January 2009

I've just published a tiny Ruby on Rails plugin that adds a script/dbdump command. Like script/dbconsole, it reads your database configuration from config/database.yml and runs the appropriate mysql/postgresql/sqlite program – but rather than running up a database console it does a database dump. See the README at the above page re password options.

Birth of a supervillain wins for today.

This survey of web developers from the end of 2008 by Aussie-based Web Directions South gives an interesting snapshot of what people are using, somewhat bent towards what people are using in Australia and New Zealand. Brief summary:

Nat Torkington: linked to a ‘Annals of Medicine’ article in New Yorker which is fascinating for two reasons, firstly for the amazing stories of (for example) reanimating people after they've been underwater with heart and lungs stopped for quite some time – but secondly for the discussion of saving a substantial number of lives using a simple and nearly free technology, once thought unnecessary, used first to greatly improve the fatality rate in military aviation, but still meeting considerable resistance (I suspect partly due to the fact that no-one makes any money off it). The technology? Checklists.

This video of Brendan Gregg shouting at his RAID arrays is geek-crazy – apparently the vibrations induce a detectable increase in write latency:

The macports build of tsung is currently failing here because the SVN checkout is from an HTTPS url with an invalid certificate. I've submitted a Portfile change to use the HTTP tarball, which fixes the problem.