Recent Blog Posts
Blogs ยป Archive for October 6th, 2004
Taming MySQL Administration
Taming the management of your MySQL Server may have just become a little easier with the most recent release of Navicat.
This GUI administration tool for MySQL servers has some advantages for the developer — for starters it runs on Linux, Macintosh and Windows with fair consistency (as far as equivalent feature sets go). A feature matrix is available online.
(to see the screen shots included with this post please see the Open Sourcery blog at http://www.sitepoint.com/blog-post-view.php?id=200601)
Several existing and new features will appeal to power users, including:
- Import from ODBC source (Windows only)
- Stored Procedure design for MySQL 5 (all versions)
- Batch Job and Scheduling (all versions)
- Data Transfer from MySQL to MySQL or to a file (all versions)
- Manage indexes and foreign key configuration
- User privileges management
I kicked around Navicat on both Mac OS 10.3.5 and Windows XP Pro using both development and production database servers and found it easy to use in function and interface. Some of the areas of interest are below.
The main view of Navicat, as shown below, is a clean workspace with support for multiple sql server connections.
Interaction with connections and tables can be done via double clicks and right click contextual menus.
To get started with testing, I moved …
Making silhouettes in Photoshop
This brief tutorial will go over how to trace and “cut out” an object in Photoshop and create a black silhouette, a la iPod ads.
Let’s start with this picture I downloaded from istockphoto.com (ID – 110035). While the white background makes it easier to cut out, any background with enough contrast to the foreground object should work (and you can always touch up afterwards!).
Now, I’ll use Photoshop’s handy Extract filter. Go to Filter > Extract and the Extract dialog window will pop open.
Using the brush tool, I outline the shape that I want to cut out along the edges. Then I fill the shape with the paint bucket to show the areas that I want to “keep.” When you outline, then fill, you’ll be able to click the “Preview” button to view the extraction. When I’m done, I click “OK.”
I fill the background with a contrasting color so that I can see how well the extraction did. As you can see in this closeup, some of the edges are a bit “transparent.” It actually makes the highlights look like the green is “reflecting” off of them (a good effect if I want to add a background …
JsLint for PHP anyone?
Anyone with excess time and skill on their hands? Would be awesome to see a port of jslint to PHP (and Perl / Python / Ruby for that matter). There’s probably some issues with multibyte strings to contend with but browsing the source it looks doable.
It would mean is tools like Simple Test could help validate Javascript on a page they’re. Simple Test comes with it’s own regex-based parsing tools, which I introduced briefly here. Whether regexes are the right way to go though is another question, bearing in mind character encoding issues.
SOAP meets real world
Useful article over on O’Reilly: Don’t Be Afraid to Drop the SOAP recounting experiences and problems with SOAP while working on Bricolage, a Perl CMS. Probably doesn’t need saying but going to anyway: if you want reality, talk to the Perl guy.
The conclusion I’ve formed about SOAP is it really isn’t suited to the Internet and arguably not even for Extranets but rather for integrating disparate systems inside corporations with generations of legacy technology. And even then, you should consider XML-RPC first. The strongest thing I think SOAP has going for it is just that everyone agrees so it’s possible to find implementations on all sorts of platforms. There’s probably a lesson to be learned here about “design by committee”.
Was also interested to see that the author of the article, Sam Tregar, is now working on Krang. By chance had lots of opportunity to pick the brains of Perrin Harkins who’s also part of the Krang team and was talking about it at OSCOM. Aside from being a really nice guy, Perrin has seen it all when it comes to IT and the Internet so buy him a beer at the next conference (believe …
