Early last year (2005) I installed MySQL on OS X.  I was recently faced with the task again and realized I’d completely forgotten everything I did.  I just wanted to point out a couple of handy links for accomplishing this task:

http://developer.apple.com/internet/opensource/osdb.html
http://www.osxfaq.com/tips/unix-tricks/week108/monday.ws

The first link discusses installing from source while the second directs you to the binary install.  I do remember doing a binary install and that definitely seems the route to take….unless you need to compile with any special options.

This morning a good friend of mine invited me to watch a Dallas building get demolished. Unfortunately I didn’t get to witness the event in person, but was able to catch it on channel 5 news. Luckily I was able to Tivo the implosion and am posting it here for your enjoyment.

The implosion took place about 5 miles from our house and we could hear the explosions from our house. It was pretty cool to watch it on TV and then hear the delay as it came through our living room.

Supposedly the largest Whole Foods Market in the country will be built at this location. That’s pretty exciting news and what’s even more suprising is that it will be open in just over a year.

The video file runs about 7.5MB and lasts approximately 3 minutes. I ran it through FFmpeg to bring the size and quality down because the original was well over 600MB!  Please forgive the spotty audio since I’m trying to master FFmpeg’s audio settings.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.db75.com/videos/implosion_012906.swf" height="285" width="325" /]

It’s been a good while since I’ve imported data into mysql using the command line.  In the past I’ve used the load data infile syntax, but this time decided to use the mysqlimport client instead.  The raw data from the csv file looked like the following:

“Microsoft”, “MSFT”
“Macromedia”, “MACR”
“Google”, “GOOG”

and to actually parse this data and load it into mysql I used the following command:

mysqlimport –fields-enclosed-by=’”‘ –fields-terminated-by=’,’ –lines-terminated-by=”\n” –columns=name,symbol –user=root stocks nasdaq.csv

Also note that the name of the database was stocks and table was nasdaq.  The mysqlimport client automatically looks for a table name that matches the name of the file….before the extension.

I stumbled across this ZDNet article talking about the beta versions of Microsoft’s next generation of designer tools.  While I’m a huge fan of Macromedia’s and Adobe’s web tools, I decided to download Microsoft’s Expression Graphic Designer.  It seems to be very functional and have all the sorts of features you’d expect in a graphics package.  One cool thing that I noticed at first glance was a thumbnail tooltip that pops up when you mouse over a layer in the layer list.  This is extremely useful to know what layer you’re referencing without actually having to show & hide it.

The Expression Designer will probably never run on the Mac OS so I’ll be sticking to Fireworks and Photoshop.  It will be interesting to see what type of market share Microsoft will gain in the web design arena.  Most serious designers/developers stick with Macromedia and Adobe tools.

The beta version is free to download so give it a run.  I can’t see M$ charging more than $300 for the designer once it goes commercial.  This would put it at a price point that would make it more approachable than Photoshop, which currently runs around $650.

Hopefully this announcement means I’ll never have to look at a piece of Frontpage code again!

I recently posted about extracting jpeg frames from video files. I received an email from a reader who was having problems with the singlejpeg argument. It turns out that the latest version of FFmpeg doesn’t support this argument, which has now been replaced by mjpeg. I haven’t had the opportunity to upgrade, but if you run into problems be sure to give this a try.

I really don’t understand blog spam. For that matter I don’t really understand spam. I know what it means, but I can’t seem to believe that it’s the least bit effective. Maybe I’m not the ideal spam recipient, but I’ve never talked to anyone that’s fallen into a spam scam.

A major problem I dealt with in the past was having my blog comments fill up with link spam. It got so out of control it was ridiculous. There were times I had to delete over 100 comments a day because I left them completely open. Actually, with the version of MovableType I was using there wasn’t a way to moderate the comments.

Lately I’ve been impressed with WordPress and the amount of functionality you get out-of-the-box. The biggest time saver has been the comment moderation. I’ve been getting a few spam posts recently and WP has helped me purge them. When a comment is posted I receive an email with a link to approve or disapprove the comment. This links me to the admin where I can do bulk operations and purge all invalid comments from the system. You can see a screen below with the links blurred out. This is just one of the many features that I’ve begun to enjoy with WP.