MovableType@Gmail.Com for sale

June 19th, 2004

Message sent to the orkut MovableType community:

hi
MovableType@Gmail.Com For Sell (sic).

If you want this ID in Gmail , Plz email to me . xxx@gmail.com

Ugh. This Gmail name-squatting is getting ugly.

Posted by Chu Yeow at June 19, 2004 SGT | Permalink | Comments and TrackBacks (1) | Category: Fun

Thanks for the Gmail invite

June 18th, 2004

Well, a reader was kind enough to offer me a Gmail invite gratuitously:

Want a gmail invite? I think I’ve got one left and I’d much rather give it to someone who cares about web standards (yay) than compromise what I think is my moral integrity by whoring out something I got for free in the first place.

You can’t deny there is some truth in the bit about “whoring out” Gmail invites that seem to have been happening of late heh (heard of Gmail Swap?). Well, not everyone is whoring out their invites - some of them go to a good cause (like donations to charity or non-profit organizations).

Anyway, I’d like to thank Luke for his kind gesture. Luke wrote about his Gmail invites as such:

I’ve got 2 invites left and although free stuff (or auctioning it off for cash through ebay) is tempting, it doesn’t sit right with me morally, ethically, or somethin’.

Nice.

Luke keeps a blog at http://blog.lukema.net/ and also an anime blog with mini-reviews of anime like Naruto and Full Metal Alchemist. Visit his website sometime.

Posted by Chu Yeow at June 18, 2004 SGT | Permalink | Comments and TrackBacks (54) | Category: Blogging

A for-loop? For whom?

June 18th, 2004

The Daily WTF has a very funny reader-submitted entry on for-loops (or rather, the lack of them).

Good stuff on The Daily WTF, which has near-daily posts on programming-related things that make you say “WTF?!?”. Recommended reading.

Alex Papadimoulis, the person behind The Daily WTF, is currently giving out Gmail invites for submissions to The Daily WTF.

Posted by Chu Yeow at June 18, 2004 SGT | Permalink | Comments and TrackBacks (1) | Category: Fun

Table names and case sensitivity - bad MySQL

June 17th, 2004

This issue has wasted a good part of a day trying to figure out why my database-driven pages failed to work correctly after dumping a database from my Windows dev machine into a Linux box - I just had to whine about this.

Following database naming conventions (actually, there are many, not all of which advocate using mixed case naming schemes), I decided to use mixed case table names when developing on my Windows box. So a table containing localization (or L10n) information for widgets would be named `Widget_L10n`, and the lookup table for widget to purchases would be named `Widget_Purchases`. No problem. Everything worked fine on the dev machine.

When the time came to move into live testing, I dumped the contents of the database into a file and proceeded to import into the production database server. Of course, nothing worked. I checked the database contents - everything was there. I checked the scripts - everything was good to go; if it works in the dev machine, it should rightly work in the production. I then checked the dump file, thinking it unlikely that something was wrong there but checking anyway - everything seemed fine. I went back to the MySQL client (I was using MySQL Front) and it hit me - the table names were in lowercase. And the PHP scripts were (correctly) using the mixed-case table names. Gah! The database dump file contained queries with the table names in lowercase, so they were lowercase in the Linux box while I was using queries with mixed-case names. At that point I hated myself for forgetting how MySQL stores table names - as a name of the file that stores the table. The manual said so and I even read that before.

Lesson learnt: use all lowercase identifier names in MySQL for portability across Windows and operating/file systems where lettercase matters (such as Linux and Mac OX X UFS volumes). Throw the existing database naming conventions you have out the door.

Posted by Chu Yeow at June 17, 2004 SGT | Permalink | Comments and TrackBacks (5) | Category: Web development

Mozilla Thunderbird 0.7 freshly roasted

June 17th, 2004

Mozilla Thunderbird 0.7 has just been released. Go get it (or go to the Thunderbird 0.7 release FTP directory for the zip build).

New and noteworthy is the inclusion of the extension and theme managers (derived from that in Firefox). This is also a static build so performance has significantly improved.

Update: just saw this Promoting Mozilla Thunderbird page pointed to on one of the TrackBack pings I received. Nice buttons.

Posted by Chu Yeow at June 17, 2004 SGT | Permalink | Comments and TrackBacks (7) | Category: Mozilla
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