Category Archives: Development

General development news

mysql> SHOW TABLE STATUS; — It looks horrible!

Posted on by

TL;DR; – the results of MySQL’s SHOW TABLE STATUS is pretty horrible on a small terminal window, and most of the time shows way more than you’ll ever want to know for a quick summary.

Ivan Cachicatari over at http://en.latindevelopers.com/ivancp/2012/a-better-show-table-status/ came up with a stored procedure which nicely cuts it down to just the information that’s useful about a database, but I decided that most of the time it could be cut down even further:

This literally just shows the information about the tables, and not any of the crap associated with stuff I don’t use (interoperability is a pain) such as stored procedures and triggers, and I also rarely use views so that went too.

Google Blog javascript balls

Posted on by

So, I’ve just seen http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/ipv6-countdown-to-launch.html, if you don’t know what I’m on about, it’s pretty cool! Just mouse-over the balls, and have a play! :D

Unfortunately, they’ve hidden the code to do it, so there’s no easy way of finding out what they’ve done. Looks like each ball is tied to a specific point, and they just elastically bounce around that point. Still looks cool though :D

Front page redesign!

Posted on by

I’ve just redesigned the front page of the site – see what you think!

It replaces the navigation bar with a much more blocky navigation which takes up most of the front page, allowing you to easily get to an interesting bit – it looks cleaner too.

Raspberry Pi, and Raspberry Pie

Posted on by

:(

I went to bed early last night cos I knew I had to be up early this morning. Getting up at 05:30 is something that is incredibly rare for me. Unfortunately, it was a bit pointless this time around.

I was trying to get one of these:

Copyright 2011-2012, Raspberry Pi Foundation

It’s called a Raspberry Pi, and it’s essentially a computer the size of a credit card. With an ARM11 processor manufactured by Broadcom, 256M RAM, HDMI/RCA video output, 2 USB ports and Ethernet, powered by micro-USB, with SD for storage. What more could you want for a basic computer system?

Initially, it’ll run a variant of either Debian or Fedora Linux, and my plan is to use it either as a local web server/proxy server/dns server, or maybe running XBMC as a low-power media frontend. It’ll also be good for simply messing about with.

Oh, did I mention the price of this thing? No?

$35 (USD).

In the process of trying to order one, we (everyone who wanted one) brought down not only RS Components’ website, but Premier Farnell too in mere seconds. They were warned about the traffic, but seemingly thought the warning a bit frivolous since both of them didn’t adequately prepare for a HUGE traffic surge.

And now I have a craving for raspberry pie.