Posted on 13/4/2016, 9:16 pm, by Colin Charles, under
MySQL.
Interesting developments in the MySQL world – it can now be used as a document store and you can query the database using JavaScript instead of SQL (via the MySQL Shell). There is also a new X Plugin (see: mysql-5.7.12/rapid/) (which now makes use of protocol buffers (see: mysql-5.7.12/extra/protobuf/)). I will agree, this is more than just a maintenance release.
Do get started playing with MySQL Shell. If you’re using the yum repository, remember to ensure you have enabled the mysql-tools-preview in /etc/yum.repos.d/mysql-community.repo. And don’t forget to load the X Plugin in the server! I can’t wait for the rest of the blog posts in the series, and today just took a cursory look at all of this — kudos Team MySQL @ Oracle.
However, I’m concerned that the GA is getting what you would think of as more than just a maintenance release. We saw 5.7.11 get at rest data encryption for InnoDB, and now 5.7.12 getting even more changes. This is going to for example, ship in the next Ubuntu LTS, Xenial Xerus. Today it has 5.7.11, but presumably after release it will be upgrade to 5.7.12. I am not a huge fan of surprises in LTS releases (predictability over 5 years is a nice thing; this probably explains why I still have a 5.0.95 server running), but I guess this small band-aid is what we need to ensure this doesn’t happen going forward?
As for the other question I’ve seen via email from several folk so far: will MariaDB Server support this? I don’t see why not in the future, so why not file a Jira?
Posted on 18/9/2011, 3:14 am, by Colin Charles, under
General.
I stumbled upon Google Native Client today. It looks really interesting and you can see why Google seems to be targeting their technologies for the Chrome browser first (link with regards to Dart, their future of JavaScript; quote: “We will strongly encourage Google developers start off targeting Chrome-only whenever possible as this gives us the best end user experience.” – Mark S. Miller).
The promise of better in-browser games for example, is what excites me about this initiative. There is also the promise of better native/traditional desktop apps, running in the web browser. I was at a show recently where I saw this HRM app that is Windows-only and their proposal to run it on Linux? Use virtualization. This is something they might find useful, for example.
Try out the example apps. Its surprisingly easy to get started. On OSX, you can see that when running the Pi example, the Native Client module is using quite a whole load of CPU time (in Chrome, do Window -> Task Manager).
In all that, I learned about Google Chrome’s about:flags. You need to enable Native Client support and restart Chrome to get this all working. There’s a fairly good about:flags resource; clearly lots more things to play with there (and helps me understand what the idea being the ChromeOS/Chromebook is now).
Posted on 3/6/2009, 12:27 am, by Colin Charles, under
General.
Twitter has a wonderful Location: field, and a lot of clients, like TwitterFon (for the iPhone), or twibble (for Symbian devices), tend to update the field automatically. They tend to update it with the phone’s built-in AGPS, so at worst, your accuracy in location, is about 100m or so. 
I find this to be a tiny problem. You can copy the location string (GPS coordinates), paste it into Google Maps and find out that the person at the Location above, is at MidValley Megamall.
Who cares when you’re in a public location? That can be a good thing for bumping into friends. But what about stalkers who now know where you live? Or an angry wife, that knows you weren’t working late, but chilling out with the guys at a nearby pub?
This is where Google Latitude kind of makes sense. Its opt-in. You only share the location with your friends. Twitter is just open (very rarely, do people’s profiles remain private).
Anyway, I thought it would be cool to write a quick Greasemonkey script to send me to Google Maps automagically. After all, Dive Into Greasemonkey still applies… Quick search on userscripts.org, and I found Twitter Google Maps Link. It does exactly what I want, so I didn’t need to hack up some JavaScript. Win :)
