I didn't do the math, but it would have probably taken over 10-15 hours to restore the database from the mysqldump. There's a couple easy tweaks I did not use. For one, I used --skip-opt and made my mysqldump files full INSERT statements (for verbosity and the ability to "diff" them if I ever needed to) - this was stolen from a backup script I wrote.

If you read the documentation/blogs, it says to use --opt when running mysqldump for faster imports. Well, duh! While I was at it, I also tweaked a couple other things. Right now it is moving MUCH faster. What did I do?

• On the source, I used mysqldump --opt (it seemed to dump the database faster too)
• On the destination, I set innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit to "0" in my.cnf for the time being. This server isn't used yet, so that's safe.
• I also put "SET AUTOCOMMIT=0;" at the top of the script, and "COMMIT;" at the bottom of the script. I don't need any commits until the end, this is a fresh import.

The results are not very scientific, but here's how it breaks down so far (still in the middle of the process)

• Without these tweaks, at 107 minutes it was only at 2.2gb out of 13gb.
• Without these tweaks, at 12 minutes it was at 4.5gb out of 13gb.

I think this will save my bacon, I wish I had done this sooner and not wasted that two hours originally. Someone in #mysql recommended I look at XtraBackup, but it seemed like too much to learn and attempt my first run at it while I was having to do a  production migration.

Due to the fact that their service always uses over 100 megs of RAM, and seems to continuously get stuck on certain files, I was planning on getting rid of it soon. Today's announcement made this decision even easier though, as now they've decided to go the way of other companies with tiered pricing models. With how cheap technology continuously gets, any company marking prices up really pisses me off.

So, I give a profane salute to you, Mozy, as you have now joined the ranks of companies I feel personally displeased with, and definitely will not recommend (not that I really did anyway.)

Even AT&T (one of the main companies I despise) let people grandfather in their unlimited plans, and cell networks take a lot more beating than a backup service with hard drive prices going down every day. Adding more servers to a rack is a lot harder than adding cell tower capacity. That type of "next month you'll be forced to change" does not sit well with me.

Dear Michael,

Thanks for being a valued Mozy subscriber. For the first time since 2006, we're adjusting the price of our MozyHome service and wanted to give you a heads up. As part of this change, we’re replacing our MozyHome Unlimited backup plan and introducing the following tiered storage plans:

50 GB for $5.99 per month (includes backup for 1 computer)
125 GB for $9.99 per month (includes backup for up to 3 computers)

You may add additional computers (up to 5 in total) or 20 GB increments of storage to either of the plans, each for a monthly cost of $2.00.

While this policy takes effect for new MozyHome customers starting today, your MozyHome Unlimited subscription is still valid for the duration of your current monthly term. In order to ensure uninterrupted service, you'll need to select a new renewal plan.

This is a very hacky, no-garbage-collection, but still "working good enough" script. At the advice of #chromium on freenode, when asked about cookie sharing between Incognito windows, I was told it's been discussed before, and I got the information on how to make sure that your Incognito windows don't share information or cookies by forcing separate user data directories.

I'm not really worried about privacy, I'm more annoyed that I launch separate Incognito windows and it shares cookies between them, which is sort of against the point. I have to login to the same sites over and over under different accounts for different clients, and it's a PITA.

Major things to note:

• This assumes you'll run some sort of "temp directory cleanup" tool on your own for Windows. This doesn't have any concept of "oh yeah, I have to cleanup that temp directory I made"
• None of your extensions, bookmarks, settings, etc. will be remembered in this session. It's completely barren.
• You will never (assuming the GUID is unique) get the same session more than once.

As I said, it's hacky, and you'll need to change a couple of the paths. I couldn't figure it out elegantly, and I was getting tired of trying to find script examples on the net (why is it so hard to find code that works together for Microsoft languages?)

Perhaps someday soon Chrome or someone will develop something more robust for this. For now, if you want - this does seem to work, at least on my XP SP3 system.

Note: This is vbscript. Make a file called "incognito.vbs" or something and it should work.

' keep us honest
Option Explicit

' because we have to
Dim strDirectory
Dim strTempDirectory
Dim TypeLib
Dim objFSO
Dim objShell
Dim strChromePath

' change this if you want - anything with spaces has to have be wrapped in triple quotes
strChromePath = """C:\Documents and Settings\mike\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe"""
strTempDirectory = "C:\Windows\Temp"

' make a clean guid
Set TypeLib = CreateObject("Scriptlet.TypeLib")
strDirectory = TypeLib.Guid
strDirectory = Replace(strDirectory, "{", "")
strDirectory = Replace(strDirectory, "}", "")
strDirectory = strTempDirectory & "\" & strDirectory

' create the directory
Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
objFSO.CreateFolder(strDirectory)

' launch it, or fail
If err.number = vbEmpty then
   Set objShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
   objShell.run (strChromePath & " --incognito --no-first-run --user-data-dir=" & strDirectory)
Else
   WScript.echo "VBScript Error: " & err.number
End If

' cleanup
Set TypeLib = nothing
set objFSO = nothing
Set objShell = nothing

' quit
WScript.Quit()

I just discovered this tool in the last hour. It not only  allows you to make wireframes, but actually usable prototypes - with links to external sites and other pages inside of the prototype, pull in external images and content, has layers like photoshop ... the list goes on and on. Best part is the learning curve was quite simple. I found another tool which was an Adobe AIR-based app, if I recall, but it was a bit cryptic and hard to use. This thing allows you to even invite people to do usability testing on your prototype, record their movements, leave comments, etc. Best of all, the cost is extremely reasonable!

There's simply too much to name off and now all I want to do for the next month is prototype out all my ideas!

https://pidoco.com/

OS X users using Safari wound up with a proxy issue after clicking on a button on our site, and reloading the page.

The suspect seemed simple to me - the button has to do something persistent that makes the browser behave differently the next page load - so a cookie or a session-based thing on the server side which scrambles the request. Session stuff seemed incorrect as it should show a PHP error or something, not actually make the proxy reject the request. So I came to the easy conclusion of going down the cookie route.

Sure enough, it was an onclick function which set a cookie - one that worked in every browser including Safari on Windows*, but broke on Safari on OS X. So we looked to see what the cookie was. Turns out, Safari on OS X at the moment does not like when a cookie's value ends with a comma "," - it  literally breaks cookie handling altogether. It sends some request that our proxy considers invalid and rejects, and checking without the proxy involved showed us that some cookies (if not all of them) were not being sent to the server (or at least not properly) - which included our authentication cookies. The minute we nuked this "bad" cookie, our other cookies got read properly, the proxy allowed the request, etc.

So, for those people who like to see things more direct and don't like to read a lot of fluff (me included!) here's a simple breakdown:

BREAKS: CookieName=Foo,Bar,Baz,
WORKS: CookieName=Foo,Bar,Baz

Pretty simple. Odd that it appears to be inconsistent across platforms. Anyway, have fun with that little nugget of information. If I wasn't lazy I would look into exactly where to submit a bug, somewhere in the WebKit community I assume.

* I cannot confirm that Windows did not suffer from this, a coworker provided that information.

/etc/init/my-kvm.conf:

description     "my-kvm"

start on (net-device-up
   and local-filesystems)
stop on runlevel [016]

respawn
exec /usr/bin/kvm -hda /root/virtual-machines/my-kvm.bin -no-acpi -m 128 -net nic,macaddr=DE:AD:BE:EF:18:12 -net tap -vnc :0

Enjoy.

I have to say that I have been impressed with Chrome, for the most part. I still would like a status bar at the bottom, I'm used to having some sort of "frame" around my windows to know where they end. Also it has a limited amount of things to customize inside of the options. However as far as development goes, it's moving along quite steadily after the initial launch and stagnation. I did expect this version to be noticeably faster but so far it seems the same. I especially expected Gmail and other Google properties to magically perform better... but nothing major to report so far.

When it comes down to it though it's becoming the default browser on almost all of my machines. It's faster on startup and such than Firefox and less prone to large memory usage (but still is a bit bulkier than I'd like...) but it's design is much better than Firefox's due to it's sandboxing. Hopefully development continues at the same rate though!

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=41467

From my understanding, if you type in http://www.foo.com in your browser it will now remove the http:// - not that it matters, the browser auto-prepends if it you leave it out, but it's not intuitive at all now, and it's not like it was a change that needed to be done.

This is just going to make more people copy/paste the wrong URLs into pages, not get autolinked properly, etc. How many <a href="www.foo.com/"> type links will there be if this starts spreading... I like being able to copy/paste directly from the address bar.

I don't care if people don't put it in when you type in "yahoo.com" - the issue here is the output and reuse and the general idea of "this is a legitimate URL" - considering the RFC for URLs does maintain that you need a scheme!

"A URL contains the name of the scheme being used (<scheme>) followed by a colon and then a string (the <scheme-specific-part>) whose interpretation depends on the scheme."

I am not just saying Drizzle just because I help out with the project in various ways, however, that should be a good sign that I believe in it if I am willing to put any effort into it. With people behind it like Brian Aker, Eric Day, Monty Taylor, Stewart Smith, Jay Pipes, you've got a coding powerhouse that could solve the cancer issue if it was up to software development to fix it. These guys work around the clock and have been refactoring and re-examining everything inside of MySQL. What's going to be left ideally is a superfast microkernel that supports plugins for everything - leveraging the best options out there for replication, messaging, storage engines, etc. Growing apart from the monolithic huge distribution model that MySQL currently follows.

The second key player is MariaDB. Another fork off of MySQL, led by Monty Widenius himself and with other MySQL key players behind it, there is no doubt it will continue Monty's legacy as being able to spin success out of a tiny little open source product. I believe it will stay more traditional in-line with MySQL, but will provide more advanced functionality and scalability as it is developed further.

I won't get into other options like PostgreSQL as I don't follow the rest of the community there much.

Also, we'll see more NoSQL (did we ever bottom out on a better term for that?) options. CouchDB and MongoDB (both of which from a 50,000 foot view look identical from a usage model) and options like Cassandra will also become important and your data needs will become the decision maker for going with a SQL or a NoSQL database. Both of which offer advantages. However, I see Drizzle as making huge strides in leveling the playing field (or attempting to) with it's replication work to make it as scalable as NoSQL databases seem to be with their ability to scale out and replicate changes easily (which to me are their main selling point right now...)

Anyway, this is from a user perspective, not a developer perspective, and from what I've seen from #drizzle on freenode, a few SQL and open source conferences, blog talk and my own gut feelings.

I should make a note that I still use MySQL and will probably continue for some time. Neither Drizzle nor MariaDB are production-friendly yet. However, I believe 2010 should see the first "production capable" release of Drizzle (not sure of MariaDB.)

It is an exciting time though as we're starting to be presented with more options by the day, in fact there are so many various NoSQL databases now, key/value stores, and even a few more SQL databases that it's too hard to keep track of them anymore. There's a lot of code being written and with this whole Oracle possibly inheriting MySQL depending on the EU's judgement, it could ultimately help usher in some of these smaller projects into the spotlight quicker depending on what Oracle does with MySQL...

On the source host you want to clone:

dpkg --get-selections > file

On the destination host:

dpkg --set-selections < file
apt-get dselect-upgrade

Now your machines should be identical, package-wise.