So I made a change as you can see, I now allow you to use Facebook for registration and/or login to this site. If you don’t want to use your Facebook account you can create an account here or login here.

I want everyone to be able to make comments and share my thoughts with others.

Let me know what you think.

Thanks

Lee Thompson

SR MySQL DBA

I finally found out a few ways to hold the IPHONE 4 properly, this in what Steve Jobs meant by saying to the world “your holding the phone wrong

First $$$$

1. Leave phone in box. Never touch IPHONE 4 with your bare hands.
2. Put on rubber gloves like these
3. Open box, but do not remove phone without gloves on.
4. Do not remove clear coating protective shield.
5. Proceed to make a call.

Second $$$

1. Get some Tin foil and fold into a origami hat. Seen Here
2. now that you have the cheap version of Apples external antenna you can use the phone as normal.**** Make sure you are always wearing your hat during the calls or you WILL DROP THEM.

Third Step Free!!!!!!!!!!!!!

1. Hold the Phone with your feet since its obviously your hands messing up the signal.

OK Apple (Steve Jobs) recognize that it is a design flaw and that the fact is you need to fix it and send all consumers a new model that has been fix. Not a rubber bumper thats a band-aid do us right give us a phone that works out of the box.  Looks Like ill have to go with Droid X.

Stop making us use the crappy IPHONE like you suggest

Many times am I asked what privileges do i need for this user. Explaining them can be confusing so I made this to share with everyone to help them understand MySQL users and privileges. Hopefully this will help you in deciding proper permissions for users. Click image below to download the pdf.

The attached pdf has a  table that anticipates that you want to know two things about privileges:

• What action is permitted: Read either the “What action is permitted” column, or the “Privilege Column Name” column
• At what level of granularity can it be set: For the privilege you’re interested in, note the “X”‘s, and read up the table to see which privilege tables provide that privilege, and then inspect their Key columns to understand the level of granularity.

I tried multiple times to get Dell video chat(sightspeed) for Ubuntu. It comes installed on Dell’s Mini, but there is no where where you can download the application. I found the easiest was is to take the restore ISO and mount , then found the required packages needed to set up Dell Video Chat on my machine. I now can use this chat to talk with family and friends running Dell video chat on windows. The reason i am using this is Dell video chat is I have found the picture is very clear and it is simple to use. So talking to my 2yo niece is great (she knows how to answer the call.)
Why am I writing this article? well i found other people looking for this and wanted to let them know I have made a package that will install it for them on their Ubuntu machines. You can download it here.

Let me know what you think, or if you run into any bugs.

In a tough economic times business and households are always looking to save money, I have discovered talking with business owners that they are cutting corners on products and staff to save money, and homeowners aren’t buying software due to price. Cutting corners on products can lower product quality and lower customer satisfaction. Lowering these can close a business as customers will go else where to get the quality they are looking for. Cutting staff can cause stress on teams, as workload become unbearable which could cause more outages and more mistakes to production. Homeowners feel that the price of software are too expensive and hesitate to purchase commercial software. (Some businesses and homeowners even turn to pirating software). What can be done to help save money? Look at open source! Open source is a community based solution that has limitations, OpenSourceDefinition but not prices as high as commercial software(Usally free). I have compiled open source alternatives to some of the applications you use in everyday business and home life. I use these applications on everyday life tasks and work tasks. I will add more so check back often.

Operating systems

Commercial
Mirosoft Windows 7 (32bit or 64bit)
Cost on the Microsoft website is $119.00 to $219.00.

OpenSource
Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Fedora, Centos, Debian, FreeBSD (32bit or 64bit)
Cost FREE
What about the interfaces also know as GUI?
1.KDE is my preference. You can see KDE in action here, also KDE was release many years before Windows 7 and believe Microsoft got there enhancements from it.(see this video)
2.Gnome was the first built GUI for open source it is light weight and fast, fully customizable even has a windows theme so you can make your open source machine look like windows. See Gnome in action here.
Both of the above support all browser including Internet explorer(except you need to install under (WINE).  Use FireFox!
I use Kubuntu with KDE 4 and I have not found any thing I cannot do on it windows can including the neat snap to window thingy.

Programs

Commercial(It will Cost you)

Office suites
Microsoft office(A suite of administrative, communications and business applications including Access, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Word ,OneNote)
Cost on the Microsoft website is $499.00 to $700.00

Adobe PDF
Create and share Adobe® PDF documents with Acrobat® 9 Pro software, the essential PDF solution for business. Now create seamless document portfolios with a wide variety of content, help protect your documents and easily create and manage electronic forms.
Cost $99.00 to $299.00

Project management
Microsoft project(Control your project work, schedule, and finances)
Cost $599.99 to $999.99

Financial
QuickBooks is the #1 small business financial software and an easy way to help your business succeed. Instantly create invoices, pay bills, and track expenses all in one place.
Cost $159.00 to $319.00

Windows Live
What is Windows Live Essentials? Simply put, it’s free software that makes a PC running Windows 7 do more great things. Things like e-mail, instant messaging, photo editing, and blogging.
Cost Operating system

DVD Software
Convert avi mpeg divix to DVD Not a default to windows!?!
Cost ??

Open Source(FREE)

Office suites
OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages.
There is one thing that Openoffice can not do and that is OneNote, but there is a similar application called Basket which has most of the similar features of OneNote Cost is free also.
Cost FREE

OpenOffice Writer
Writer is the word processor part of the OpenOffice suite. Its a full featured word processor with all of the advanced features found in commercial word processors. Also Writer exports directly to HTML or PDF for use on website – or just for e-mailing without loss of layout or design and while staying compatible with the receiver’s software solutions.
Cost FREE

Project management
Redmine
Flexible project management web application. Written using Ruby on Rails framework, it is cross-platform and cross-database. It includes calendar and gantt charts to aid visual representation of projects and their deadlines.
Cost FREE

Financial
Gnucash
Features double-entry accounting (so your books always balance); stock, bond, and mutual fund accounts; small business accounting; customers, vendors, job, and invoice management; reports and graphs… basically, all of the stuff you’d expect from Quicken and Quickbooks. But in this case, it’s free.
Cost FREE

Windows Live(not all in one suite)
E-mail (Nothing better than Thunderbird,it is a Mozilla porduct know its gonna be good)
Instant Messaging (Pigeon, connects to all all instan messaging systems including Microsoft Communicator)
Photo Editing (Krita, its a OpenSource Photoshop).
Blogging (BlogTK has all the features for blogging).
Cost FREE

DeVeDe
A program to create video DVDs and CDs (VCD, sVCD or CVD), suitables for home players, from any number of video files, in any of the formats supported by Mplayer. The big advantage over other utilities is that it only needs Mplayer, Mencoder, DVDAuthor, VCDImager and MKisofs (well, and Python, PyGTK and PyGlade), so its dependencies are really small.
Cost FREE

This is not all the software differences if you have any more please post them, or let me know and Ill add them. The price difference is well A LOT compare to FREE. Many people are scared to move to open source, because they are afraid of what they do not know. You learned Windows you can learn open source. I wrote this article using the open office suite and it has all the bells and whistles Microsoft products use. If you want to test or see what you can save I will show you how to get started just contact me.

I was looking around WordPress.org at idea’s, that the community was suggesting. I took the Password Suggestion idea and made a small change to 2 of the core scripts. This change will give the administrator of a blog the ability to randomly generate password for users they are adding or editing. This was a 5 min project and you can see the changes below. I have also made it possible to see plain text passwords in the password fields. I don’t know if I am suppose to release stuff like this for WordPress and I hope I have not offended anyone on the core development team.

Add User

<pre><?php if ( apply_filters('show_password_fields', true) ) : ?>
        <tr>

        <!-- Added By Lee Thompson of http://www.mysqlhow2.com -->
        <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
        function passgen() {
         var chars = "0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ!@#$%^&*()";
         var string_length = 10;
         var passgen = '';
         for (var i=0; i<string_length; i++) {
          var rnum = Math.floor(Math.random() * chars.length);
          passgen += chars.substring(rnum,rnum+1);
         }
         document.adduser.pass1.value = passgen;
         document.adduser.pass2.value = passgen;
        }

        </script>
        <!-- end add -->

                <th scope="row"><label for="pass1"><?php _e('Password'); ?> <span><?php _e('(twice, required)'); ?></span></label></th>
                <td><input name="pass1" type="password" id="pass1" autocomplete="off" />
                <!-- Added By Lee Thompson of http://www.mysqlhow2.com -->
                <input type="button" value="Generate Password" onClick="passgen();" />
                <!-- end add -->
                <br />
                <input name="pass2" type="password" id="pass2" autocomplete="off" />
                <!-- Added By Lee Thompson of http://www.mysqlhow2.com -->
                <input type="checkbox" onchange="document.getElementById('pass1').type = this.checked ? 'text' : 'password'; document.getElementById('pass2').type = this.checked ? 'text' : 'password'" /> Show passwords
                <!-- end add -->
                <br />
                <div id="pass-strength-result"><?php _e('Strength indicator'); ?></div>
                <p><?php _e('Hint: The password should be at least seven characters long. To make it stronger, use upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols like ! " ? $ % ^ &amp; ).'); ?></p>
                </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
</pre>

Edit User

<pre>
$show_password_fields = apply_filters('show_password_fields', true, $profileuser);
if ( $show_password_fields ) :
?>
<tr id="password">
<!-- Added By Lee Thompson of http://www.mysqlhow2.com -->
        <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
        function passgen() {
         var chars = "0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ!@#$%^&*()";
         var string_length = 10;
         var passgen = '';
         for (var i=0; i<string_length; i++) {
          var rnum = Math.floor(Math.random() * chars.length);
          passgen += chars.substring(rnum,rnum+1);
         }
         document.getElementById('pass1').value = passgen;
         document.getElementById('pass2').value = passgen;
        }

        </script>
        <!-- end add -->

        <th><label for="pass1"><?php _e('New Password'); ?></label></th>
        <td><input type="password" name="pass1" id="pass1" size="16" value="" autocomplete="off" />
                <!-- Added By Lee Thompson of http://www.mysqlhow2.com -->
                <input type="button" value="Generate Password" onClick="passgen();" />
                <!-- end add -->
                 <span><?php _e("If you would like to change the password type a new one. Otherwise leave this blank."); ?></span><br />
                <input type="password" name="pass2" id="pass2" size="16" value="" autocomplete="off" />
                <!-- Added By Lee Thompson of http://www.mysqlhow2.com -->
                <input type="checkbox" onchange="document.getElementById('pass1').type = this.checked ? 'text' : 'password'; document.getElementById('pass2').type = this.checked ? 'text' : 'password'" /> Show passwords
                <!-- end add -->
                <span><?php _e("Type your new password again."); ?></span><br />

                <div id="pass-strength-result"><?php _e('Strength indicator'); ?></div>
                <p><?php _e('Hint: The password should be at least seven characters long. To make it stronger, use upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols like ! " ? $ % ^ &amp; ).'); ?></p>
        </td>
</tr>
<?php endif; ?>
</pre>

Installation is pretty easy

But first I can not stress this enough as you will be changing core scripts. I am not responsible if it breaks your site.
BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP

Install by downloading the files

1. Download the fies here.
2. Backup user-new.php and user-edit.php located in /wp-admin.
3. Extract file in /wp-admin directory via ftp or scp.

Install by changing the files

 Open /wp-admin/user-new.php in your favorite editor (I use VIM)
Find "<tr>" around line 118
Add after <!-- Added By Lee Thompson of http://www.mysqlhow2.com -->
 <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
 function passgen() {
 var chars = "0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ!@#$%^&*()";
 var string_length = 10;
 var passgen = '';
 for (var i=0; i<string_length; i++) {
 var rnum = Math.floor(Math.random() * chars.length);
 passgen += chars.substring(rnum,rnum+1);
 }
 document.adduser.pass1.value = passgen;
 document.adduser.pass2.value = passgen;
 }

 </script>
 <!-- end add -->
Find "<input name="pass1" type="password" id="pass1" autocomplete="off" />" around line 138
Add after <!-- Added By Lee Thompson of http://www.mysqlhow2.com -->
 <input type="button" value="Generate Password" onClick="passgen();" />
 <!-- end add -->
Find "<input name="pass2" type="password" id="pass2" autocomplete="off" />"
Add after <!-- Added By Lee Thompson of http://www.mysqlhow2.com -->
 <input type="checkbox" onchange="document.getElementById('pass1').type = this.checked ? 'text' : 'password'; document.getElementById('pass2').type = this.checked ? 'text' : 'password'" /> Show passwords
 <!-- end add -->
Save file.
Open file /wp-admin/user-edit.php in your favorite editor (I use VIM)
Find "tr id="password">" around line 295
Add after <!-- Added By Lee Thompson of http://www.mysqlhow2.com -->
 <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
 function passgen() {
 var chars = "0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ!@#$%^&*()";
 var string_length = 10;
 var passgen = '';
 for (var i=0; i<string_length; i++) {
 var rnum = Math.floor(Math.random() * chars.length);
 passgen += chars.substring(rnum,rnum+1);
 }
 document.getElementById('pass1').value = passgen;
 document.getElementById('pass2').value = passgen;
 }
 </script>
 <!-- end add -->
Find "<input type="password" name="pass1" id="pass1" size="16" value="" autocomplete="off" />" around line 314
Add after
 <!-- Added By Lee Thompson of http://www.mysqlhow2.com -->
 <input type="button" value="Generate Password" onClick="passgen();" />
 <!-- end add -->
Find "<input type="password" name="pass2" id="pass2" size="16" value="" autocomplete="off" />" around line 319
Add after
<!-- Added By Lee Thompson of http://www.mysqlhow2.com -->
 <input type="checkbox" onchange="document.getElementById('pass1').type = this.checked ? 'text' : 'password'; document.getElementById('pass2').type = this.checked ? 'text' : 'password'" /> Show passwords
 <!-- end add -->
Save File.

Well I hope this helps the administrators that are looking for a random password generator, in the administration section for adding and editing users.

Description:
My Plugin Stats, will show the download stats of your custom plugins. It pull the information from wordpress.org. It creates a dashboard widget and you can monitor many plugins at once. You can add and remove as many plugins as you like.

Some of the features:

• Add Plugins you want to watch stats on.
• Fully intergrated dashboard widget.
• Compatible with all versions WordPress
• Will work with any caching system.

If you have any problems with the plugins, please visit [http://mysqlhow2.com/] for further information and provide some feedback first, we may be able to help. It’s considered rude to just give low ratings and nothing reason for doing so.

If you find this plugin useful and would like to say thanks, a link, digg, or some other form of recognition to the plugin page on our blog would be appreciated.

Installation:

1. Donwload the ZIP file My Plugin Stats and upload it to your plugins directory and unzip.
2. Activate plugin in your administration section.
3. Place widget in your sidebar.
4. Select the woots you want to watch in the administration section.

FAQ:
None

Screen Shots:

Changelog:
1.0
Inital release

This article talks about raid levels and how they work. I like to use raid 5 and raid 10, this is based on performance testing that reads are faster on raid 5 and writes are faster on raid 10. I will be posting benchmark results soon so that you can see the differences of raid levels.

RAID 1
RAID 1 mirrors the contents of the disks, making a form of 1:1 ratio realtime backup. The contents of each disk in the array are identical to that of every other disk in the array. A RAID 1 array requires a minimum of two drives. Although RAID 1′s writing process copies the data identically to all drives, a RAID 1 mirror would not be suitable as a permanent backup solution for businesses, since RAID architecture by design allows for certain failures to take place (e.g. vandalism or accidental file deletion). However for home or other applications, where vandalism is very unlikely and accidental file deletion is put up with, RAID 1 offers a good backup solution.

RAID 3/4
RAID 3 or 4 (striped disks with dedicated parity) combines three or more disks in a way that protects data against loss of any one disk. Fault tolerance is achieved by adding an extra disk to the array, which is dedicated to storing parity information; the overall capacity of the array is reduced by one disk. A RAID 3 or 4 array requires a minimum of three drives: two to hold striped data, and a third for parity. With the minimum three drives needed for RAID 3, the storage efficiency is 66 percent. With six drives, the storage efficiency is 87 percent. The main disadvantage is poor performance for multiple, simultaneous, and independent read/write operations.

RAID 5
Striped set with distributed parity or interleave parity requiring 3 or more disks. Distributed parity requires all drives but one to be present to operate; drive failure requires replacement, but the array is not destroyed by a single drive failure. Upon drive failure, any subsequent reads can be calculated from the distributed parity such that the drive failure is masked from the end user. The array will have data loss in the event of a second drive failure and is vulnerable until the data that was on the failed drive is rebuilt onto a replacement drive. A single drive failure in the set will result in reduced performance of the entire set until the failed drive has been replaced and rebuilt.
RAID 6
RAID 6 (striped disks with dual parity) combines four or more disks in a way that protects data against loss of any two disks.
RAID 10
RAID 1+0 (or 10) is a mirrored data set (RAID 1) which is then striped (RAID 0), hence the “1+0″ name. A RAID 1+0 array requires a minimum of four drives: two mirrored drives to hold half of the striped data, plus another two mirrored for the other half of the data. In Linux MD RAID 10 is a non-nested RAID type like RAID 1, that only requires a minimum of two drives, and may give read performance on the level of RAID 0.

RAID 01
RAID 0+1 (or 01) is a striped data set (RAID 0) which is then mirrored (RAID 1). A RAID 0+1 array requires a minimum of four drives: two to hold the striped data, plus another two to mirror the first pair.

RAID can involve significant computation when reading and writing information. With traditional “real” RAID hardware, a separate controller does this computation. In other cases the operating system or simpler and less expensive controllers require the host computer’s processor to do the computing, which reduces the computer’s performance on processor-intensive tasks (see Operating system based (“software RAID”) and Firmware/driver-based RAID below). Simpler RAID controllers may provide only levels 0 and 1, which require less processing.
RAID systems with redundancy continue working without interruption when one (or possibly more, depending on the type of RAID) disks of the array fail, although they are then vulnerable to further failures. When the bad disk is replaced by a new one the array is rebuilt while the system continues to operate normally. Some systems have to be powered down when removing or adding a drive; others support hot swapping, allowing drives to be replaced without powering down. RAID with hot-swapping is often used in high availability systems, where it is important that the system remains running as much of the time as possible.
Note that a RAID controller itself can become the single point of failure within a system.

We will talk about nested raid levels in the upcoming days as I start to benchmark for which ones have better performance with out risk

These are some settings values I look at when I start up a new MySQL instance. Not all instances of MySQL will have the same, so I tweak until I get optimal performance out of MySQL. Also remember not to go into swap when allocating memory.

General MySQL Settings
The Most important ones are:
Key Buffer
The key buffer holds the indexes of tables in memory and a bigger key buffer results in faster row lookups. Adjust according to your own needs. Bigger is better, but prevent swapping at all costs. A good rule of thumb seems to be to use 1/4 of system memory.

Query Cache
This is where the magic happens. Well, not magic really, just plain old caching. Keeping the result of queries in memory until they are invalidated by additional writes enhances performance by magnitudes. The query_cache_size, as the name suggests, is the total size of memory available to query caching. The value query_cache_limit is the maximum number of kilobytes one query may be in order to be cached. Setting this value too high might prevent a lot of smaller queries to be cached. Setting it too low will result in bigger queries to never be cached, and the smaller queries not being able to completely fill the cache size, which would be a waste of resources. Adjust according to your own needs and memory available:

Table Cache
An important variable if your application accesses many tables. It is the number of tables a thread can keep open at the same time. A value of 512 should do no harm.

Sort Buffers
sort_buffer_size (the variable previously known as sort_buffer), used for grouping and sorting and is a per-thread buffer. If the buffer can not hold the data to be sorted, a sort is performed on disk. Watch out for making this too large as the buffer is allocated for every thread that needs sorting and with many sorts it can easily consume all your memory.

Binary Logging
MySQL has a few powerful features. Replicating data changes to a second server is one of them. MySQL keeps a log file of data changes which is used for this purpose. If you do not use replication or use the file as incremental backup, you can disable it. This will save you expensive disk write actions for every change to your data. For applications that have a lot of frequently updated data, this can be quite a performance boost. According to the official docs, this will generally result in just a 1% boost but it’s an easy gain if you do not need the log. Read more about the binary log here. Comment the following line:
log-bin = /var/log/mysql/mysql-bin.log

Temporary Tables
Temporary tables are used for sorting and grouping. The buffer is created on demand so watch out for setting this too high here as well. If the buffer cannot accomodate the data, a temp file is used on disk instead.

Delayed Writing
This setting can greatly improve writing or updating data to a table. Instead of directly committing data to the disk, MySQL queues writes and returns write queries immediately. Be very very careful with this, because this also means that in case of a power failure or crash, you lose data. You can use this for logging if you don’t mind losing a couple of rows in case of a crash.

Connection Timeout
This is a little tweak that determines the closing of sleeping connections. The default is one hour and is often too long for practical purposes. I often set this at one minute instead (60).
wait_timeout = 60
The above settings are just to make mysql a little faster in general. You can get much better speed improvements by optimizing the database itself. Setting the correct indexes on tables can be a life-saver.

MySQL Innodb Settings
The most important ones are:

innodb_buffer_pool_size
70-80% of memory is a safe bet. I set it to 12G on 16GB box.

innodb_log_file_size
This depends on your recovery speed needs but 256M seems to be a good balance between reasonable recovery time and good performance

innodb_log_buffer_size=4M
4M is good for most cases unless you’re piping large blobs to Innodb in this case increase it a bit.

innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=2
If you’re not concern about ACID and can loose transactions for last second or two in case of full OS crash than set this value. It can dramatic effect especially on a lot of short write transactions.

innodb_thread_concurrency=8
Even with current Innodb Scalability Fixes having limited concurrency helps. The actual number may be higher or lower depending on your application and default which is 8 is decent start

innodb_flush_method=O_DIRECT
Avoid double buffering and reduce swap pressure, in most cases this setting improves performance. Though be careful if you do not have battery backed up RAID cache as when write IO may suffer.

innodb_file_per_table
If you do not have too many tables use this option, so you will not have uncontrolled innodb main tablespace growth which you can’t reclaim. This option was added in MySQL 4.1 and now stable enough to use.

Also check if your application can run in READ-COMMITED isolation mode – if it does – set it to be default as transaction-isolation=READ-COMMITTED. This option has some performance benefits, especially in locking in 5.0 and even more to come with MySQL 5.1 and row level replication.

2-17-2008 TODAY WordPress.org posted woot watcher!!!!!!!!!!!! Check it out here Woot Watcher

Description:
Wordpress Woot Watcher, will monitor and check woot, shirt woot, kids woot, wine woot and sellout for new products every 10 hours. When a woot-off is launched it updates the woot product every 30 seconds, to increae your chance for a bag of crap or something you want cheap. WordPress Woot Watcher is a sidear widget, where you can select the woot sites you want to monitor in the administration section. The default installation selects woot.com. This widget was built by Lee Thompson of MySQLHOW2.com and Mark Stoecker of POUNDBANGWHACK.com. We have been testing and found this to be stable to release to the community.

Installation:

1. Donwload the ZIP file WordPress Woot Watcher and upload it to your plugins directory and unzip.
2. Activate plugin in your administration section.
3. Place widget in your sidebar.
4. Select the woots you want to watch in the administration section.

FAQ:
Can I use light boxes
Yes, it works with jquery lightbox or lightbox 2.

Screen Shots:

Changelog:
1.1
Inital release

Please donate for continued development.