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Having recently updated my opinion on iWeb from “it’s OK” to “it sucks”, I’ve now gone one step further and decided that it REALLY sucks! I just did a very minor upgrade from iWeb 1.1 to iWeb 1.1.1 and it broke my site. I can’t really put it any simpler than that, it just broke my site. Read more

Tagged with: Apple • review • software

Tim O’Reilly has finally weighed in with a response to this mess and although I don’t agree with everything he says, I do think he’s thinking along more acceptable lines in general than the CMP letter would have led one to believe. The following quote is the important part that says what I felt needed to be said:

But I’m really mindful of the fact that Web 2.0 has become so successful as a meme that we’re not looking at a traditional brand name situation. This controversy is also bad for my most important brand, my own name, especially since O’Reilly and not CMP is taking all the heat! So I’m going to be talking with CMP about this situation over the next couple of days, and will see if we can come up with a solution that will satisfy our reasonable desire to protect the name of the conference while taking into account the dual role of “Web2.0” — as a brand for our conferences and as a handy meme for discussions of this phenomenal technology.

I am a bit annoyed at his insistence that Tom Raftrey owes him an apology though, I don’t think that’s fair.

Related Posts:

• A Darker Side of O’Reilly
• And The Web 2.0 Fun Continues

I posted about this yesterday after I was sent a link to the post on Tom Raftery’s blog about O’Reilly sending lawyers after an Irish Conference. I was firstly shocked and secondly annoyed about it so I decided I’d keep an eye on it and see how this all evolved. Before this I never quite realised the power of blogging … it has really opened my eyes and the blog sphere is positively buzzing about this little doozey and O’Reilly are feeling the heat! From my spin through the blogsphere the first thing I note is a unanimous agreement that O’Reilly made a HUGE booboo by sending the lawyers in on this one as a first resort and so close to the date of the conference. This has achieved only two things, it has made O’Reilly look so bad that techies all over the web are vowing to take their book business elsewhere and given so much free press to IT@Cork that their conference is sure to sell out! The second thing that even the few O’Reilly apologists I came across seem to agree on is that “Web2.0” isn’t really even a trademarkable term! Read more

I was more than a bit surprised to see a company I have a lot of respect for acting the complete prick and bullying and Irish IT conference because they are using the term Web2.0 in their title. Regardless of what O’Reilly think I really don’t think they can Service Mark a commonly used term like Web2.0. I’m pretty sure there is precedence out there on this kind of thing. Personally I hate the term Web2.0 and find it a turn off where ever I see it so I’d love to see it die a death but I’m not on for having big American corporations come in to Ireland and start bullying Irish institutions.

*boo hiss*

Mind you at least the good news is that the bad press O’Reilly got in the blog-sphere had the desired effect and O’Reilly have caved in and are letting the conference go a head this year, but not in future.

Here’s a link with more details: www.tomrafteryit.net/oreilly-trademarks-web-20-and-sets-lawyers-on-itcork/

I’ve previously done a guide on the right way of installing Tomcat 5.0 on the Mac but things are a little different on Linux so I figured I’d do another guide. This one is a little less advanced because it only covers running Tomcat as root and not as a non-root user. Depending on how busy I am in the next while I may or may not do a follow-up article on the additional steps needed to run Tomcat as a non-root user. I have tested this procedure on RHEL ES 4 with Tomcat 5.5.17 and the Sun JDK version 1.5.0_6 but it should be the same on all Linux distros and for all 5.X Tomcat versions, the only thing that is likely to change is the location of $JAVA_HOME. Correction, the startup script included is for Redhat based distros only (RHEL, Fedora, CentOS etc).

Read more

Tagged with: Apache Tomcat • open source • Linux • Java • web server

When I first reviewed iLife 6 in my article about creating my first podcast I was a little hard on iWeb but gave it a generally OK review. Turns out I was a little hasty! After a few more weeks of use I’ve come to the conclusion that it sucks! Yes, the interface is very nice and yes you can easily make a podcast by dragging and dropping but it still sucks because everything goes most terribly pear-shaped the moment you go to publish your web page. To see what I mean have a look at the site for the IFAS podcast which I’ve been using as a test case for iWeb: www.minds.nuim.ie/~ifas/podcast.

You might say my sample page looks alright on the surface, because it does. But, now try to highlight some text. Oops, you can’t because it isn’t in fact text but an image. Everything is in fact an image. All text everywhere. WTF! That’s not web design, it’s desktop publishing! The result is not so much a web page as a poster or flyer for printing! So much for getting indexed by search engines …. oh well, it’s not as if you publish stuff on the web for people to find and read is it …. oh wait …. bugger!

Things go even more pear-shaped when publishing though. If you remember last time I told you that you could only publish directly to the web if you had a .Mac account (which I don’t because I don’t need one). This means that you have to publish to a folder on your local machine each time you want to update the site. You might not think that’s too bad. You’d think you just publish it and then use a good SFT client like Transmit 3 to sync with the server so you only upload changed files. Well you’d be in for a nasty shock. Each time you re-publish the site everything gets re-generated so your sync will result in ALL files being uploaded again. This is inconvenient when your podcast has two episodes, positively annoying when it has three (like mine now does) and simply impossible when it has 10, 20, 30 or more.

Conclusion

The simple truth is that iWeb is totally impractical and un-usable in the long term. Nice Try Apple but absolutely no cigar this time. Version 2 had better be a major major improvement!

Tagged with: Apple • OS X • review • software

Having first read all the documentation on Foreign Keys and hence side-stepping the most common pit-falls by making sure all my tables were of type InnoDB, all the columns involved had indices and had exactly matching types I was most disappointed to get a bizarre and senseless error from MySQL:

Can't create table './epath/#sql-1a1_f9.frm' (errno: 150)

I’m using the latest stable release of MySQL (5.0.22) on OS X 10.4 Tiger.

The first thing I tried to solve this was a bit of googling which led me to loads of threads reminding people about the obvious stuff I was sure to avoid (table type, indices & matching data types). However, deep in the bowls of one of these discussions I did discover that, despite the documentation’s utter failure to mention this fact, foreign keys apparently only work when the columns involved are un-signed numbers.

The columns I was trying to link first were both of type varchar so I tried with a different pair of columns of type int (which I first set as being un-signed). This worked so I took the identical syntax and tried again with my varchar‘s, no joy, just the same uninformative error. It then occurred to me that the items in these columns will always be exactly two characters long so I changed their type to char(2) but again I got the same nonsensical error.

Some more googling seems to confirm my theory that MySQL will only be happy with foreign keys that are numeric un-signed types. This is a serious problem for the project I’m now working on. My data has a load of primary keys that are non-numeric that need to referenced as foreign keys all over the place. The two most obvious examples being 2 letter department codes and 3 letter alpha-numeric machine IDs. I could hack this by creating additional integer auto-increment fields in my departments and hosts tables and using these as primary keys instead of the logical fields but that is wasteful and pointlessly complex.

This is my first foray back in to serious MySQL development for a year having used PostgreSQL in the interim and I think I’ll be switching back to PostgreSQL before you can say ‘MySQL sucks’.

Tagged with: databases • MySQL

MySQL on the Mac has come a long way in the last few years. MySQL now release binaries for the Mac and those binaries are contained in a nice OS X package and even contain a preferences pane for the System Preferences App to allow you to easily control your MySQL server. I installed the latest version on my machine in work today and it is fair to call the installation process painless. You just click next a few times and enter your password once or twice. Because of this I have no problem saying that the server end of things with MySQL is now sorted on the Mac, but what about client GUIs? In this article I’ll be describing three free MysQL GUIs that I found and tested. All my tests were carried out with the latest stable binary release of the MySQL server for OS X (5.0.21) on a G5 PowerMac.

CocoaMySQL

The first GUI I came across was CocoaMySQL and I have to say I was far from impressed. Although the interface is nice in it’s simplicity the app simply does not play nice with the latest versions of MySQL server and hangs and does funny things so until the app starts to work correctly with modern servers the simplicity of it’s interface is irrelevant. After failing to create a table I un-installed this program.

MySQL Administrator

MySQL Administrator is released by the MySQL people so I considered this app to have great promise. The first thing I noticed is that it gives you an awful lot of
information about your MySQL server and also lets you control the server
and edit it’s config very well. However, when it came to creating tables I
was horribly disappointed.

I tried a simple test to create a table with two columns, an auto
incrementing integer called ‘id’ that is the primary key and then a
column called ‘name’ that is a varchar. The interface let me
prepare it all beautifully but the moment I clicked ‘Apply’ I got an
SQL error. I tried repeatedly but no matter what I did with the GUI I
could not get this simple table created. The GUI shows you the SQL it’s
about to execute and lets you edit it so I did eventually get the table created by manually editing the SQL being sent. I did experiment on a bit
and found that if you don’t use auto increments the interface does work
but since I use them a lot I just got fed up with this application. My
disappointment was magnified even more when I realised that there is no
way to enter data with this app either.

I had very high hopes
that this app would turn out to be my on-stop-shop for everything I
want to do with MySQL but it simply isn’t. The fact that it’s obviously
still buggy as hell and that you can’t use it to insert data means that
I really have no use for this app.

YourSQL

YourSQL is another nice simple front end for MySQL. I tested the latest stable version (1.7.2). This is very much a program for people who are familiar with MySQL and know the various datatypes etc.. This program will only make sense to people who know what they are doing but for those people it will save a lot of time. It uses a Finder style column-based interface for navigating servers, databases and tables which works really well if you have a lot of databases to manage. This is a good app for speeding up simple DBA tasks if you know what you are doing. The app is small and fast and hence I actually really like it.

I spent a few hours using this app today to build a fairly complex database and I have to say I found it a joy to use. It was easy to add a database, to add and edit tables and to view, search and insert data. To me that is what a MySQL GUI should do so this app gets 9 out of 10. Why not 10 out of 10? Well it didn’t do one thing, it didn’t give me an easy way to set up foreign keys. However, the interface makes it very easy to run SQL queries directly so if you want to add a foreign key to a table you can do so yourself quite easily in this way.

Below is a screen shot I took while I was experimenting today.

Conclusions

Although the actual MySQL server is now very easy to set up and control on the Mac there is still a shortage of good GUIs out there. ATM there is only one that I would recomend over the classic phpMyAdmin route and that is YourSQL.

Tagged with: OS X • review • software • databases • MySQL

I’ve been watching Bush’s approval ratings slide over the past months and was happy today to see them, hit a new low of 29%. A figure that low means that he has not only annoyed the Democrats (which we all knew he would) but also the neutrals and even many conservatives. The only people I imagine he has left are religious extremists and capitalist extremists (or the Oil Lobby as most call them). As far as I can see the only reasons that people voted for him were his proclaimed ideologies but it seems that no amount of public Christianity can hide his total incompetence from the American people. For a long time after 911 it was considered un-patriotic to disagree with Bush on security restrictions and wars but that sheen has now gone. Almost 5 years after 911 he still does not have a single success story. Afghanistan is still a mess (but a mess that is out of the news now), Iraq is also a complete disaster area and worst of all he still hasn’t caught Osama or found his mythical WMDs! Add to that the American troops dying on a daily basis, the rubbish economy, the ineptitude of his response to Katrina and more recently that wonderful fiasco with that ports deal and you get a good measure of the man’s leadership abilities. Finally add to that his dilution of the boundaries between church and state and his flagrant homophobia and you have a man very few people can see as doing a good job. Well done Americans, what took you so long?!

When OSX came out there were three new features that Steve ranted on about. The first was Spotlight, which I use a lot and really like, the second was Dashboard, which a quick scan of the articles in the Mac section of my blog will clearly show I like a lot, and the final one was Automator, which I’ve really neglected. I never even bothered to play with it properly until today! But, better late than never and since I had a free hour and some backups I wanted to automate I figured I’d give the classic rsync shell script approach a miss this time and see what Automator could do for me.

Introduction

In case you’re not familiar with Automator the idea behind it is that you can write scripts to automate repetitive tasks or tasks that you do a lot but without typing or seeing a single line of code. For the full Apple hype have a look at the Automator page on the Apple Site.

So, the question is, does Automator live up to the hype? Well IMO it does. It did take me a few minutes to get into the swing of things and I have to say I’d probably never have figured it out without looking at the sample workflows but once I got into it it was dead easy. You just drag and drop in the actions you need in the position you need them and then tinker with the options on each action until you have what you need. Something I found really helpful was that you can create complex workflows by chaining together simple ones. I initially started by trying to write one killer workflow that would deal with all elements of my backup but I soon realise I would be much better off breaking the task up and then creating the killer workflow by adding together all my small workflows.

My Experimental Workflow

I wanted to back up to a SAMBA share that is not that big so I was only interested in backing up important stuff. To me important stuff meant:

1. My email
2. My FireFox bookmarks
3. My Work Documents

So, I started by creating a simple workflow to archive my Thunderbird folder to my desktop, move it to a folder on the share and then re-name it with the current date. Then I used that as a base for creating similar flows for my FireFox settings and my documents. Finally I tied all this together with a flow that did the following:

1. Connected to the samba share
2. Ran the three backup flows
3. Ejected the samba share

Within 30 minutes of starting to play with Automator for the first time I had the above done, tested and working. I can now very easily and very quickly backup my important stuff to my samba share.

Below are some screenshots of some of my workflows to give you an idea of what the interface is like.

(above) The workflow for backing up my email.
(below) The workflow that ties all my small workflows together

Not Perfect

However, there are a few things that annoyed me, firstly, Automator crashed once when it had just finished saving a workflow. I’m not accustomed to Apple programs crashing so that worried me a bit but it only happened once and since then I’ve been poking around with automator for hours with no more crashes. The other thing is that I can’t get the action for disconnecting from the share to work. I’m not sure if the problem is with Automator or with OS X’s samba. Mind you samba support on Tiger has been flaky to say the least so it doesn’t really surprise me that Automator has some issues with it. The important thing is that it can connect to the share which it does without problems.

Conclusions

Automator delivers on it’s promise of letting you do powerful things all within a simple drag and drop interface. The range of actions available is simply phenomenal ranging from simple sysadmin tasks like moving and copying files or running shell scripts to automatically burning backups to CD and automatically processing entire folders of images. Automator also integrates with just about every Apple program so you can automate more tasks than I could possibly describe here. To get some idea of how many actions there are have a look at the screenshot of the action browser pane below. Yes, it crashed on me once but I’m still very happy with it and will be using it a lot.

Tagged with: Apple • OS X • review • software • Automator • operating system

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