lsof -p $(ps ux | egrep [/]opt/local | awk '{print $2}' | xargs | sed 's/ /,/g') | fgrep opt/local | awk '{print $9}' | sort -u | xargs port provides | sed 's/.*: //' | sort -u | xargs port -f upgrade


The command line rules!

It’s meant to rebuild every MacPorts package I’ve got installed that is loaded when I start XDarwin (the xfree86 port in MacPorts) in a vague attempt to fix the completely broken mouse pointer in X.

In a company far far away, I used to be a Java developer. At that time I thought that applets could be a good thing for the web. Since then, and for most of this millennium, I’ve been somewhere between indifferent and blisteringly annoyed when encountering Java applets. I silently hoped they would go away.

But they just won’t die.

Recently I joined Facebook, and they use a crappy upload applet for photos. Which reminded me of the crappy upload applet that comes with Gallery. These might be the most beautifully crafted objects, whole Versailles of Java, but during the time the ruddy thing painfully loads I can’t use the browser, and the OS even mentions that things are not responding. Okay, Versailles was not built in a day, so I’ll go and feed the donkeys or something and come back when it’s done. But, of course, it’s not beautiful as promised. It’s an eyesore, a pig to use, and breaks just after I’ve invested 20 excruciating minutes choosing photos of family barbecues.

So I’m voting with my browser preferences, and I vote for no more Java on the web. Applets were cool for a month or two, but have been a mercilessly flogged but nevertheless dead horse ever since.

Flash, on the other hand, actually has a use. Video. After over a decade of squabbling between Real, Apple Quicktime and Microsoft SomethingMediocre, it took a vector animation program to pretty much solve cross-browser video.

That’s great. But I really really do not want to watch another whizzy website Flash-splash page or another Microsoft disinfomercial next to the news. So Flash might be next to get the chop.

I’ll be using Lynx before the year’s out.

I’m writing this after reading about the Wifi Liberator on Boing Boing. It’s a simple pairing of some hardware and software that lets you freely share your paid-for Internet connection at a WiFi hotspot with everyone in the vicinity. It’s probably against the terms and conditions of those hotspots, but they’re normally so overpriced and such poor quality that my sympathy doth overfloweth not. The WiFi Liberator is a manifestation of the discontent people have with pay-for WiFi services, and the operators should take note.

My wife spent 6 days last month at the aforementioned hospital after an emergency c-section. Incidentally, the hospital was clean and modern, and the staff were friendly and professional. After the birth I took the laptop in so she could email friends about the baby, keep in touch with me, and maybe post some stories, but the high price of WiFi put us off the idea. At one point I bought a one-hour card anyway, but there was no signal.

Internet access isn’t yet a utility service like phone or water, but a data service to the home/person will become a standard fitting eventually, quite soon perhaps. For some I think it’s already more important than water, air and sex (for some the Internet is sex). In any case, if it’s advertised (and it was, in the lobbies, the lift, on leaflets…) then it should at least work, and for that price it should collect my laundry too.

You may argue that WiFi access is often expensive, and that this hospital is not unique. But that’s not a reason to roll over. I’m still dreaming about how to provide some competition to this with my limited resources, and if I don’t do it then I’m sure someone else will, because €28 a day is a rip-off.

In other news, I want to apologise for my content-free blatherings about the Apple iPhone. I don’t think anyone reads this blog so I’m talking to myself, but I want to make my contrition public even so, for future readers :-)

Apple Mail can automatically delete old junk mail, but I also use KMail and SquirrelMail, and it’s often a long wait between the times I load up Mail, so I need something else. It requires Python 2.4 (perhaps earlier, but I’ve not tried it), and that’s it. Run it with a --help to get started.

Incidentally, the script is also in a Bazaar repository, and you can branch it if you want:

bzr branch \

http://www.premolo.net/~gavin/Scripts

Right now the script doesn’t care about SSL (I run it on the same box as my Courier IMAP server) and it uses CRAM-MD5 authentication which may not be to your taste. It’s not had a lot of testing either, so be careful, and take some backups first :-) It’s in the public domain though, so happy hacking, and I’m more than willing to merge patches.

I thought my old Nokia was pretty nifty, if a bit slow and unreliable, and my Sony Ericsson is much better. I’ve played with some Windows handsets and they’re much the same. But the iPhone is leagues, fathoms, miles, light years ahead of these. Next to the iPhone the current batch of smartphones come across as smart as a house brick talking politics at dinner.

Argh! My cell phone is corporate suited plastic lump of curdled boredom! It represents the product of a permeating lack of innovation, meddling from middle management, committee thinking, unmotivated staff, a “can’t do” culture, a, a … hang on, I lost myself thinking about the Great Seattle Graveyard of Imagination. Actually, my phone is fine and works well, but it has been utterly utterly outclassed by Apple’s iPhone.

I think Apple exceeded the hype: suddenly, every other phone on the planet looks so very old.

Update: seems like it was only at first sight. Apple might have practiced some Microsoft Innovation courtesy of LG.

The easiest way to install, say Alfie, is to use easy_install from setuptools:

easy_install premolo-alfie

I’ll be adding in script support for running Alfie from the command line, but in the meantime you can use this slightly unwieldy incantation:

python -c 'from premolo.alfie import template; from sys import argv; template.main(*argv[1:])'

I’m working mostly on Alfie at the moment, and hoping to get a 1.0 release out the door in the first quarter of 2007.

First, some context.

I recently launched a dating website for Luxembourg. “Oh no!” you scream, “Not another bleedin’ dating website!”. No apologies though; Luxembourg needs some loving, and I was the man for the job.

As part of my preparations I wrote a few libraries to flex my Python muscles, which is to say that I didn’t want to write any namby-pamby front-end code just yet. I’m a real hacker goddammit and I’m going to build me some libs.

So I wrote a templating system, some tools to wrap around Apache/mod_python, and collected several other little things into a common package.

I also needed an object-relational mapper, or ORM if you’re short of time and/or breath. I kept cutting my fingers on the sharp edges of SQLObject, and the sheer volume of impenetrable documentation for SQLAlchemy was intimidating, so I wrote my own. In fairness, the documentation for SQLAlchemy was probably fine, and SQLObject could have been fixed, but I wanted to do it my way, being a real hacker and all.

And thus began the journey which led me to conclude that I’m not going to use MySQL any more.

I’m not going to actually relive that journey with you. It was long and had lots of swearing. My wife can let you know all about the frantic desk-slamming, the irritated pacing, and the endless cups of tea. I did a lot of cursing during my skirmishes with mod_python too, and my choice of (human) language was generic/base enough that my wife probably could not discern the MySQL-induced tantrums from the mod_python ones.

I didn’t pull my hair out though. That’s because I hardly have any, and standing in front of a mirror trying to find strands to tear out with tweezers gets in the way of the ‘moment’.

Back to the point, my beefs with MySQL.

Doctor, …

CTRL-C does not do what it says on the tin

Firstly, and this is a bit petty, but when I type CTRL-C in the mysql command-line client, the client exits. This is really annoying, because I have learned that CTRL-C in every other interactive (*nix) command-line means either (a) ditch the current line, or (b) cancel the current command. There is no “(c) Exit”, because it doesn’t exist. Except for MySQL, where you are instantly dumped back to your shell, transactions turned to dust, and left with that bubbling sensation at the top of your head as the blood boils and takes another couple of months off your life.

REFERENCES

Declaring a column with a REFERENCES clause has no effect. In the words of a friend, this makes the baby Jesus cry.

You may ask “Why is this a problem?”, and you’d be right to ask. “It’s there for compatibility with other dialects of SQL” is a good answer, but not good enough. “It’s a feature that will be introduced later on” is another reply, to which I laugh heartily, then shed a small tear of my own. The problem is that it is misleading and creates a false sense of security. People believe that they have an extra tool to maintain the consistency of their data, but alas, it is not so. MySQL is a database, and as such it should not go playing fast and loose with the data that it holds.

This is another example of unexpected results, but more fundamental than the CTRL-C thing. I know it’s in the docs, but my brain is not big enough to remember every gotcha in the book. Someone else said this first, but software should either work, or fail hard. MySQL should not accept my request; it should totally barf on my shoes. Perhaps there should be an option to ignore these clauses, but that should be the thing that you have to look in the manual to discover, and the default should be to either respect them or throw them back in your face.

Foreign keys

I first learnt about relational databases on Oracle 7, so I quickly learnt to appreciate foreign keys and all other kinds of constraints. I could not get enough of the lovely little hairy fellows. Of course, there is a limit to how well they can keep your data in pristine condition, but they do help to catch problems early, especially during development.

So I was glad to see that MySQL supports foreign keys on InnoDB tables, and have eagerly used them. But they have shortcomings.

Like, not actually working.

I restored some invalid data from a dump, just for fun (actually, I was being stupid, but to admit that would make me appear fallible, which, as we both know, I am not). It was invalid because it should have violated at least one foreign key constraint, but MySQL didn’t notice. At first I thought that MySQL had probably disabled constraints during loading, then had problems re-enabling them at the end, and not told me about it.

But the keys were enabled, and I was unable to add new invalid data to the table. I deleted some of the invalid data and tried to re-insert it, but that was denied too. Hmm.

Data consistency is bread-and-butter stuff for a relational database, and I subverted it unexpectedly. If a constraint is enabled, I fully expect that nothing violates that constraint, and it’s not unfair to insist on that.

Foreign keys in MySQL are still useful, but they are no guarantee that the data is consistent. And to compensate, we have to write some scripts to verify our data, one of the things that we hoped to avoid by using foreign keys.

Okay, fair enough, this is probably a bug. At least, I hope it’s not a feature. But this is core functionality, and a gaping hole like this makes me tremble like a chicken at a KFC.

Default values

mysql> CREATE TABLE a (
    ->   b VARCHAR(10) NOT NULL,
    ->   c VARCHAR(10) NOT NULL,
    ->   d INT NOT NULL
    -> );
mysql> INSERT INTO a (b) VALUES ('b');
mysql> SELECT * FROM a;
+---+---+---+
| b | c | d |
+---+---+---+
| b |   | 0 |
+---+---+---+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Whoops, I forgot to set values for the c and d columns. But how cute, MySQL has filled them in for me. That’s why it’s called MySQL, because it always looks out for me, aah.

NO! I set them NOT NULL with no default so that I would be forced to enter a value. If I don’t enter a default, don’t guess one for me. Tell me I’m an idiot and get me to think again. Why is there an assumption that the empty string or zero is good for me, now that I’ve rejected NULL?

“I don’t want to work for NULL euros an hour!”

“Okay, let’s put you on our ZERO euros an hour rate instead.”

Roll it all up

You’ve probably seen the pattern. Most or all of my problems with MySQL comes from differences between what I expect will happen, and what actually does happen. But I know these quirks now so they won’t cost me much development time any more, and I’ve built my ORM to cover the most obvious cracks.

But something still bothers me. The water still isn’t clear and I’m afraid there’s a slimy green monster in the depths. What quirks do I not know? Will they one day bite me on the rear like a three-jawed radioactive toad on an arse biting frenzy?

The default MyISAM engine lacks foreign keys and transactions, but InnoDB feels tacked on, and foreign keys still don’t work properly. MySQL tries to please everyone by accepting, yet ignoring, things like REFERENCES clauses. When inserting it has a habit of choosing default values for NOT NULL columns instead of telling me I’ve forgotten to specify a value. In trying to be accommodating it actually ends up surprising and frustrating.

Bizarrely enough, I still like MySQL. In the end it’s worked well for me. The performance is good, and it is easy to maintain and backup. But I won’t be using it again. When storing mission-critical data it is vitally important to do the right thing, and MySQL often does not do the right thing.

I’m a software developer living in Luxembourg, but I’m actually English. I got together with a lovely Luxembourgish lass, left my job doing techie stuff in Norwich, England, and headed for the rolling hills of Middle Europe.

I started a company, Premolo, to sell my skills and software. I haven’t seen stellar success so far, but I’m working on it, and this blog is a shameless attempt to get more attention for myself and my company. So, now you’ve seen my not-so-hidden agenda, go forth and find something useful, interesting or worth flaming in my postings.

Thanks, Gavin.