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Large MySQL databases

... don't work very well using the MyISAM table type. Corruptions and system lock-ups are a-plenty when you have MyISAM tables with more than 1,000,000 records. The only reason that you would want to use MyISAM tables is to use the full-text searching functionality, and this feature is only marginally better than using the SQL 'like' statement.

Mein Großvater Witz

Mein Großvater hat immer zu mir gesagt: "Junge, gehe nicht ins Bordell, da gibt es Dinge, die du nicht sehen solltest."
Natürlich bin ich aus Neugier dann doch mal hingegangen.
Und was hast du gesehen?
Meinen Großvater!

SPARC II Linux Distro

A Linux Distro for those 1990's Ultra 5 and Ultra 10 Sparc-II computers!

Blessed are the cheesemakers
Blessed are the meek
Blessed are the bignoses

Oooh, that's nice, isn't it?
- from Monty Python's The Life of Brian

In 2008 and I built a specialized Linux "distro"! BigNoseLinux is a binary Linux installation for Sun Ultra5/10 computers that hail from the late 1990's (!) and is based on the Gentoo Linux meta-distro. The BigNoseLinux distro is primarily intended to quickly create a web server using the classical LAMP-stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) with Joomla and a few other useful web-based management tools.

Burst a Content-indexed PDF doc into separate chapter PDF files

You can burst a PDF doc with a table of contents into separate chapter PDF files, with each file named according to the chapter's name. This is a description of how to go about it, and in the end there is a full "Burst By Bookmark" shell script to do exactly this, although strictly speaking, we are not dealing with PDF bookmarks, but with PDF table-of-contents chapters. If the PDF doc doesn't have a table of content, you can add one using a bespoke and expensive PDF tool, or use a different method to chunk the doc up into chapters.

Instant Swiss

Learn Swiss in 5 minutes

Swiss (Schwiizertüütsch/Schwiizerdütsch/Schweizerdeutsch) is a quite different language to formal German (Hochdeutsch). It still has not been formalized, although this was attempted once and failed dismally. Not much is printed in Swiss, nearly all business and education is done in formal German (albeit that the German spoken in Switzerland differs from that spoken in Germany to the same extent that English spoken in the UK and the USA differ).

Filename Data Cleansing with BASH, PDFTK & LibreOffice

I was given a USB stick with 16,000 PowerPoint files with the .ppt extension dating from 2005, of which each document is a manually scanned page of sheet music. This was done by a very diligent soul all those years ago, who knew little of the pernicious ways how Big Tech operate by regularly changing the data formats of digital artefacts, which forces users to constantly upgrade their expensive software. No surprise then that files produced by the version of PowerPoint from back in 2005 are not recognised by the more recent versions of the PowerPoint application.

Cool One-Liners in BASH

Check this out! Impress girls with your BASH skills. Be the coolest kid on the block. Get invited to all the parties. Get everyone to buy you beer, etc...

Here are some cool tricks to use in BASH.

Chuck Norris

Being a child of the 70s and the 80s, we not only had the best music ever, but we also regularly watched Chuck Norris movies in dimly-lit school halls to the rattling sound of a reel-to-reel projector and a single small speaker up front, operated by some overweight, chain-smoking, horn-rimmed glasses-wearing woman with a stinky hair-perm and a post-menopausal shriek. Ten cents that cost us! For this money, our guy Chuck was obliged to get himself into a fight with some ne'er-do-wells and win.

Poland: I am here for the Beer

Winter in Poland is cold - it is -20°C today and the rivers and lakes are frozen over. Hot food helps and was thus consumed. I hope I am wrong, but it appears to me that Polish cuisine consists of cabbage, cabbage, cabbage, potatoes and some meat. And large dill pickles. This is what lunch today suggested in any case: I had 3 different types of cabbage piled high onto my plate - red cabbage, cole-slow and sauerkraut - by a lovely little old lady in the local eatery who thought I lacked essential gasses.

Frikkie in Irak

Frikkie is 'n huur soldaat en besluit om aan te sluit by die American Marines in Irak. En een dag is hy afgesonder van die res en 3 Irakse soldate keer hom vas op 'n sand duin en hy besef hy sal moet 'n plan maak hier.

Create a bootable USB stick in Linux

Here is how to quickly create a bootable USB stick using just the standard commands on the Linux command line: We use the dd command and write the .iso file directly to the root of the USB stick.

Controlling the Bull in Software Development

It's nearly 35 years now that I have been in the software production and integration business and as an IT consultant, I have witnessed the inner workings of many types of businesses that claim to run their businesses with the aid of software and teams that do software development and integration into the business. I am still regularly surprised how so many businesses, including some of the most venerable banks and public organizations that are accountable to tax-payers, haphazardly fail to deliver functional software solutions that serve the business in this day and age, when we already have so much cumulative experience to learn from.

Coding Rules

A Collection of Coding Rules gathered over the years...

In the words of Suzi Quatro, Wernher von Braun may have been "a f@#king Nazi", but he did have a point: How often have you not tested something because there was a prevailing opinion of "What could possibly go wrong?", or "Of course it will work!".

How to drop all tables in a MySQL database

... without destroying the database.

If a tree falls in a forest...

Bishop Berkeley espoused the school of thought called Idealism, which went along the lines of: "To be, is to be perceived". One fyne day he dreamt the following conundrum up: "If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?" The implication is that if no one perceives the event, not only does the tree not make a sound, but the tree does not even exist.

This is, of course, a load of old rubbish. The good Bishop can't do me for defamation since he ceased being perceived in 1753. Had he lived in today's more cynical world, he may well have come up with more relevent thought-experiments to illustrate the philosophy of Idealism, thus:

AVI to DVD conversion

Directly Burn DVD's from .avi files

Here is a quick and simple-to-use utility to convert an AVI file to the weird intermediate files and to then write them all to a DVD. It is called avi2dvd and is written in BASH-shell. It is unlikely to run on Windows.

More about it here at https://sourceforge.net/projects/avi2dvd

How to Dedupe a table in MySQL

A quick and dirty way of stripping duplicate records out of a MySQL table!, if your table has no indexes or constraints.

Getting Oracle's SQLPlus Client to run on Linux

If you are running a Linux version that does not support RPM packages and you need to install Oracle's sqlplus client, you have two options to install it:

Oracle DBMS_PIPE - why you should abandon it

A classical method of getting Oracle-based processes communicating with the outside world is by using the DBMS_PIPE package: Typically, we write to a pipe from an Oracle PL/SQL-based process, and then we continuously run an asynchronous Oracle PL/SQL process which reads the pipe and processes what it reads. A common use of DBMS_PIPE is for debugging, logging and launching external processes.

Oracle External Procedures

It is possible to call O/S commands or third-party programs from within SQL or PL/SQL with external procedures. Let's build and install an External Procedure on an Oracle Database Server and see how we can call an O/S-level host command from within SQL code to do anything. No, actually, let's not. It is dangerous. Think of an ExtProc as a root kit for Oracle...

Oracle server construction guide on Linux

A step-by-step construction guide to install and configure a Linux server from scratch and how to then install the Oracle 10g RDBMS on it.

Product Quickcode Generator

How to generate your own Base36 Quickcode sequence using the SHA2 hash

Run this process for a few hours and you too can have your very own unique sequence of millions of unique Quickcodes that will keep your inventory management system well-fed for life.

String-Matching help for SQL Server

The task of matching strings between heterogeneous systems, especially that of matching personal or company names or addresses, is not easy with SQL Server's limited set of built-in string SQL functions. Here is a C# CLR-Assembly (with source code) for SQL Server with some advanced string-handling functions that may help:

LTrim - like Oracle's LTRIM function.
InitCap - like Oracle's INITCAP function
FlattenCharSet - Replace western characters with diacritics with best-choice, non-diacritic characters
StripPunctuationMarks - Remove all punctiation marks from the given string.

Unix Utilies for Windows

If you still have an old version of Windows floating about from before the days that MS conceded that the Windows O/S should be built on the Linux O/S, and you want to do anything vaguely sophisticated in the brain-dead command line shell of Windows (a.k.a. the DOS prompt), then you need a collection of commonly used UNIX utilities that can run under Windows. You should first ask yourself why you are running an outdated and unsafe version of Windows, but that is another story...

The Cats' Bill of Rights

1. Humans shall make no law respecting an establishment of boundaries or prohibiting the free exercise therein, or abridging the freedom of access, or the right to peaceful assembly.
In other words:
The cat is entitled to go outside any time s/he wants.