Based on one of the comment suggestions, inspired by the fact that I’d been messing around with automating the Windows cursor some months back, and having half an hour too much spare time, I came up with my own contender for the world’s most useless computer program:

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WTq2nRgYeQ)

If you’re intensely interested, the interesting part of the C# program is here:

using System;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
using System.Threading;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using System.Drawing;

namespace Shannon {
public partial class Shannon : Form {
[DllImport("user32.dll")]
static extern void mouse_event(int dwFlags, int dx, int dy, int dwData, int dwExtraInfo);
[Flags]
public enum MouseEventFlags {
MOVE = 0×1,
LEFTDOWN = 0×2,
LEFTUP = 0×4,
}

public Shannon() {
InitializeComponent();
}

// In order to show what’s going on, we don’t do any work until the
// program has settled down.
protected override void OnLoad(EventArgs e) {
base.OnLoad(e);
Application.Idle += new EventHandler(OnLoaded);
}

private void OnLoaded(object sender, EventArgs e) {
Application.Idle -= new EventHandler(OnLoaded);
// form is centered on a 1600×1200 screen
Cursor.Position = new Point(790, 575);
Thread.Sleep(500);
for (int i = 0; i < 135; i++) {
mouse_event((int)(MouseEventFlags.MOVE), 1, -1, 0, 0);
Thread.Sleep(20);
}
Thread.Sleep(150);
mouse_event((int)(MouseEventFlags.LEFTDOWN), 0, 0, 0, 0);
mouse_event((int)(MouseEventFlags.LEFTUP), 0, 0, 0, 0);
}
}
}

For the past many years, I’ve been using an e-mail hosting provider that prides itself on offering a special class of services. Things have actually been very good, with few hiccups along the way. However, for the past month, things have seriously gone downhill with e-mails taking hours or even days to arrive.

And the problem is indeed with the provider: The Received: headers tell their own very sad story on just how long it takes for an e-mail to progress through their internal systems.

Worse, the support people are being less than helpful, refusing to recognize the problems and doing nothing to communicate what they are doing to resolve their problems.

Below is a quick analysis of just how things have been in March. The times shown are from the time an e-mail first enters the provider’s network (according to the first Received header with the provider’s IP) until actual delivery (last Received: header, which coincides with the time that I see the mail in my client).

Some 40% of the emails take more than 5 minutes to arrive. Whenever I trigger something in a web form that requires me to confirm an e-mail, there’s a 1 in 5 chance that I’ll be waiting for an hour or more before that e-mail arrives.

Clearly, this doesn’t work. What’s worse, this isn’t just a single-day fluke: This has been going on throughout the month:

(Note that avg/median times are on the scale to the left; max times are on the scale to the right. Click for larger version)

So now the hunt is on to find an e-mail hosting company which can provide a proven, stable service, preferably one in Scandinavia or elsewhere in Northern Europe.

Yes. I’ve considered Google Mail. But I value my privacy too much.

Just released by Wrox: Expert PHP and MySQL by Andrew Curioso, Ronald Bradford and Patrick Galbraith.

For once, an “Expert” book where you not only can, but must take the title seriously. This book is choke-full of information, examples and best practices written by some of the foremost experts in their respective fields. All of the authors clearly have extensive experience working on setups requiring expert knowledge. Best of all, they are not afraid of thinking outside the box and the solutions they present are in no way limited to pure PHP and MySQL solutions.

This book really does expect something from the reader, so perhaps a word of caution is in order: you really do need to be familiar with a range of non-beginner subjects on both PHP and MySQL. I strongly recommend that you first read Chapter 1 of the book, helpfully available on the books’ website. If you are not familiar with the contents presented here, you’re not likely to gain much from your purchase.

If, on the other hand, all that you read there is Known Stuff, you’re really in for a treat with this book. If you write programs because you have that personal itch, this book is going to make you feel as if you’ve just been attacked by a horde of mosquitoes. Really. You’ll be re-thinking everything about how you build your websites from now on. But you won’t need any itches for this book to make you re-think how you work with PHP and MySQL.

The book is extremely information-packed. I’m not one to shy away from reading 3-400 pages of technical references in a day, but this book is so densely filled that you simply won’t be able to do that. Considering the breadth of topics covered, the authors at the same time manage to dive very deeply into each subject, covering all relevant resources, options, program libraries and best practices along the way. This does not make the book hard to read, to the contrary the language is very clear and concise. Don’t expect information to be repeated anywhere.

Whether it’s due to the authors or excellent editing, the language is very consistent and flows very well from chapter to chapter. If it wasn’t for the change in subject matter and the authors’ stated focus areas in the beginning of the book, it would be hard to discern that three people have been involved in writing this book.

A wonderful trait of all the authors is that they are very frank in assessing the available technologies, and don’t mind telling you which things simply don’t work, and why you should stay away from them - even when those technologies are offered by their respective employers.

You’ll learn not only how to make the most optimal pure-PHP and pure-MySQL solutions, you will also see how you can integrate both of these with external programs by writing your own extensions and libraries. Descriptions of best practices in subjects such as user authentication and security will probably make you want to go back and check whether something could be improved in your own code and web server setup.

The chapters on advanced caching techniques, multi-tasking, optimization and debugging considerations are all very detailed and to the point. You’ll be able to immediately put the techniques presented to use, and the book will serve you not only as a great tutorial, it will also be a great reference later on when you want to tune your setup.

There are of course a few chapters that could have used a bit more work. One chapter consists of barely more than a listing of output of feature lists, another contains very lengthy outputs that the reader might as well pull up on his own screen when working with some of the products. But these examples really are exceptions in an otherwise extremely well-written, informative and above all useful book.

Another word of caution: The book is highly UNIX (Linux) centric. If all your work is done using Windows, your benefit from reading this book might be limited. Then again, reading the book and realizing the potentials just might explain to you why it is most shops deploy their PHP/MySQL solutions on Linux.

You can buy the book from amazon.com, or amazon.co.uk

For more MySQL-related information om this site, see:
Other (My)SQL book reviews || Other MySQL blog entries
MySQL Pop Quizzes || MySQL Function of the Day

Do pay them a visit. You might learn something!

A member of my family has for a long time been battling with a “Webcam Avatar”, a stupid white cat that replaced his video feed in Skype. Apart from not knowing how it had entered his computer in the first place, whatever he did to reset his webcam settings, it would keep reappearing once Skype was restarted.

It turns out that the “Webcam Avatar” is not Skype-specific, but rather something that gets pre-installed along with all the other crap Dell puts on a laptop (or perhaps as part of a system upgrade).

To remove it, you need to go the path of Control Panel-> Add/Remove programs -> Remove Live Cam Avatar. It might appear in more than one place

Overheard someone mentioning “Delhi Belly” in a conversation, and unable to figure from context what it was about, I headed to the otherwise very helpful Merriam-Webster dictionary.

Which, having defined the term, promptly and cheerfully suggests that you follow a link to “Visually explore traveler’s diarrhea”

Uhm. No thanks. I don’t think I will.

I. Don’t. Care.

Really. I just want you to get started on your task and get the job done.

If you insist on showing a progress bar, fine. But then get the counts you need in parallel with the operation you’ve been asked to perform. Perhaps you’ll find that the job you’ve been asked to do is completed before you finish counting.

User-friendliness my ****.

Getting the job done is user friendly. Wasting my time isn’t.

“We will be part of a larger company, but it will be called MySQL” Mickos said.

Sigh…

Writing the app turned out to be surprisingly trivial; from the time I downloaded Haxe until I was looking at the first iterations blink on the screen was just a few hours.

The main problem in using Haxe is the lack of structured library documentation; most of my “coding” time was spent Googling for information on which classes to use and how to use them.

Give it a whirl! If you need inspiration for starting patterns, try one of the two patterns below.