Tech News and Rambling from a Surly Little Bastard…
Welp, I’m not sure how available these beta invites are yet, nor if this is actually allowed, but…
I have received a couple of these, and as I have no desire to actually test this product, if you want one, the first two people who drop me a comment on this post requesting a code are welcome to them.
Be sure to specify an email address when posting, so I can get back to you (it won’t be displayed in the comments, if that’s what you’re worried about.
I originally found the site through one of their other Mac-centric blogs, FreeMacWare, which lists a piece of Mac freeware every day (with some great stuff in their archives to be sure!).
Well, I’m not sure how they get away with it, but they also have a site dedicated to daily music: Free Mac Music.com. Thus far, my tastes have been pretty identical to those of the author(s?), so I’m really loving it. Today’s recommendation of Joshua Radin was dead on.
I’d highly recommend both sites for their respective audiences (Mac-users and Music-lovers). Check ‘em out!
I’ve spent the morning updating my Mint installation, and tracking down some really neat Peppers (ie: plugins) for it. Did you know there was a blog dedicated to Mint peppers? Neither did I.
So since I’ve been updating Mint and adding all these cool new features, it only makes sense that I look at my stats (which I haven’t done since sometime in early December, I’m sure).
As a web author, it’s always pleasing to see that you’ve apparently helped contribute something back to the community - you helped “scratch an itch,” as it were. So I took a good deal of satisfaction in seeing that even now, 2 months later, my entry about burning DMG images on a PC was fairly popular (about 895 hits this month).
Oddly enough, looks like they’ve all come in through links from other sites, not direct search results. Guess I don’t have that Google juice yet…
Ah well, back to the grind…
You know a feature I’d really like to see, either natively in MySQL, or inherently through phpMyAdmin (et al)?
The ability to add descriptions to field definitions in a table (ie: field “post_title” would have description “Holds the Post’s Title” - very simplistic example, but you can see how it would scale).
This would help not only document the original developer’s actual intent for what a column should store (particularly since documentation is usually the least favorite thing for developers to do), but also serve as a type of quick reference or keyword reminder so those of us who follow behind you (or just can’t remember what we ourselves intended something to be) can quickly remember without digging out huge sets of documentation (which may or may not exist), and without leaving the environment we’re already established in.
Storing the original create statement, along with any alter statements, and notes on what any why something was done would also be a welcome paper trail for some of us, although on busy systems, those logs could grow quite rapidly. Think about it along the lines of a database-design wiki. You can mark your ALTER statements as “minor edits” or “major edits”, and include a note about what’s being done, why, and by whom. If something horridly blew up, or another developer came along later, you could easily check the reasoning behind the change or quickly roll it back as needed.
It’s all about docoumentation, and with as poor reputations most of us have for keeping up with such menial tasks, you’d think giving everyone a little help would be worth some extra time and database overhead.
Of course it’s quite possible such things already exist (and I know some do in various other database systems), so please let me know if I’ve missed something…
Six Symptoms You Should Never Ignore
I think i just gave myself one of those symptoms you’re never supposed to ignore, after reading these comments about Six Symptoms You Should Never Ignore…
My god was that hilarious. Funniest thing I’ve read all week, by far.