Weekly Roundup - December 17th 2007
Posted December 17th, 2007 in Weekly Roundup
This is my weekly roundup for the week of December 10th to December 16th 2007, where I look back at the posts I made over the past week as well as useful and interesting articles on other websites and blogs that I might have read.
Articles posted on my blog
This week turned out to be a MySQL week with 5 out of the 6 new regular posts being about MySQL. This started off with me talking about the SQL query I use to work out top selling categories on my Linux CD Mall website on Tuesday, and then using the MySQL Query Cache on Wednesday after the query was running just a little too slowly.
On Friday, Saturday and Sunday I wrote a series of posts looking at the MySQL command line tools for backing up and restoring data. I'm sure I'll write some more about this in the future, but initially this week we looked at backing up MySQL with mysqldump, using mysqldump to save data to CSV files, and finally restoring data from a tab delimited file to MySQL.
Thursday saw the only non-MySQL post for the week, which was about triggering errors with PHP, something I needed to do for a database class I had been working on.
Interesting articles found offsite
As usual, I read a lot of interesting stuff around the Internet and have bookmarked a selection here.
Last week I posted some links to some examples of drawing graphs with PHP. This week I found an even better example, creating a 3 dimensional pie graph with PHP and Google's chart API. It looks really great.
DailyBits posted about The Essential Website Usability Checklist; 13 points for making sure your website is usable.
Linux.com had a useful Linux command line script for customizing directory listings, by making patterns matching in filenames appear a different colour.
The Commodore 64 celebrated its 25th anniversary. I can still remember hacking BASIC games on the C64 to cheat and get better scores...
PC World NZ had a summary of the Vista SP1 changes.
Brainbell.com had an introductory tutorial to CSS
Reinhold Weber posted about 50+ CSS Best Practices and Coding Guidelines and 40 Tips for optimizing your php Code. These are both older posts; I'd come across the latter one before but found the former one when searching for something else this week. Both contain some interesting stuff.
Another older older article, which is linked to from 40 the tips post above, about optimizing PHP code.
Still on PHP, namespacing will be introduced in PHP6, and w3style had an example of its usage, and also an interesting example of a lightweight and flexible front controll for php5.
Office/Visio/Project 2007 Service Pack 1 were released. You can download them here.
The blogging platform Movable Type is now open source.
A post on TalkPHP had some examples of using abstract classes in PHP5.
DailyBlogTips offered 10 tips for blogging in non technical industries, including offering email subscriptions prominently and explaining RSS somewhere on your blog. Although my blog is a technical one, I have been intending to do both of these, and will certainly do this on the non-technical blogs I will be setting up shortly. (More news on these early next year).
How to set up networking in FreeDOS, including a bit of a history of why networking wasn't in MS DOS originally and how it was added etc. Oh, and you can buy FreeDOS from the Linux CD Mall.
A site called cpanelconfig.com looked at how to identify slow MySQL queries using the slow queries log. Although the domain name makes it sound like it's cpanel oriented, the solution offered is generic to any Linux distribution, and not just hosts with cpanel.
Joost de Valk wrote a metrics plugin for Wordpress, which was reviewed, and with more screenshots, by Shoemoney.
ars technica looked at KDE 4.0 RC2, with a few screenshots. There is a Kubuntu live CD which runs KDE 4.0 RC2 (details here). I've tried it out and may post an article about it here. On the whole it seems pretty buggy at this stage.
10 tips to speed up your linux system (read the comments for useful insights into some of the suggestions). One of the things it looks at is "reducing swappiness".
And finally for this week, a tutorial about using CSS overflow
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