the jof

Critical Mass

Critical Mass

If perhaps you’d like to export some MySQL data as csv values, here’s a little sed hack I figured out this afternoon:

[jonathan@magnar:~]$ mysql -umysqluser -ppassword dbname -B -e “select * from tablename order by foo;” | sed ’s/\t/,/g;’ > somefile
That sed block might be a little scary to some newbies, but it replaces tabs (\t) with a comma.
That’ll give data in the format of:

foo,bar
baz,gazonk

Sometimes, quotes are more appropriate for some automated csv imports, so use this instead:

[jonathan@magnar:~]$ mysql -umysqluser -ppassword dbname -B -e “select * from tablename order by foo;” | sed ’s/\t/,/g;s/^/”/;s/\n//g’ > somefile

That’ll make data in the form of:

“foo”,”bar”
“baz”,”quux”

This post from Schneier on Security is a hoot.

Someone asked me today why their MySQL databases seem to be getting corrupted when they used a custom init script they hacked up to stop it. Well, when I took a look it appeared that they someow got the idea that sending SIGKILL to stop every PID with ‘mysql’ in the name was a good idea.

This is a really bad idea for a couple of reasons. First off, picking which processes to slay based on the name is a horrible idea because there could certainly be other processes with mysql in the name which should be kept running in some instances. And secondly, stopping MySQL with a SIGKILL will _corrupt_ databases. It’s completely untrappable by any process, and affords it no chance whatsoever to clean itself up and die gracefully.

In my opinion, a SIGKILL should only be used as a last resort, and one should at least give a SIGHUP and a SIGINT first to try and do things properly.

Last night I had a dream in which I was at a gelateria having gelato with Bruce Schneier and Lawrence Lessig.
“That was odd”, I thought when I woke.

Strangely, it must have been seeded by revisiting the “Bruce Schneier Facts” page yesterday. Bruce Schneier: one of the best cryptanalytic badasses of all time.

To be honest, I’m a bit disappointed that I got turned away from Mighty tonight at the Revision3 party. Granted, I’m sure they have an alcohol license to protect, but their doorman was pretty clear that despite the fact that they were serving food it was a venue policy.

Now, I could only begin to understand wanting to filter out the 18 and under crowd, but from 18 to 21 (which is just a totally arbitrary age…) there’s a bit of a grey zone. When it comes down to it, I would guess that there’s probably a minority of immature and/or irresponsile young adults that are ruining the situation for everyone else. Perhaps we should be issuing maturity licenses rather than arbitrarily valuing a non-existant correlation between age and maturity, because it just doesn’t exist.

What I would recommend to venues is considering hiring door men and women with a level head that get to decide who goes in and who doesn’t, because frankly, most of the time it’s pretty obvious who’s going to be a problem.

This also brings up another topic that I hadn’t really been made aware of until recently. A couple of weeks ago, I went to a “Bloggers Mett-Up” in support of Jane Kim, who is running for school board this year in San Francisco. We got to talking about issues facing youth in the city, when she really made clear that there isn’t a whole lot for those under 21, and especially those under 18. She certainly planted the seed that got me thinking about off and on since then, and she’s totally right.

Datasafe?

I found it a bit concerning and odd that a company that specializes in keeping documents secure would have a van full of bankers boxes just sitting wide open and unattended on the street.

The car from Washington state

Jane Kim Meetup