Lee Packham's Corner

Is it any wonder the world is infested with spam?

admin — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 17:16:37 +0000

If you Google for ‘iTunes’, you get a nice sponsored link at the top that looks like it goes to the official Apple iTunes page. In fact, it does not. It takes you to http://www.itunesgu.info/uk.html (probably best not to go there!). It forces you to sign up to download iTunes. At the very least, it means they captcher your e-mail address/name details. You can even PAY! Yes really. You can pay $11.67 per year for a 3 year membership!?

I dread to think what’s actually in the download.

Google and Apple should really stop this sort of thing - don’t you think? Way to spread the badness around the Internet.

Google offering spam/adware above official downloads

The Wowhead Christmas Wallpaper

admin — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 08:42:58 +0000

The guys at wowhead.com have posted their Christmas wallpaper with a load of Alliance eye candy. The only issue is… where’s the Horde eye candy?

A Christmas Present for You - The Wowhead Blog.

Unibody Macbook Pro constantly waking up

admin — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 12:43:05 +0000

If you have any bluetooth device that constantly wants to talk to your new Macbook Pro (like a headset/keyboard) - it will wake it from sleep constantly and thus drain your battery. Fun eh?

How Warcraft reigned supreme in 2008

admin — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 22:30:06 +0000

I’m an avid World of Warcraft player myself. I tried Conan and Warhammer this year… why did they fail? The Register gives some insight… not a very good insight… but an insight none the less!

How Warcraft reigned supreme in 2008 • The Register

CRY vs. DRY

admin — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:15:22 +0000

A work colleague coined a fantastic term for code that just isn’t DRY:

Constantly Repeating Yourself - CRY

Not only does it describe one’s reaction to amazingly shoddy code, that just oozes of a developer spending all day using Copy and Paste, but seems an appropriate opposite.

Back to refactoring CRY code with me!

Apple Bluetooth Keyboard under Vista

admin — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 18:36:26 +0000

I enjoy gaming. I don’t enjoy having to use a full PC rig to play them. I prefer playing on my Macbook Pro. I recently got myself the new Unibody one and wanted to play Left 4 Dead and Fallout 3 under Vista x64 (it has 4GB of RAM, x86 makes little sense).

After a painful install, I wanted to get my Apple Bluetooth keyboard to work. When I am at home, my MBP sits up on a Griffin stand and I use the Bluetooth keyboard. However, for love nor money, I could not make the thing work under Vista. It would just keep flashing it’s little green light for no apparent reason - until I finally figured it out!

At the step where you have to ‘enter’ the passkey. Enter it, then press ENTER repeatedly. Silly? Yes! The only thing that got it working for me? Yes! It seems that you have to keep persuading the keyboard to actually stop being discoverable and be useful. This appears, to me at least, the only way to achieve it.

The blog - It’s moved! Again!

admin — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 08:17:12 +0000

I decided to come back to a Wordpress based blog - hosted at Joyent. The reasons were pretty simple. I wasn’t overly happy with the way that Typepad’s pricing model worked. It’s ok for people wanting a pretty basic blog, but if you actually used it and want to customise it, I think Wordpress is better.

I could have done the whole free hosting on Wordpress.com thing - but I prefer hosting myself.

Hope the few readers I do have like the theme!

Mus domesticus (Rodent Mice)

admin — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 06:14:12 +0000

We get mice up in our flat a reasonable amount. A block of 50 or so flats tends to mean there'll always be some. Plus, this is London - so you're never too far from them I guess. Being on the 5th floor helps a bit, as they have quite a way to come to get here.

So we put down traps and poison. Recently however, we've noticed an increase in the number that brave beyond underneath the kitchen. Annoying? Yes. Obvious as to why? No.

They're eating the poison. We have a number of open bait trays with a nice 'bleed them to death' type affair. The trays under the kitchen were empty! I mean, completely. Couple of droppings and that's it! We've caught a couple in traps too.

So now I have relocated the bait under the kitchen. I guess we'll also have to get more poison! Blocking their entrance and exit is hard. Basically they're coming in from around the waste pipes and there isn't really any way to properly block it (without removing the entire kitchen). More elaborate methods of blocking required.

I'm also a little concerned that the poison isn't actually killing them!

However, those few that do read the blog… any clever tricks on dealing with these pesky buggers? Do these "Ultra Sonic Repellents" work?

Big table and changing indexes

admin — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 13:37:47 +0000

MySQL sucks at large tables. Sorry if you’ve come here thinking that I, in any way, like MySQL. That said, I have to look after some sizeable databases which are on MySQL for various reasons - so needs must.

I recently needed to sort out an issue with indexes on a table. I needed to drop one, and add a couple more. Snag? The table has 3.6 million rows and as such I would call it a large table.

Normally, I guess, you would do something like:

ALTER TABLE foo ADD INDEX (my_column);

ALTER TABLE foo DROP INDEX old_index;

This doesn’t work when you have a lot of rows. Well, it does… if you have a few hours to spare. Let’s look at why.

When you add an index to a pre-existing table, MySQL has to go look through the entire table to populate the new index. When you drop an index on a pre-existing table, it loops through every row depopulating the index before finally dropping it.

So, here’s what I did to speed things up:

SELECT * FROM foo INTO OUTFILE 'foo_outfile.dmp';

```
CREATE TABLE foo_a LIKE foo;
```

ALTER TABLE foo_a ADD INDEX (my_column);

```
ALTER TABLE foo_a DROP INDEX old_index;
```

LOAD DATA INFILE 'foo_outfile.dmp' INTO TABLE foo_a;

```
TRUNCATE TABLE foo; DROP TABLE foo;
```
```
ALTER TABLE foo_a RENAME foo;
```

Why TRUNCATE before DROP? That’s easy, DROP tries to delete each row. To delete each row the index has to be updated… 3.6M times! TRUNCATE trashes everything, then you’re dropping an empty table!

The importance of tabs

admin — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 22:16:39 +0000

This sort of thing drives me barmy - why can’t people set a standard on tabs?

The above snippet is taken from eJabberd (a Jabber Server written in Erlang). Notice how some lines are soft tabs, others are hard. The causes havoc when dealing with merging in source control (I don’t care if you use a new fangled Git approach). Whitespace (both tabs and line endings) must be consistent on programming projects. Much pain ensues if they are not!

Personally I set rules in SVN commit hooks. This means that if a developer has anything ‘bad’ like Windows Line Endings on a Python project, then it is dealt with accordingly.

Saves a lot of merge pain!