Its been a long time since I updated this blog and I thought I’d better put something up before people think I’m dead.

My issue with this blog is so; I post my technical knowledge now at Fliquid Studios and my Green / Eco / Sustainability at Sustain Myself so I don’t really know what to write here anymore. I do have a fair bit to write about from the news or a socialist activism point of view but don’t really think many people like reading my complaints and arguments about how much better I could rule the world if I got the chance.

I recently started working at a new company after a potential business venture worked out to be too difficult for me in the current economic climate. The company I work for is fantastic and I am playing a fairly pivotal part in their moving forward in the market. My problem is that there are so many things that need to be done for this company and I simply can’t sit back and wait for others to do it because there aren’t any others. I could do nothing, but I can’t do that when I know there is work to be done. I have also put forward a helluva lot of changes that I think are necessary and that means even more work, so I am absolutely flat out during business hours and I don’t generally get online in the evenings (its the last thing I want to do). This means that its getting harder and harder for me to commit the time to a blog (or blogs). 

I have started at the Gym though and three times a week I crowbar myself away from work to spend 40mins kicking my own ass. Yesterday I burned 220cal on the bike there which I thought was cool (of course my lunch was about 1200cals but thats a story for another day).

While I am enjoying my job (for the first time in a long time) I feel less energetic about other things. I haven’t been spending much time with my fish lately and that upsets me as my fish seem to relax me and give me my own thing to concentrate on, away from everything else.

Have you ever thought that this is not where you planned to be? I had high hopes for myself, I was going to establish myself somewhere, somehow and I just haven’t managed to do it. While I have been extremely fortunate in my life, I wish I had worked harder when I was younger and had less financial commitments so that I would be able to have more behind me at this stage of my life.

I was looking at houses for sale in Tasmania today and found this. I love it. Look at the view! And its more than $100k cheaper than the house we have bought. What an awesome lifestyle change that would be. I’d have to commute to Sydney, but what’s a few hours flying everyday?

On a final note, I am more in love with my daughter every day and although she tests me so much, I think she’s my main reason for staying sane.

Over and Out.

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Ok, I know I have been neglecting this blog for a long time. Thats because most of my technical rantings have moved to Fliquid Studios. But, I needed to share one of the most ridiculous usability failures I have ever experienced.

Today I was searching for a simple tank volume calculator to work out how many US Gallons my fish tank is (179 for those interested), so I made a quick search on Google and then clicked on the second result. Well, the page loaded and then a javascript alert popped up saying “The Lightnin Tank Volume Calculator currently supports Netscape Navigator 6 and Internet Explorer 5.” which wasn’t too bad but then by clicking yes, sent me back to my Google results! So, basically they are saying that because I don’t use IE5 (released in 1999!!!) or Netscape 6 (released 2002) and that Firefox only accounts for 20% of the browsing market share, I cannot view the page. Of course, I could disable javascript but why? If they don’t want me on their site then that’s up to them, but I can’t see how they still have the 2nd spot in Google with this stupid approach to web development.

</rant>

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Recently I was trying to upgrade using Yum on my Fedora 9 machine and I got an awful message that I did not have enough space to complete the upgrade. What the hell? My / partition has a huge 10GB, how can this be so?

[root@Garth Download]# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2             9.5G  8.7G  312M  97% /
tmpfs                 722M   80K  722M   1% /dev/shm
/dev/sda4              17G   12G  4.2G  75% /home
/dev/sda1              28G   25G  3.1G  90% /mnt/Winxp

As you can see, my laptop has a 60GB hdd, so I am consistently having this argument with it.

The problem with most command line utilities is that it is difficult to see what you have installed and how much space each has. Then I remembered a little script that I used a few years back that told me what RPM’s I had installed and how big each was. Eureka! Just what I need.

So, I had a little fun, did a little search and found the beloved rpmhogs script.

Check this out;

[root@Garth Download]# perl rpmhogs.pl
  246,007,784  java-1.5.0-gcj-javadoc-1.5.0.0-21.fc9.x86_64
  246,902,300  java-1.6.0-openjdk-javadoc-1.6.0.0-0.13.b09.fc9.x86_64
  231,068,455  openoffice.org-core-2.4.1-17.4.fc9.x86_64
  114,684,216  texlive-texmf-fonts-2007-22.fc9.noarch
   91,189,935  glibc-common-2.8-3.x86_64
   87,927,623  compat-gcc-34-c++-3.4.6-9.x86_64
   84,367,402  git-1.5.5.1-1.fc9.x86_64
<snip>

How good is that? I love it. Now I need to uninstall a crap load of stuff I dont use.

And, yes, my Laptop’s name is Garth. My media PC is named Cassandra and my wifes laptop is named Wayne. Who can guess my theme?

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Well, today I found out that I am no longer required at REA Group (realestate.com.au). It doesn’t come as a surprise but it is certainly not welcome.

I have a few things in the pipeline, but the most exciting is the partnership with Michael Little in Fliquid Studios which is a web application development company.

We have a lot of applications we are working on and will plan on launching shortly. I will keep everybody up to date with what is going on.

In the meantime, I plan on just relaxing a bit. Its been a busy few years and having a month off is very attractive right now.

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Almost an hour ago (or maybe more) one of the worlds most popular blogs, mashable, posted about Google Ads for Terrorism. Basically, Googles automated ad server, which picks up on keywords and displays ads based on those words, seems to advertise a lot of bad stuff.

eBay had this problem for a long time. A Google search for ‘live slaves’ would bring up eBay ads for ‘Cheap Live Slaves!’. Fortunately, they have now been removed and the only ads for ‘Live Slaves‘ now are for women. Phew.

Anyway, so I was thinking to myself, that if one of the worlds largest, most popular blogs posts about something that is very offensive to a lot of people and being perpetrated by the worlds largest and most respected internet behemoth, they are likely to fix it quick smart, right? Wrong. The thing is, this has been happening for a while A quick search on Google reveals hundreds of thousands of results. Interestingly, the first link I clicked on that criticised Google was apparently a malware site.

I continued to the site anyway despite the multiple full page warnings. There were a bunch of great examples of this approach to automated ad campaigns;

I thought I’d try this out for myself. So I went to nytimes.com and did a search for ‘terrorism‘. Low and behold, look at the ads Google decided to give me;

Surely, in this extreme technological period. The worlds largest online company can come up with an algorithm that would stop this from happening. I personally, having never been directly affected by terrorism, dont find it very offensive, more surprising. Still, I find it very odd.

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A judge has let a bunch of Greenpeace activists off the hook after they did 35,000 pounds damage to a coal plant. In their defence, they stated that the plant will do much more damage than that in the future and were all found not guilty.

Full Story at The Independent

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grep is a file content searching tool for Linux. It is loved by programmers for its ease of use and swift search results (with customisable output). For example, if you forgot where you left your debug code, you can quickly display a list of the files that contain the code like so;

grep -ril ‘var_dump’ *

But, the problem with grep is that it is not possible to limit the subdirectories it searches within based on a pattern. A lot of people misunderstand the “-exclude” option, thinking that they can stop grep from returning results from SVN directories using it like so;

grep -ril –exclude=”.svn/*” ‘var_dump’ *

Little do they realise that exclude is for file names only and grep has no functionality for restricting search based on directory names. grep can invert the found rows and only show the non-matching lines using the ‘-v’ parameter and can remove the .svn directories but it is very slow;

grep -ril "’var_dump’ * | grep -v svn

So, in comes ack. ack is much faster than grep (it uses perl regular expressions) and searches recursively and ignores revision control subdirectories (.svn) by default. Also, it displays the found code in a much easier to read format (if you opt to display the lines as opposed to just the file names);

To make things easier, ack is available in a lot of repo’s for different Linux distributions.  I was able to get ack this easily;

sudo apt-get install ack

Done. Its also available as a perl script incase you cannot install it due to dictator sys admins (you know the type.).

If you code and use grep for your line-level searching, do yourself a favour and get ack.

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A lot of people these days use graphical clients for creating their database schema’s and therefor start with the Entity Relationship diagram and then have it generate the SQL for them. I prefer to write SQL directly as I seem to have an ongoing misunderstanding with most graphical clients but then I would need to somehow create an ER diagram for the SQL I wrote and this meant I’d double up on work a little bit. Today while searching for another application to do just what I want (and not cost me a cent) I found a post about something that will be extremely handy.

SQL Fairy is an ER Diagram creator for Mysql and other databases but uses the raw SQL files and includes relationships (like foreign keys etc).

Its not perfect by any means, but its easy and gives a great representation of the database relationships. The lines representing relationships actually go over the tables which is a bugger and as it outputs directly to an image, you cant edit it. But, for a quick and easy ER, its bloody good.

As noted in the post I found this little gem at, its super simple to install and use, particularly if you are using Linux. I am on Kubuntu (for the record, my distro of choice is Fedora) and installed it as easy as this;

sudo apt-get install sqlfairy

Then, to generate the diagram was as easy as this;

sqlt-diagram -d=MySQL -o=sample_schema.png schema.sql –color

Unfortunately, it did fall over when my schema contained a SOURCE within the SQL, but apart from that it was quick and simple enough for me.

Now, if I can find an app that does the same thing but allows me to edit my ER first and give me multiple saving options (XML, SQL, etc) then I’d be extremely happy.

sqlt Man page
sqlt-diagram Man page

EDIT: About a year ago, MySQL released an application named ‘Workbench’ for this very purpose. An ER diagram program with reverse engineering capabilities from .sql files. The application was used by me on Windows for a while before a Linux friendly version was released. But, when Sun bought MySQL earlier this year, they made most of the MySQL applications commercial and were charging for licenses. Thats why Workbench was not mentioned above.

I am pleased to announce that it appears Workbench is free for download again. More information on Workbench can be obtained at its website.

This is the same schema as the above diagram done in Workbench using reverse engineering from an SQL file.

MySQL Workbench

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About a year ago I came up with a funny idea to replace the finger cursor on links to a slightly modified version that I like to call ‘The Bird’.

I drafted my friend Lauren to do the work as I am not as useful behind a Photoshop enabled pc as she is.

Anyway as I am not using the cursor (I will put it as a mouse cursor on one of my sites at some stage), I feel it is wasting away. So, I present to you, my loyal readers, ‘The Bird’.

Its as beautiful today as the night it came to me in a dream after many-a-drink at the pub.

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