any good – it’s just about to go into the DVD player #
  • @Gemmaboyle Isn’t it? Eurovision tired everybody out 🙂 #
  • @Gemmaboyle Well let’s face it, all that excitement after years of complete nothing #
  • @fmpwizard Thanks, I’ll investigate in reply to fmpwizard #
  • RT @adamcoomes: Repeets.com launched! It shows the latest hot and top tweets being retweeted. http://repeets.com (#repeets your thoughts) #
  • Cool, first trial of the daily recipe service from Cheffy.com is live! http://bit.ly/1814wi #
  • House of Pain and Blur before be time – lord knows when I’ll get to sleep! #

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MySQL Docs Updates and Stats

We got an interesting question on the documentation list the other day, which basically asked if we provided a service that listed changes to specific pages in the manual.

While I like the idea of such a service, the mechanics of making such a service work are very difficult. To start with, and to re-iterate something I have to explain again and again:

the MySQL documentation is rebuilt up to 10 times *every* day

We don’t have set schedules for when we release changes. We don’t bundle changes up and then produce a new reference manual on a set day of the month, or week. If I make a change to the documentation right now, there is every chance that you would see that change in the live docs at http://dev.mysql.com/doc within 3 hours, and for the PDF format, possibly even within the hour.

Yep, it happens that quickly. And that happens every day of the year – even at weekends and holidays.

It’s also worth pointing out some of the statistics of the documentation to help explain why such a system might be impractical, but not impossible.

Our current mysqldoc repo, in existence since we made the move to DocBook, has just hit revision 14955, which means over the last 3 years and 7 months, we’ve made on average 11.45 commits every single day. On some days, we make many more than that, and sometimes those changes can be minor (like a typo correction), and other times they will be a huge reorganization or rewrite.

But there-in lies the other problem with any kind of monitoring of changes – our documentation is big and complex. Any ‘page watcher’ to notify you of changes would be limited by the fact that we split the reference manual into just over 2000 different HTML pages. And of course we do that for each manual (4.1, 5.0, 5.1, 5.1-maria, 5.4, and 6.0). For those keeping score, that’s about 12,000 different HTML pages for the reference manual alone.

If you want to talk printed pages (and why not), the Letter-sized PDF manuals for the main documents in English (reference manuals, GUI docs, the MySQL version reference (15 docs) constitutes about 17,300 pages of content.

We actually create 91 different documents from our English language repository, and 234 documents across all languages in up to 14 different output types (PDF, HTML, texinfo, txt, etc).

So to return to the original question, would a page monitoring service be possible?

Probably.

Would it be useful?

I’m in two minds about this. I can see the value of having a way to see changes, but if what you want is to be able to monitor changes in behavior, then most of the time this is documented in the changelog, and we have a number of different outputs available for viewing the changelog information in more useful ways.

Other, more minor changes, and in some case major rewrites wouldn’t feature in the changelog (because they don’t relate to a change in the product we are documenting). Whether you would find such changes useful is up to you. A rewrite normally means we’ve decided to change the content to make it clearer, or we’ve re-organized the information to make it flow better. Again, it doesn’t necessarily constitute a change to the product that wouldn’t otherwise be in the changelog.

Would it be practical?

Probably not – the sheer size of our documentation would mean that just providing the data on the changes would probably double the number of pages and information, and it wouldn’t always be clear whether the change were just a typo correction or a major rewrite. And tracking the changes if we change a page ID (which we do, from time to time), would it difficult to correctly identify changes across different pages that really had the same content.

Of course, I’m open to suggestion here, and we are doing things to further improve and enhance the content, and maybe this is something we will consider. But I’m open to input on whether this is needed.

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UNIX network analysis

I have a new tutorial on analyzing networks, in terms of understanding your basic network configuration, the other machines and devices on the network, and the general topology.

From the intro:

When accessing a new UNIX system, or even understanding an existing one, a key part of the puzzle to how the system operates is the network configuration. There are many aspects of the network that you need to know and understand to correctly identify problems and prevent future problems. By using some basic tools and commands you can determine a lot about the configuration of a single system, and through this basic understanding, a good idea of the configuration of the rest of the network. With some additional tools, you can expand that knowledge to cover more systems and services within your network.

In this tutorial you will use some basic tools within the UNIX environment that can disclose information about the configuration of your system. By understanding these tools and the information they output, you will be able to gain a greater understanding of your system network configuration and how it works. You will also examine tools and solutions that can look at the wider network and gain more detailed information about your network, its potential security issues, and key points of information that will help you identify and diagnose problems when they do occur.

Read UNIX network analysis

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Solutions for tracing UNIX applications

Tracing applications are something of a passion for me, especially with the introduction of DTrace in Solaris and Mac OS X.

To support that, I have a new tutorial about the different methods available for tracing Unix applications. I tried to concentrate on tools and techniques that don’t require access to the source, like using truss and DTrace.

From the intro:

Most developers and systems administrators know what should happen in their operating system and with their applications, but sadly, this isn’t always the case. There are times when an application has failed, or is not behaving as you expect, and you need to find out more information. By using your existing knowledge of how your application should work and some basic UNIX skills, you can trace the application to find out what is causing the problem. This tutorial will teach you the basic techniques of using tracing tools to find out what your application is doing behind the scenes.

First, the tutorial looks at the distinction between debugging and tracing, and how the two solutions differ. Then it examines some specific examples of where tracing can be used to solve problems in your application. DTrace provides elements of both system tracing and debugging, and also provides you with the ability to time and benchmark applications. Finally, the tutorial shows how to trace the information being exchanged between network computers to help find problems in network applications.

Read Solutions for tracing UNIX applications

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