Sir Ken Robinson - Hammer Lectures

Many of you asked for more from Sir Ken Robinson and his thoughts regarding education and multiple intelligences. I've been following hist lectures for quite some time, and here's one of the better single-view segments, presented at UCLA in 2009.

Letter Sweep

Following suit with the likes of Tim Bray and Eric Meyer, I figured I'd throw together my browser's letter sweep tonight.

• [A]dmin Site. Yeah, I guess I would be visiting the admin panel for this. Quite frequently.
• Mirascape's [B]log. An infrequent haunt of mine, but fairly obvious.
• [C]MON. Cluster Monitor for MySQL Cluster, something I almost always have open.
• Google [D]ocs. This one is painfully obvious, I use Google Docs extensively.
• [E]ricMartindale.com. Okay, that's a gimme. Does this make me egocentric?
• [F]acebook. I'm actually fairly ashamed of this one. Why can't I have a cool F site? *sadface*
• [G]mail. Three accounts linked using Google's Multiple Sign-in. Open [almost] all day.
• [H]ighcharts JS. A pretty kick-ass Javascript library for generating charts on the clientside.
• [I]nternal Discussion. A site for communication with my team. :)
• [J]Query Mobile Demo, 1.0 alpha 3. I've been spending a lot of time toying with jQuery Mobile, seeing where it's going compared to Sencha Touch.
• [K]r.github.com. Keith Rarick's GitHub redirect. Total ass-kicker.
• [L]inkedIn. Pretty straightforward, between hiring for our team at @Mirascape and the travel to and from various conferences and Meetups lately.
• [M]irascape. The augmented reality platform I'm responsible for.
• [N]oxBot. A nice PHP-powered IRC bot with various plugins. A bit out of date, but very powerful. Been using it for a couple things lately.
• [O]K, QR Me!. A QR Code-generating link shortener I built.
• [P]ostmark. Best Email delivery service I've used. Nice RESTful API, flat rate for emails sent.
• [Q]uora. These guys nail Q&A, and they're doing it pretty well. Check out all their buzz, too. But for some reason, I just don't stick.
• Google [R]eader. “From your 1,040 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 21,549 items, clicked 274 items, starred 853 items, shared 37 items, and emailed 8 items.” -- </stats>
• [S]erver Stats for Mirascape. Powered by Munin, it's how I keep track of the status and metrics of all my servers.
• [T]witter. Not surprising. I love their webapp for my personal use, but own and manage at least five accounts using SplitTweet.
• [U]serVoice. Pretty sweet tool I use for giving the communities I manage a good way to build a consensus on what they desire most. Examples I run: for RolePlayGateway, and EVE UserVoice for EVE Online.
• Google [V]oice. Allows me to use SMS from my computer, read (as opposed to listen to) voicemail. Great tool. If only it supported MMS.
• [W]achovia. One of the places I do banking.
• [X]DA Developers. An indisposable resource for getting rid of carrier-installed crap and running my own choice of software on the hardware I purchased!
• [Y]ouTube. Another big namer. No surprise.
• [Z]ecco. Where I trade most of my public stocks. :)

Surprisingly populist, and there's a lot of Google-owned properties in there. I'm also using Chromium, so I think it prefers the roots of the sites I visit instead of searching through my history for individual pages.

MySQL Cluster: Generating Partition Reports

If you're using MySQL Cluster and have recently added a nodegroup, you can use the following code to generate a report of what tables are currently partitioned across the nodes as you apply ALTER ONLINE TABLE ... REORGANIZE PARTITION to them to get them partitioned:

select count(p.table_name) as partitions, p.table_schema, p.table_name from tables t join partitions p on (t.table_schema=p.table_schema and t.table_name=p.table_name) where t.engine='ndbcluster' group by p.table_schema, p.table_name order by partitions desc;

You'll get a nice clean report of all your tables, what schema they belong to, and how many partitions they have. Use in combination with my method of finding the largest tables in MySQL and you'll ensure smooth growth of your cluster!

Find Largest Tables in MySQL

If you're trying to find what tables in your MySQL deployment are consuming the most amount of space, you can use the following query to find this information directly from the information schema.

SELECT CONCAT(table_schema, '.', table_name), CONCAT(ROUND(table_rows / 1000000, 2), 'M') rows, CONCAT(ROUND(data_length / ( 1024 * 1024 * 1024 ), 2), 'G') DATA, CONCAT(ROUND(index_length / ( 1024 * 1024 * 1024 ), 2), 'G') idx, CONCAT(ROUND(( data_length + index_length ) / ( 1024 * 1024 * 1024 ), 2), 'G') total_size, ROUND(index_length / data_length, 2) idxfrac, engine FROM information_schema.TABLES ORDER BY data_length + index_length DESC LIMIT 25;

You'll get a list of the top 25 tables by total size (index size + data size), how many rows they have, and the engine they are using to be stored. Being able to see what engine is being used is especially helpful when running MySQL Cluster.

Auto-Dim Your Display at Night [Linux]

If you're at all like me, you often find yourself tapping away late at night on some project that you just need to hammer out those last few lines before you get to bed. Inevitably, that just doesn't happen.

So, I came up with the following solution subtly remind me that I really should be going to sleep (or hey, at least make the LCD easier on my eyes while I'm working!):

Edit the crontab for your root user using crontab -e. Add the following:
0 22 * * * echo -n "0" > /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD0/brightness # dims LCD to 0% at 10 PM
0 7 * * * echo -n "100" > /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD0/brightness # brightens LCD to 100% at 7 AM (all-nighter time!)


You can test either of these commands from the command line directly; you'll also need to make sure the path to your LCD's brightness setting is correct.