Social networking seems to be the buzzword of the moment, MySpace and Beebo are apparently a bit last year and now its Facebook, Flickr and Twitter. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t really “get” it. I mean, its not that I don’t have friends. I do, lots of them. So many in fact that they all go months and months without hearing from me as I find it so hard to keep up with them all! My friends are (almost without exception) internet-enabled so they should fit well onto the social networking model. Some of them are people I only know through the internet, but that doesn’t seem to change my persective.

Its not that I’m actively avoiding these things. Here are links to my accounts on:

• flickr
• LinkedIn
• del.icio.us
• facebook (not sure about that link, I’m on there somewhere though)
• twitter

I have the accounts, but I don’t really know what to do with them. The most useful so far has been del.icio.us, which I use to keep hold of bookmarks between multiple locations but not to share stuff really¹. I think I “get” LinkedIn; I try to keep up with colleagues that I respect and would work with again on there, and in fact have actually used it today to check if I’m linked to someone, which is nice. Flickr is fine, I put my friend’s wedding photos there for her, but I’m not raving about it. Facebook has landed in my offline friendship group recently and I’m still waiting for the penny to drop about why people seem to be losing whole swathes of their lives to it. I’m on there, but if I haven’t seen you for years and/or your number isn’t in my mobile phone, then I’m not adding you as friend because clearly you’re not! And as for twitter … this is just a mystery.

So has the world gone mad or am I simply missing the point, like people who read websites in real life rather than on feed readers? Your thoughts please!

¹ Also I used its API to write a game earlier in the year.

When typing a long document the other day with sore hands, I looked up the keyboard shortcuts for applying headings in Open Office. Here’s a quick few:

I’ve set an idle timeout on the development server at work in an attempt to cut down the number of sessions that have been left logged in on unattended PCs. It was really easy to set up!

You can set this in /etc/profile but I realised that ours just includes a file /etc/bash.bashrc so I added my line to that:


# set the idle timeout - logs you out after an hour
TMOUT=3600


New sessions logged in after this will automatically log themselves out after one hour of continuous inactivity.

Google Analytics have been migrating their users to a new interface over the last few weeks. I like analytics (something to do with an unhealthy fetish for statistics I think) so I’ve been pretty impatient waiting for my mail to come through. Anyway its here and I’ve been migrated – woohoo!

I thought it would be cool to blog about some of the functionality that is available in analytics … until I sat down to do it and realised what a very long blog post that would be. So here’s the first installment.

The dashboard

The first thing you see when you view a site’s stats in analytics is the dahsboard, and its quite a change:

The strangest thing I find about this is the changed date range – I’m accustomed to seeing my site stats on a per-week basis rather than the four weeks that it now seems to like to show. Its cool though and gives a better overall picture of what is happening, especially for people like me that often only drop in and even then not necessarily weekly!

There are so many options from this screen that I’m literally going to mention a few and save the rest for another day, making this my new mini series of blog posts¹. To start with lets take a look under that temptingly clickable date range:

You can use either of these interfaces to pick your date range, which is really nice. The timeline one has grabbable side controls, so you can slide or stretch that range as you like.

Also note the compare control on the right hand side of the box … I used this with a week’s date range selected, and it projects last weeks data onto this weeks (although both date ranges can be altered) – look!

Its a nice touch and each point on that graph is hoverable, showing the exact number that has been plotted. Its possible to display all sorts of metrics against time from this one screen, look at that “visit” button on the top right?

Hidden in there is a treasure trove of options just waiting for you to drop in and get new perspectives on your traffic trends:

This simple section of the new interface kept me entertained for quite a while (although as I said, I do like statistics so am easily entertained by this type of thing), its slick and its easy to use and the flash does add a lot. I’ve found its buggy under Linux, although that might be more to do with the flash implementation than anything else, however it is a bit disappointing. I managed to borrow the MacBook though and that was much more stable (and hence the screenshots are raken in safari!).

I do like the new interface and I’ll be writing more about some other aspects of it in the future, if there’s anything you have found particularly useful or would like to know more about, add a comment and let me know.

I could post a whole page of links on this subject, I’m a woman in IT and its not easy. The women I know in the area will already have read all of them anyway, so there’s little value in that.

This one is for the guys. If you only read one of the why-don’t-women-join-tech-groups articles, read this one. Please?

http://www.devchix.com/2007/06/09/let

Last week I learned a valuable lesson about backing up MySQL, it was this:

• It is not enough to copy the files out of /var/lib/mysql or wherever if you want to backup your databases.

The thing with copying files is that if the mysql daemon is still running, there’s no guarantee that the physical files are up to date or even consistent. MySQL can do its own housekeeping whenever it would like to which means file write operations. It also keeps information in memory and will write it to disk at a later time to suit itself. The recommended backup method for MySQL is to use the mysqldump tool – more on that later.

The Scenario

Having had a server failure and discovered that file backups taken while the mysql server was running was all we had, I was unsure if we were going to get everything back. I did manage to recover the databases, by doing the following:

1. Find a server with a similar version of mysql. Happily my “lost” server was 5.0.21 and our development box runs 5.0.24 so I wasn’t too worried about changes in file formats.
2. Stop the mysqld on that box
3. Copy the files into /var/lib/mysql (this is on ubuntu but I think its a pretty similar setup on other distros). I didn’t have any data on this machine to start with which made things simpler. MyISAM stores its data in directories called the name of the database.
4. Check the file permissions – the files need to be owned by the user that mysql runs as. This caught me out the first time around.
5. Bring up mysqld and hold your breath.

In the event we seem to have most things and to be honest that’s more than I dared hope. There are some corrupt tables but nobody can swear that they weren’t like that before so with a bit of luck we won’t make any nasty discoveries further down the line [1].

MySQL Backup Strategy

I’ve been doing some setup on the new servers and backing up what was salvaged from the old one. I’ve devised a simple loop which dumps and zips each database in turn, using a shell script. The code for the script is below:

#!/bin/sh
for i in `mysql -B -u root -e “show databases” | tail -n +2`; do
echo $i
mysqldump -u root $i | gzip -9 > mysql/$i.`date —iso-8601`.gz
done

Its nothing that isn’t used by sysadmins everywhere but its simple and it works for me so its here (for when I forget what I did!). This example writes a .gz file for each database into a folder called mysql in the same location as where you call the script from. You probably also need to add -p switches to both the mysql and the mysqldump calls unless you are running with no root password which is rarely a good idea.

I hope this is all helpful to someone; I know I learned some useful lessons this week!

¹ I’d also like to point out that this was an internal server with little critical information on it and a backup routine that’s been running so long nobody can remember setting it up. Which isn’t great but its less bad that it might be.

I’ve been having fun over the last few weeks, writing about the fun things that you can do with Unix (see earlier articles about cowsay, fortune, mesg and go fish). This is the last in the mini series unless anyone has any other good suggestions for things that should belong here, and its MOTD or “Message of the Day”.

When you log into a unix box (or linux box, I’m using the term fairly indiscriminately in this instance) you will get a standard greeting message, usually telling you what kind of a system it is and adding a bit of a disclaimer. They aren’t very interesting messages but they are easy to change. Look at the contents of /etc/motd and you will see the text that gets displayed to a user on log in.

Traditionally this file is used by sysadmins to let users know of any changes that have happened or perhaps to warn of scheduled down time. However its also pretty usual to find something a bit more light-hearted there. My particular favourite is to add some ascii art as a welcoming banner to the user … what’s yours?

I’ve come across lorelle’s blog challenges before but this one caught my eye. The challenge is to come us with a search phrase that you are the top hit for in google. Here’s mine:

cowsay house

I think that pretty much sums up this whole site in fact! Can you rise to the same challenge? Let me know what your number-one-in-google phrase is.

Following on from the other articles in the fun with unix miniseries, today its go-fish. This is a game, from the package bsdgames and its addictive :) There are a bunch of other games in the package too but this has been a personal favourite for some years. Basically its a game of happy families, but with an ordinary pack of cards and text-only.

I installed the package on my ubuntu system with the command:

sudo aptitude install bsdgames

Run the game by typing

go-fish

Firstly you will be prompted to say whether you want instructions, then the game starts. You get a list of the cards you have, and you have to start asking for cards to make up “books” of four. Here’s a transcript of the beginning of a game:

Would you like instructions (y or n)? n
I get to start.
I ask you for: 5.
You say "GO FISH!"
Your hand is: 4 7 9 J J J K
You ask me for: j
I say "GO FISH!"
You drew Q.
I ask you for: 6.
You say "GO FISH!"
Your hand is: 4 7 9 J J J Q K
You ask me for: 9
I have 2 9's.
You get another guess!
Your hand is: 4 7 9 9 9 J J J Q K

When you make a set of four cards, it appears at the end of the list:

Your hand is: A A 6 7 7 10 10 10 Q K + Book of 3

The game ends when the cards run out and the winner is the one with the most complete “books”. Have fun!