Brett Wayne Stoppel

Getting the size of your MySQL database

brett — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 15:05:18 +0000

I recently upgraded a Drupal installation. In the process, the database has to be backed up. The DB backup seemed large to me so I wanted to check the size of the MySQL database. I found this tip on the MySQL forum from Prakash Babu.

SELECT table_schema "Data Base Name", sum( data_length + index_length ) / 1024 / 1024 "Data Base Size in MB" FROM information_schema.TABLES GROUP BY table_schema ;

It worked great and confirmed the size of the backup.

No more support for IE6*

brett — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 23:29:48 +0000

Following suite of one of my favorite web application, Basecamp, Telos Studios will no longer support IE6 by default. The web has evolved past old proprietary browsers like IE6, NN4, etc. It is time to stop the rat race of backward compatibility and to allow the modern web to be the default.

Ahh. I sigh a gigantic sigh of relief as IE6 is a pain in the ass to develop for.

*Kind of. We’ll still develop for it, but doing so will cost extra. This goes for Firefox 1.x and 2.x as well.

UPDATE - Google has just released a new code base for IE6 users. This is too bad. It really is time for IE6 to die. I don’t want IE6 users to feel justified in their continued use of the antiquated browser. Of course, with Google’s mountain of money and army of engineers they can take on nearly any web related problem and come up with a solution. Although, in this case, it took a patch to IE6 Javascript engine from Microsoft itself to make the new code base work right - and they had to leave out a few features like drop shadows and rounded corners.

1 Trillion Pages

brett — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 21:52:09 +0000

They say that the world is a small place. While the physical world is finite and seemingly small place, the web is not. Google has indexed one trillion documents that are available on-line. Google engineers claim that another billion pages come on-line every day. That is a lot of pages. The online world may be getting larger, but thanks to the search engines it is seemingly smaller.

A quick review of MySQL Workbench

brett — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:39:04 +0000

I recently purchased MySQL Workbench Standard Edition to help me design databases and to reverse engineer the databases of open source projects that I build on and support. I figured insight into the open source projects workings would allow me to extend and support them better.

So far I have only reversed engineered two open source ecommerce projects: Zen Cart and Magento Commerce. Workbench did a great job of identifying the tables, and in the case of Magento building the relations between tables. The layout or autolayout of the results left plenty of room for improvement. I tried to make Magento DB layout better by moving tables around, but Workbench could keep up with the task. When moved, the tables would disappear and then reappear when dropped. If your lucky, the table would be in the neighborhood of where you wanted it. If your not lucky, it would stay put.

All in all, Workbench seems to be coming along but it isn’t ready for serious design work. I look forward to the day that it is.

UPDATE: MySQL Workbench can crash randomly. Make sure you save often. When it crashes, a dialogue box will appear to offer you the option of saving. Save. Do not click cancel. Upon canceling, Workbench will only proceed to crash making you lose all your unsaved work. It just happened to me.

UPDATE: I found a little problem with the SQL CREATE export. At the very end of the CREATE syntax, the table type is specified. For example:

ENGINE = InnoDB;

Sometimes the line is not terminated with a semicolon (;). If the line in improperly terminated, importing the .sql file on the command line throws an error: ERROR 1064 (42000).

Sketchup - Intro to sections

brett — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 08:10:03 +0000

This tutorial show how to use the basic functionality of the section tool in Google Sketchup including positioning, limitations, and the context menu - reverse view, align to section, group section lines.

Sketchup Jackpot

brett — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 07:13:15 +0000

I found a great tutorial series for learning how to draw a house using Google Sketchup. I’ve only watched this one. If the others are as good, I’ll watch them all.

PHP cURL

brett — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 07:12:23 +0000

One of the most important options for using PHP’s cURL library is CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER. When set to true, curl_exec() will return the transfer as a string instead of outputting it out directly. This let’s you store it in a variable.

Symfony (CLI) command line interface tasks

brett — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 15:52:51 +0000

A quick tip for deploying a Symfony 1.1 application. If you need a find a Symfony 1.1 CLI task, simply type

php symfony list

If you are like me and have a Symfony 1.1 installed and sym linked in a different location for testing purposes, you would type

symfony11 list

Paper Critters

brett — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 06:17:29 +0000

One of this year’s South By Southwest winners is Paper Critters. It’s a lot of fun to create your own critter. There are a lot of critters created. Here are a few of the critters that I have made.

Setting up Symfony 1.1 on Ubuntu

brett — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 20:31:36 +0000

Following the lead of Niko at Prendre un Cafe, I decided that I wanted to experience the new features of Symfony 1.1. First, let me say that I can’t read French, but I got the gist of what to do from the well documented Symfony 1.1 setup steps that Niko provided. Niko’s installation technique allows Symfony 1.0 and Symfony 1.1 to be run in parallel.

Some of the new features of Symfony 1.1:

Configuration is moving away from the config.php file to a configuration class
Form and validation classes have been reworked
Better UJS support
CLI tasks as classes

I will investigating these changes over the next week or so as I build a test application to explore these changes. For now, though, here is how I installed Symfony 1.1 on Ubuntu. Once again this install process was greatly aided by a post at Prendre un Cafe. Thanks.

First, install Symfony 1.1.
cd /usr/share/php5 , this is where my Symfony 1.0x install resides. svn co http://svn.symfony-project.com/branches/1.1/ symfony11

Second, hook up the CLI command symfony11 to the right place in the newly installed Symfony 1.1 and verify the command and install.
ln -s /usr/share/php5/symfony11/data/bin/symfony /usr/bin/symfony11 symfony11 -V

The symfony11 -V command should output something similar to “symfony version 1.1.0-DEV (/usr/share/php5/symfony11/lib).”

Next, create a test directory in your Symfony projects directory, generate a test project and an app.
cd /path/to/sf/projects/ mkdir sf11test cd sf11test symfony11 generate:project sf11test symfony11 generate:app frontend

Edit your Apache2 virtual host file.


  ServerName local.sf11.com
  DocumentRoot "/path/to/symfony/projects/sf11test/web"
  DirectoryIndex index.php
  Alias /sf /usr/share/php5/symfony11/data/web/sf
  
    AllowOverride All
    Allow from All
  
  
    AllowOverride All
    Allow from All

Remember to change /path/to/symfony/projects and /usr/share/php5/symfony11/ to reflect your paths.

Finally, edit your /etc/hosts file to include local.sf11.com or whatever your fake domain happens to be.

You can now surf to local.sf11.com to see your newly installed Symfony 1.1 project.