Archives of December 2004
Upgrading MySQL from 4.0/Latin-1 to 4.1/UTF-8
I upgraded the MySQL database server powering this and a few other sites from 4.0 to 4.1. At the same time, I converted the data from Latin-1 to UTF-8, which proved to be a bit more complicated thing that I had anticipated. This is how it was done.
Backing up data and removal of 4.0
First, backing up of the entire 4.0 database. This was done with the superhandy MySQL utility mysqldump with the following command:mysqldump --opt --all-databases > d:\dump.sqlThere was 420Mb of data in sql form. However, MySQL can INSERT several rows with one command, so there is no one INSERT command per one row; it is much more compact.
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Categories: Computers
Posted by Matias at 06.12.2004 21:47 (8 years ago) | 25 comments | 0 trackbacks
Reality check for security
Recently, I read Bruce Schneier's book Beyond Fear. It was quite an enlightening read: quite a few of the things the book was about were obvious in some intuitive level, but Schneier managed to formulate them in a logical manner. Even better, the formulation was very clear, consistent and easy to follow. Although the book was occassionally a bit tedious, it still was very entertaining to read, thanks to numerous examples. I especially liked those taken from the behavior or characteristics of different animals. Being both enlightening and entertaining is not very easily accomplished.
Continue reading "Reality check for security"... (598 words)
Categories: Literature
Posted by Matias at 07.12.2004 22:37 (8 years ago) | 60 comments | 0 trackbacks
The Rasterbator in the media
ReadyMade magazine is something I never had heard of until one day I got email titled "Press question". My first thought was that something had passed Thunderbird's spam filter, but it was a genuine email from their reporter, who wanted to write an article about The Rasterbator. She asked quite a lot of different things in a few emails and based the half-page article on them. The article turned out quite well, I reckon, she understood quite well all the motives and things behind being enthusiastic about the web and having too much time to do things - at least I'm quite happy about it.
Continue reading "The Rasterbator in the media"... (290 words)
Categories: Art, Creations
Posted by Matias at 08.12.2004 21:37 (8 years ago) | 19 comments | 0 trackbacks
Personification of the iPods
iPodWizard, a supercool application, can change the graphics of iPods thus allowing customization of iPods.
Kati wanted Aladdin Sane onto her iPod Mini (which is titled Ziggy). Naturally, I put the Papal Kekkonen onto mine. Now the flashing "Do not disconnect" signs will emanate papal blessings and rock decadence every second.
Categories: Gear
Posted by Matias at 09.12.2004 20:17 (8 years ago) | 13 comments | 0 trackbacks
Spam elimination by visual pattern recognizion
I'm getting so much junk mail that the sheer amount actually eases recognizing it. Thunderbird does a wonderful job in placing the spam messages into it's Junk folder, but although it never has done a false positive (determining that a non-spam email is spam), I do not trust it completely and want to glance through the junk mail titles before actually deleting them.
Continue reading "Spam elimination by visual pattern recognizion"... (199 words)