Colin Charles Agenda

I use OmniFocus and Apple Mail quite religiously. Sure there’s the wonders of GMail, but I’m an offline email kind of guy. What is not immediately obvious is how one can make a task from an email message in OmniFocus.

You want the OmniFocus Clip-o-Tron. I only recently just discovered it, and its one of those things you wonder why The Omni Group did not just install by default. It makes so much sense. It helps with GTD, after all, isn’t Mail the app where a lot of people spend their times and lives in?

Makes me wonder what else I’ve been missing out from using. This alongside MsgFiler are great tools to improve your Mail productivity.

Today before Ivan’s tutorial, he told me that in the 10.0.5 virtual machine images he created, he couldn’t find the Cassandra storage engine. I told him it had to be installed separately, and this is true – you have to install some engines separately!

When you do a yum install MariaDB-server MariaDB-client like the installation instructions tell you to do, you don’t get all storage engines (so running SHOW ENGINES might have you wondering what happened to a bunch of engines). This can easily be seen by doing a yum search MariaDB. On a CentOS 6.4 server with the MariaDB 10.0 repository configured, you should see the following:

MariaDB-cassandra-engine.x86_64 : MariaDB: a very fast and robust SQL database server
MariaDB-client.x86_64 : MariaDB: a very fast and robust SQL database server
MariaDB-common.x86_64 : MariaDB: a very fast and robust SQL database server
MariaDB-compat.x86_64 : MariaDB: a very fast and robust SQL database server
MariaDB-connect-engine.x86_64 : MariaDB: a very fast and robust SQL database server
MariaDB-devel.x86_64 : MariaDB: a very fast and robust SQL database server
MariaDB-server.x86_64 : MariaDB: a very fast and robust SQL database server
MariaDB-shared.x86_64 : MariaDB: a very fast and robust SQL database server
MariaDB-test.x86_64 : MariaDB: a very fast and robust SQL database server

So to get Cassandra or CONNECT engine support, don’t forget to install MariaDB-cassandra-engine and MariaDB-connect-engine.

Once you do that, don’t forget to actually load the engines – for example you do something like INSTALL SONAME 'ha_spider.so';.

In fact, why not check out what plugins exist in /usr/lib64/mysql/plugin? You can also see this from the MariaDB monitor: SHOW PLUGINS SONAME;. This shows active and non-installed plugins as well. Read the documentation for SHOW PLUGINS SONAME.

This is me testing the WordPress Facebook plugin. It was generally missed when I could sync posts to facebook notes, but I guess this is the first step for that to happen again. Great use of a lunch hour as I wolf down some grandma-made malaysian-style chee cheong fun.

This is probably stating the obvious, but make sure your plugins in WordPress are up-to-date. You keep up with the latest WordPress releases (and you should — there are lots of security fixes within releases), but you also have to make sure that the plugins are updated.

I deploy some systems using SVN, and on some sites, make use of the Disqus plugin for commenting. The plugin itself, as of writing, has only been tested against WordPress 3.1.4. Today, you have WordPress 3.2.1. Don’t fret though — Version 2.66 works just fine.

Why do I preach about updating stuff? My recent update had broken a production site… not the site itself, but the authors could not upload any media. The uploader (JavaScript) wouldn’t work. Chrome has the JavaScript Console available which showed me exactly what was going wrong, and that’s how I debugged the offending plugin.

Upon a little search later for wordpress 3.2.1 upload image, I see a bunch of people asking questions. The standard answer is to disable plugins to see if things work. In this case, updating solved the problem.

As is tradition after the O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo, there tends to be a storage engine summit right afterwards. This year it was expanded to also include plugins. I must graciously thank Facebook for hosting us at their campus, and giving us a rather healthy lunch, plus fueling us with all those drinks, caffeine and snacks that we needed to keep us going. While standing in the doorway, Mark (Callaghan) pointed to us that a certain other Mark (Zuckerberg) was walking into the campus, just like the rest of us.

The very raw notes are up on the Knowledgebase – Plugins & Storage Engines Summit for MySQL/MariaDB/Drizzle 2011. We definitely did not discuss anything Drizzle related, and we barely had time to focus on plugins, so the focus was still very much storage engines. There was representation from storage engine vendors: Tokutek (TokuDB), PrimeBase (PBXT/PBMS), ScaleDB, Sphinx (SphinxSE), Brazil Inc (groonga), WildGrowth (Spider), Infobright, Percona (XtraDB). Beyond the engines, there were people also representing Facebook, Wikipedia, Mail.ru, and Monty Program.

There’s a bunch of things TODO, and its probably worth commenting in the Knowledgebase if there are things that interest you. I guess next week there will be Worklog entries, mailing list posts, and connecting with folk to make sure the momentum continues on.

FriendFeed seems to be getting all the attention these days. There is now even a WordPress plugin, FriendFeed Comments that will help integrate your FriendFeed comments and more, with every post you make. This can be useful, as there are many times that people discuss a blog posting on Twitter.

Discuss is a broad word. Can you really say much in 140 characters? FriendFeed doesn’t have that limitation. And I’ve recently found out that I can make use of it in twhirl.

So I’m cleaning up my FriendFeed to ensure there is no unnecessary duplication. This means dropping Jaiku and Tumblr from the list of sites I share… However, I’m adding some “value”, by adding my Google Reader Shared Items Page (which I’m using more and more these days). So if FriendFeed proves useful, I might just use that wonderful WordPress plugin (nothing similar for Twitter from what I gather).

From what I understand, at least FriendFeed doesn’t go down often ;)

FWIW, it also seems that identi.ca works with twhirl so I’m on that now too (as in beyond just parking my account there). I’m byte there. And byte on FriendFeed. See you on these new services too…