Dev::Blog

Here’s a piece of trivia for y’all while I wait for a long-running task to complete: if you have a web page (using ASP) execute a query against a remote MySQL database, and if that query happens to include a text comparison, and if the column you’re comparing against doesn’t happen to be indexed, and you happen to have nearly 6 million records in the table, well, you’ll basically fry both servers. The webserver should probably be better configured to not lose the ASP process when one page does a dumb thing, but more importantly, this is probably a good lesson in testing your queries against full-scale data sets before promoting to production (thankfully, we’re still in dev)

Ah. Index built, 10 minutes, 17.22 seconds later. Back at it, then.

Apple I Replica Creation: Back to the Garage: a step by step guide to building your own Apple I. Yeah, baby, the power of 1977*, today!

Kidding aside, I’m sure I would have been smack in the middle of the target market for this book just a few years ago. I was so bent on recreating the wheel that I probably missed out on a lot of opportunities (and to think, that was in the middle of the dot com boom. Hmm.) Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s a lot to be learned by rebuilding great works, and everyone needs a hobby. Personally, I want to spend 2005 working on as much New Stuff as I can. I’ve found the learning opportunities are just as good, if not better, and the knowledge is a whole lot more applicable**, at least the way that I’ve structured my life as of late.

* I pulled the year 1977 out of my ass. That last sentence just reads better, taken out of context, than “or whenever,” doesn’t it?

The cynical among you can substitute “lucrative” for “applicable,” but I’ve yet to really find ways to make money with knowledge. This probably makes me more cynical than you.

(Via MacMerc.)

While reading the commentary/fallout from Kottke’s decision to do his site full-time, I stumbled across this quote via Signal vs. Noise:

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.

Daniel Burnham, Chicago architect. (1864-1912)

I’m still trying to finish little plans like last year’s taxes, but they’re definitely words worth repeating.

Shameless Redesign. Done. Until it changes.

No, not my design, visually, anyway - we’ve got an art director for that. I’m really excited about the opportunities to do stuff on the back end in the next few months though.

Why, oh why, oh why do I always design websites using Firefox and Safari and then check IE6 last?

Besides the fact that I do most of my work on a Mac.

Come to think of it, this was largely sarcastic.

I just can’t wait for IE7 to add another layer of compatibility to the mix.

Come to think of it, that too was largely sarcastic.

Yes, site redesign launching in a few days. No, not this one.

Well, I’m back in action following my hard drive crash.

I lost 3 months of data.

Yeah, I suck.

To be more precise, I didn’t lose everything. My source code is pretty religiously backed up to a remote server via CVS, and I have paper records of a lot of things, so I can reconstruct much of what was lost. I did lose about 8 hours of work on one web site, which sucks, and I’m still trying to get my MP3 collection off of my iPod (400 songs to go…). The time taken to recover from this mess is a billion times more than the effort it took to actually replace the hard drive (29 screws to get it out!), and the opportunity cost of lost freelance work is way more than the cost of the hardware ($200 for a new 60 gig drive, with tax, plus another $75 for a 2.5 inch enclosure in a vain attempt to get the old drive to spin up).

Lesson learned. I’m now a licensed user of ChronoSync, and I’m backing up all my critical files to the iPod daily. That still doesn’t save me enough time in the event that I have to reinstall all my software, so as soon as the move is done (I am on a budget, here), we’ll be adding 2 250 gig drives to the G4, mirrored via RAID, which should be enough to hold incremental backups via Retrospect (already owned, but too slow and clunky with the current setup), and we might also go with external drives and Carboon Copy Cloner. It’s a bit more ambitious than previous plans, but this has been an expensive lesson. Thankfully, living in Toronto means I don’t have to take the extra step of actually keep spare drives in stock.

Oh, one last rule: always print out your software license keys. I’ll be spending the week trying to get new keys from 4 or 5 different companies that I’ve bought from in the last few months. We’ll see how that goes…