Surf 11 » Archives for October, 2005

Here are 10 tips to a better html form. Via Daily Mashup.

To prevent caching you can either use the Expires header, or the Cache-Control header.

Cache-Control: no-cache
Expires: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 16:13:22 GMT

You can use the ALTER TABLE command to change the size of a column. Suppose you want to change the size of a varchar column from 50 character to 100 characters, simply run the following SQL statement:

ALTER TABLE tablename MODIFY columnname varchar(100);

Here's a simple mysql backup script that uses mysqldump, and keeps the previous two backups in gzipped tar files.

#!/bin/bash

#makes a backup of all databases in the db list
dblist="db1 db2 db3 etc"

backup_dir="/home/backup"

for db in $dblist
do
        mysqldump $db > $backup_dir/mysql/$db.sql
done

if [ -f $backup_dir/mysql.2.tar.gz ]
then 
mv $backup_dir/mysql.2.tar.gz $backup_dir/mysql.3.tar.gz
fi

if [ -f $backup_dir/mysql.tar.gz ]
then 
mv $backup_dir/mysql.tar.gz $backup_dir/mysql.2.tar.gz
fi

tar -czf $backup_dir/mysql.tar.gz $backup_dir/mysql/

You will want to edit the dblist and the backup_dir to point to a directory that exists, and also create a mysql directory under it.

Olive Garden has posted a free recipe book on their web site.

HTML recipe book, or PDF

The Creating Passionate Users blog has a good and lengthy post with some tips for speaking at conferences, and how to submit proposals.

I some times get shin splints when I do a lot of running. Active.com has an article called Preventing and treating shin splints with some tips for runners:

• When you go from a soft surface to pavement do it gradually.
• Strech and Strengthen your calf and ankle muscles.
• It could be the shoes.
• Go see the Doctor.
• Ice them
• Once you get them stop running, and switch to biking or something like that.

Bradford Washburn has never taken any photography classes, but has produced some of the most spectacular photos I've ever seen. The now 95 year old climber, map maker, photographer, and all around interesting fellow was featured in September 2005's outside magazine:

A compulsive problem solver, Washburn would remove the door of an airplane and muscle his 50-pound camera into position using a spiderweb of ropes, lashing himself in to keep from being sucked into the void. Outside Magazine

Washburn was the first to photograph, and map many of the worlds mountains. His photo of Denali (AKA Mt. McKinley the highest Mt in North America) is often carried by climbers with the route overlayed on top of it. His wife, Barbra was the first woman to climb Denali.

Check out some books featuring Bradford Washburn's works:

• Bradford Washburn: Mountain Photography
• On High: The Adventures of Legendary Mountaineer, Photographer, and Scientist Brad Washburn
• Mount McKinley : The Conquest of Denali - Features photos by Brad Washburn.

Ray Camden explains Media RSS 1.0 an extension or namespace for RSS 1.0 feeds that allows you to enclose images, or other media (movies, audio for podcasting) in the feed. The spec was developed by Yahoo!.

A good article on O'Reilly about SPARQL, a SQL like query language for RDF. If you can get people publish RDF representations of their data, then you can query them using a common language.

Okay, so SPARQL gives the SW and Web 2.0 a common data manipulation language in the form of expressive query against the RDF data model. Web 2.0 needs something exactly like that. (Imagine the horror of trying to get all of these totally uncoordinated Web 2.0 services and apps to support the same SQL queries? That's completely impossible. It will never happen. It may be hard to get them all to map SPARQL into how they really store data. It may never happen, in fact. But it could happen, and it will long before everyone uses the same RDBS schema.)

Via: Tim Bray