Personal Data Warehouses: Reclaiming Your Data
I like the way that Simon is liberating his data from silos and making it work for him.
Link tags: sql
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‘Real’ Programming Is an Elitist Myth | WIRED
The title says it all, really. This is another great piece of writing from Paul Ford.
I’ve noticed that when software lets nonprogrammers do programmer things, it makes the programmers nervous. Suddenly they stop smiling indulgently and start talking about what “real programming” is. This has been the history of the World Wide Web, for example. Go ahead and tweet “HTML is real programming,” and watch programmers show up in your mentions to go, “As if.” Except when you write a web page in HTML, you are creating a data model that will be interpreted by the browser. This is what programming is.
Pinboard is Eleven (Pinboard Blog)
I probably need to upgrade the Huffduffer server but Maciej nails why that’s an intimidating prospect:
Doing this on a live system is like performing kidney transplants on a playing mariachi band. The best case is that no one notices a change in the music; you chloroform the players one at a time and try to keep a steady hand while the band plays on. The worst case scenario is that the music stops and there is no way to unfix what you broke, just an angry mob. It is very scary.
I Dreamed of a Perfect Database | New Republic
A really nice piece by Paul Ford on the history of databases and the dream of the Semantic Web.
Sometimes I get a little wistful. The vision of a world of connected facts, one big, living library, remains beautiful, and unfulfilled.
One thing though: the scrolling on this page is sooooo janky that I had to switch off JavaScript just to read these words comfortably.
How to support full Unicode in MySQL databases · Mathias Bynens
Some good database character-encoding advice from Mathias.
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)
You can now store (and scale) MySQL databases with Amazon. Handy.
Welcome - Perch - A Really Little Content Management System (CMS)
Drew and Rachel's little CMS looks very nice indeed.
Web Security Horror Stories: The Director's Cut at
The slides from Simon's excellent full-length presentation at the head conference. Every web developer needs to be aware of these issues.
Surfin’ Safari - Blog Archive » WebKit Does HTML5 Client-side Database Storage
I just learned from Kelly that Webkit is supporting local storage and database queries, as proposed in HTML5. Kinda like Google Gears. Potentially excited for the iPhone/iPod Touch.
xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe
Yes, you have to be a bit of a database geek to find this funny but if you are, this is very funny indeed.
Mysql database migration and special characters | Orthogonal Thought
This article is a life-saver for me. I'm constantly having trouble with special characters when I'm backing up databases for local copies of my sites.
Samuel's Blog
The working example from Richard's chapter in Blog Design Solutions. It's a home-rolled PHP/MySQL blog for Samuel Pepys featuring beautiful typography... natch.