Others have done it, so why shouldn’t I do it, too? Well, usually that’s not my line of thought, but when today I read David Linsin's blog post about his stats I thought I might follow along.

Overall stats

The overall visits to my blog – and countless others with no doubt – display the workday/weekend jagged line one would expect. The summer months seem to be a little lower on average, but that’s ok, people deserve their vacations. Blue line is 2009, green line is 2008 for comparison.

Playing chess within MySQL? Over the network? In the .. cloud? Yes!

This is a follow-up post of my 'A chessboard in MySQL' where we create and populate a chessboard. But pieces need to move, and a few wondered how. Easy!

As an example, white openes with 1.e4:

  mysql> BEGIN;
  mysql> UPDATE chessboard SET e='♙' WHERE x = 4;
  mysql> UPDATE chessboard SET e='' WHERE x = 2;
  mysql> COMMIT;

Pretty obvious. Now lets put it in a stored procedure (source included in post) so the next move is easier on the fingers and more fun to play. Lets do a 1...e5:

  mysql> CALL move_piece('e','7','e',5);

The result is the following:

mysql> SELECT * FROM …

Something to keep you warm during cold winter nights, or cool during hot summer days: a chessboard in MySQL!

Note: You should see chess pieces here below. If not, you're not watching it using UTF-8, or get yourself a good browser!

CREATE TABLE `chessboard` (
  `x` tinyint unsigned NOT NULL,
  `a` enum('','♔','♕','♖','♗','♘','♙','♚','♛','♜','♝','♞','♟'),
  `b` enum('','♔','♕','♖','♗','♘','♙','♚','♛','♜','♝','♞','♟'),
  `c` enum('','♔','♕','♖','♗','♘','♙','♚','♛','♜','♝','♞','♟'),
  `d` enum('','♔','♕','♖','♗','♘','♙','♚','♛','♜','♝','♞','♟'),
  `e` enum('','♔','♕','♖','♗','♘','♙','♚','♛','♜','♝','♞','♟'),
  `f` enum('','♔','♕','♖','♗','♘','♙','♚','♛','♜','♝','♞','♟'),
  `g` …

clus·te·ri·ous |ˈkləstərēəs;|
adjective
highly pleasant to MySQL Support Engineers: A clusterious issue a day, keeps the spouse away.
· clusterful : a hard day.

DERIVATIVES
clusteriously adverb
clusteriousness noun

ORIGIN MySQL Support Team: via Sun Microsystems.

Clusterious
noun
a rare variety of MySQL Support Engineers originally cultivated in Sweden.

1. Page2Pub -- harvest wiki content and turn it into EPub and PDF. See also Sony dropping its proprietary format and moving to EPub. Open standards rock. (via oreillylabs on Twitter)
2. SQL Pie Chart -- an ASCII pie chart, drawn by SQL code. Horrifying and yet inspiring. Compare to PostgreSQL code to produce ASCII Mandelbrot set. (via jdub on Twitter and Simon Willison)
3. …

Yesterday we held our PHP BBQ event at Munich, well it was no BBQ as the weather forecasts predicted rain,which came in the evening, but a nice evening in a beer garden.

We had more than 30 people there, some leaving early, sme arriving late, covering quite different kinds of participants: PHP core developers, professional PHP users, people doing PHP stuff as hobby, friends and PHP community veterans like Till Gerken. Many people didn't know each other or didn't see each other or some time so we had lot's of discussions, and most of them even weren't about PHP and even many non-IT things were covered, which I find always great. If you want an impression check Ulf's photos. I really hope this makes a good foundation for more regular PHP meetups.

There will be a few more events of this kind this week in Germany, so go there if you can, don't be …

Searching for MySQL with WolframAlpha, the latest entry in the search engines arena, I had a surprise:

Interpreting "mysql" as "mycil"
Input interpretation:
 chlorphenesin

A further search for chlorphenesin, explains that it is a drug pertaining to the "central muscle relaxants" category.

The Sunday before the MySQL User Conference is always full of trying to meet up with new or old friends, even if your flight lands after dinnertime. With that in mind, the very first event of the week is MySQL Camp’s “Games Day”.

From 12 noon until midnight on the Mezzanine of the Santa Clara Hyatt Hotel (adjoining the Santa Clara Convention Center), there will be an informal games day. The list of games that are definitely appearing are on the MySQL Forge at:

http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2009SundayNotes

There is still one game I would like to see appear (Set), though there is plenty to keep folks busy — board games, a puzzle, decks of cards, even building toys. I’ll probably be knitting, so if you are the crafty sort and can bring your craft with you that’s …

Filed  GCC bug 39228:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <math.h>
int main()
{
        double a= 10.0;
        double b= 1e+308;
        printf("%d %d %dn", isinf(a*b), __builtin_isinf(a*b), __isinf(a*b));
        return 0;
}

mtaylor@drizzle-dev:~$ gcc -o test test.c
mtaylor@drizzle-dev:~$ ./test
0 0 1
mtaylor@drizzle-dev:~$ gcc -o test test.c -std=c99
mtaylor@drizzle-dev:~$ ./test
1 0 1
mtaylor@drizzle-dev:~$ gcc -o test test.c   -mfpmath=sse -march=pentium4
mtaylor@drizzle-dev:~$ ./test
1 1 1
mtaylor@drizzle-dev:~$ g++ -o test test.c
mtaylor@drizzle-dev:~$ ./test
1 0 1

Originally I found the simple isinf() case to be different on x86 than x86-64, ppc32 and sparc (32 and 64).

After more research, I found that x86-64 uses the sse …

Since Kore, Lars and Marcus forced me to write this:

• Sebastian's first foreign language was Latin, for me Latin was the reason to start programming (by trying to hack the vocabulary trainer my brother wrote, so I learned Basic instead of Latin)
• I started PHP since I was too dumb to get my Perl CGI scripts working after our home server crashed
• I still have more Perl books than PHP books
• Compiling PHP 4.0 on our Pentium 90 home server took a night or so - and often forgot to activate some …