Archive for March, 2009

I do not like Evernote

March 23rd, 2009

I’ve been using the web-based version of Evernote in earnest ever since Google announced their intention to abandon Notebook. It’s nice overall but has some quirks that I do not like. The upload quota for one. The fact that I have to login all the time. Also the pop-up upgrade ads. And I don’t like [...]

Programmer’s creed

March 21st, 2009

This is my keyboard. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

MySQL performance, character sets, and left joins

March 19th, 2009

So I thought I was losing my mind when a simple LEFT JOIN on a new table was taking forever to complete: SELECT email FROM a LEFT JOIN b ON b.email=a.email WHERE b.email is null That’s about the simplest LEFT JOIN you can write to get all rows in a that are not in b. [...]

Handy Linux command lines

March 5th, 2009

Kind of a mish-mosh of snippets below. A lot of them are useful if you’re managing servers. The rest are useful more generally and occasionally. Many of these utilities may already be on your system, others you may have to install. (Hopefully you’re using a Linux distro that has all of these in its standard [...]

Flickr Pandas

March 4th, 2009

flickr.pandas.getPhotos is, as Kellan points out, “quirky” but awesome. It is essentially a firehose (three firehoses, actually) of realtime Flickr data updated every 60 seconds (not every 60000 seconds as the documentation seems to indicate). That means the “ling ling” firehose, for example, exposes about 172,000 photos per day. I’m still experimenting with the data. [...]