A bzr plugin to assist in developing focused patches. in Launchpad

I use quilt a lot for development. Currently, If I had to choose between BK and quilt - I’d choose quilt.

I use bzr in other development projects like MemberDB. I use git as a frontend for SVN (it is *so* much faster than the svn client and incredibly more space efficient… A copy of the entire history of a tree stored in git is usually less than a single svn checkout). I also use darcs (and quilt) for offlineimap and just about every other revision control tool at some point.

So this is a bit of a discussion about how I work and how bzr-loom would help it… (I’ve wished for a long time that bk had stuff like this… bk collapse is just not what I want, although others use it lots).

The loom plugin to bzr looks like a fantasy world of goodness where the revision control system …

So I finally installed the xdebug PHP extension and started doing some performance analysis of MemberDB using xdebug and kcachegrind. The upshot of which is a number of commits to the bzr tree that dramatically improve performance in several key areas. The answer? Caching.

I’m not even talking using memcached or caching things in database tables or anything like that - just about everything is still the same dynamically produced content as before, but I’m now caching some simple things avoiding many round-trips to the database while executing a script.

There were a few things that were taking a fair bit of execution time:

1. The generation of the menu. In MemberDB, there’s a menu on the left. There’s also a …

Frank talks about Storing Passwords in MySQL. He does, however, miss something that’s really, really important. I’m talking about the salting of passwords.

If I want to find out what  5d41402abc4b2a76b9719d911017c592 or 015f28b9df1bdd36427dd976fb73b29d MD5s mean, the first thing I’m going to try is a dictionary attack (especially if i’ve seen a table with only user and password columns). Guess what? A list of words and their MD5SUMS can be used to very quickly find what these hashes represent.

I’ll probably have this dictionary in a MySQL database with an index as well. Try it yourself - you’ll probably find a dictionary with the words “hello” and “fire” in it to help. In fact, do this:

mysql> create table words (word varchar(100));
Query OK, 0 rows …

MemberDB - A Membership Database

I released 0.4 today. A rather long awaited release. No doubt there’ll be bugs and the need for a 0.4.1 or something - but this is relatively bug free and has a bunch of new cool stuff to chew on.

It’s also the first real release to support MySQL 5.0 (previous releases won’t work as MemberDB heavily uses views).

it’s annoying. grr.

but, on the other hand, I am speaking about MySQL 5.0 at OSDC.

This is even cooler as 5.0 has gone GA. So it’s not “upcoming features” it’s the “here and now”.

I’ll now have to release MemberDB 0.4 (the MySQL release). Converting the Linux Australia installation over at some point soon too. The 0.4 tree fixes enough bugs that it’s worth it (one of which Pia found the other day).

So I picked up my new laptop on friday. It’s an ASUS V6V - nice and fast, light, good resolution screen and lots of disk and RAM (it came with 1GB, I’ve got 2GB).

Anyway, the transfer of data from my PowerBook went fine. I waited for xfsdump to dump /home from the powerbook to a firewire drive (and for “waiting” I do mean going out and seeing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - which was very good).

Installing Ubuntu on the ASUS went like a dream. Everything, and i do mean everything worked out-of-the-box with only one tweak. That was uncommented the ACPI sleep configuration option do-dad in /etc/default/acpi-something-foo to get suspend to ram working.

The WEP didn’t work in the installer, so I initially just used the GigE adapter until the first reboot.

The firewire drivers don’t really behave with this laptop atm… that dreaded “aborted sbp2 …

The next beta of 5.0 is out - 5.0.10. So go ahead and download it. You’re not cool unless you download it (you can find it here http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.0.html)

File swap it, torrent it, burn it to cds and give it to friends. Don’t you just love free software!

This release fixes a bunch of bugs that were holding back MemberDB from being usable on MySQL. This was bugs in new features, and the main one had already been reported.

There’s also been a few fixes for cluster which is always a good thing. Nothing show stopping though. We must be good :)