Technology
I started making this iOS game with Sprite Kit
Side benefits of jet lag + general insomnia include lots of time to learn new things. I decided it was time to learn Sprite Kit by making a game for my 2-year old to play on my iPhone. I call it “Say Shapes” – Here’s progress after 4 total hours.
Getting the mysqldump you always hoped for.
Dumping data from MySQL might be seem like a covered topic, but just so it’s clear, you aren’t stuck outputting SQL. There’s at least 3 options for outputting data. Option 1: The SQL way Good’ole fashioned structured query language output of your whole database in a single file. mysqldump -u root -p -f your_schema_name_here > […]
Givit.com shutters
Givit was a fantastic video editor for iOS devices. It had some amazing features. With it, was a video sharing service that was really clever in a lot of ways. For whatever reason(s), the company closed. The explanation is here: http://www.givit.com/what-happened/ The app, however, is still available on the Apple App Store as a stand […]
C Preprocessor Life Saver(s) – Part 1
More and more when I write code, I’m looking for optimizations, short cuts and less typing. This can mean a careful balance between maintainable code and author convenience. Here’s an example of something I use in every program I write. I use the preprocessor to define debug modes for myself to produce debug output under […]
Mac OS X KEXT trick
A friend suggested this article (http://www.rdoxenham.com/?p=259) to me. I performed the steps and BAM! My Mac performance increased noticeably.
The valuable value of MySQL NULL
In many programming languages, coders often use NULL or null as an equivalent to the numeric ‘0’ (zero) in comparison tests. This normally works out, but it’s worth mentioning that in the database world, ‘NULL’ means something else. To illustrate this, in MySQL we can see that querying NULL returns a string representing the keyword/value […]
Backing up with mysqldump part deux
MYSQLDUMP is a utility for outputting database contents into text files. This is nice, but has many configuration options. One, often missed detail is the specific permissions required to accomplish the job. I made a note on the mysql manual (bottom of page) to illustrate what I consider to be a best practice for automated […]
My Favorite Data Visualization Libraries and Frameworks
As a dba, programmer, business intelligence developer and all-things-data for my company, part of my job is to create useful info-graphics and dashboards for our management team. The numbers alone are fascinating, but when you present them graphically, the trends are easily and instantly understood. Here is a list of my fav tools: jqPlot jVectorMap […]
Using screen in the Linux shell
Have you ever been remotely connected to a host using SSH and thought to yourself: “self, I wish I had more than one window…” So naturally, you opened an additional SSH session. This is fine, but then you need to organize desktop windows when there’s a much simpler solution: Use the screen shell program. Screen […]
