n3wjack's blog

how to safely run destructive sql statements

n3wjack — Fri, 11 May 2012 19:01:50 +0000

This tip is one of those “Why didn’t I think of that before” things when I saw it being used first. You see, sometimes you’re on this production database and you need to run some SQL statements in Microsoft SQL Management Studio. Statements that if you mess them up will end up ruining your customer’s day, and most certainly yours too.
Of course you’ve already taken a backup, but that isn’t perfect. It takes time to restore those and the most recent changes might be lost. The database might also be humongous, making backup & restore operations rather annoying.

Enter:

BEGIN TRANSACTION

You know this! Before you run any statement doing anything destructive on your database, first run the BEGIN TRANSACTION statement. It feels like spring doesn’t it? With fluffy little bunnies hopping around merrily in the green grass and yellow flowers.
Whatever you run next, nothing will actually happen until you run:

COMMIT TRANSACTION

If in the meanwhile however that delete statement turns out to act like the Spanish Flue and wipes out half of the precious records stored in your database table, there’s always:

ROLLBACK TRANSACTION

Undo. Restore from last save. You don’t lose a life.
Awesome. More fluffy bunnies.

One thing to keep in mind though. As long as your transaction isn’t committed your statements will be putting locks on rows and perhaps even tables. The longer you keep those, the more chance other people’s queries will have to wait for you to release those locks and might even time out. This is bad. So keep your transaction trickery as short as possible.

For more details on those magical statements, see MSDN.

getting good stats without google analytics

n3wjack — Thu, 03 May 2012 11:16:13 +0000

Google is huge and scary these days isn’t it? I mean they track our ass all over the place and I was actually helping them to do so. On my blog I was using Google’s free Analytics service to keep track of who, when, where and why people came to my blog.

The stats are pretty, easy to understand and extremely extensive. The downside is that all these stats end up in the massive Googleplex data center and are without doubt neatly analysed and lined up with your regular Google searches through that cookie that identifies you no matter if you’re logged on or not.

No me gusta.
So I removed that line of JavaScript from my pages ét voila, no more Google snooping on my watch. Problem is I liked those pretty graphs and lines and I sort of missed taking a peek at them now and then to see what pages where the most interesting and what crazy search results people where using to get to my blog.

Then I ran into something called Piwik. It’s free, open source and it does pretty much exactly the same thing as GA, but stores everything in your own private MySQL DB. It installs as easily as WordPress on your web server, and to activate it you just insert the JavaScript snippet it provides you with. A few seconds later you’ll be getting pretty graphs and figures and spend countless hours spying on your blog’s visitors with the real-time results.

Sweet!

Photo by Flood, cc-licensed.

mighty handy android apps

n3wjack — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 08:09:26 +0000

Well look at that. It’s been since 2010 that I actually reviewed the list of Android apps I often use. Can’t have that now can we? What awesome and fresh new apps would I be using these days? Which ones have I ditched for more shiny or slick ones? Let’s see!

The stock browser. Yes. I’m still using it. The other ones, still too bulky imo and don’t seem to be adding any features I can’t live without.
The stock energy manager had to go for a better one I’m afraid. So now I’m sporting Free Power Widget on my homescreen which also gives me access to Bluetooth & mobile data settings and has customizable colours. Ooh, pretty indeed.
Catch Notes is still there. Kicking note-taking buttocks.
FBReader also still there. Best eReader out there & open source.
Advanced Task Killer Free has gone. The stock one is good enough really.
Tweetdeck. You betcha. Best Twitter app for the phone. Ever. Love the tabs. The tabs make all the difference for me. Slide, slide, slide and you’ve seen everything you want. Awesome. From Twitter Inc nowadays. Makes sense.
Zeam Launcher has now replaced the stock launcher because minimalistic goodness and features. It adds a nice customizable toolbar, double-tab multi-screen overview and the easiest way to uninstall apps ever. You just drop them from the app list onto the trashcan ét voila, you can uninstall that bugger without using the market or “Play” thing, nor having to go through the slow loading and tedious system applications menus.
LittlePhoto is the only phone app besides the stock on I’ve kept around. It’s minimal but has lots of nice filters which you can combine in an endless number of ways until you have the perfect image… all messed up. Not locked into any online photo sharing thing either, so you can just save locally and share to whatever you like.
iPaper is a must if you are already using instapaper.
As photo viewer I’m using QuickPic now. Why? Because the stock one just isn’t fancy enough. It also has more features, but still, sometimes you just want things to look pretty dammit.
Dropbox is worth mentioning too. If you don’t know about it, it’s for syncing your files in the cloud to all your devices, so in this case also your Android phone. Lately they’ve done a great job on the Android app, making it a breeze to upload photo’s (automatically even, which is a bit spooky) or other files to your global cloudy storage space. Beats hooking up that darn USB cable to your PC for sure.
An old version of Acrobat Reader for PDF’s, because the new one is just plain worthless on Android imo. Sorry guys.

Photo by Adam Foster | Codefor, cc-licensed.

noisy sounds by Cooh and Oyaarss

n3wjack — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 15:47:39 +0000

Cooh is known for a good stomping drum’n'bass tune. This guest mix the did on the pirate radio Radio Record is no different. It’s full of the harder kind of drum’n'bass, conveniently labelled hard-step. I think they call it that because it’s kinda hard and the beat sort of steps. Anyway, it makes more sense if you listen to it really.

Another good and noisy sounding set is this Oyaarss Methlab mix. If you need a break from the hard-step, but still want your beats distorted and your sounds twisted, this half hour set is perfect. Songs taken from Oyaarss last album according to the Adnoiseam blog, which makes me want to check that out.
Enjoy.

There seems to be more where that came from too, which is nice.

dubstep injection

n3wjack — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 20:12:18 +0000

I feel guilty. Srsly. I do.
I’ve downloaded these awesome dubstep mixes a while ago and I haven’t posted them here yet for you guys to download, share and enjoy.

It’s this Peace Off mix 09 I ran into on their bandcamp page for one. It’s the harder kind of in-your-coked-up-face dubstep where the insane basslines switch faster than an epileptic cat in a centrifuge. OSLT. If you’re out of coffee this is audible caffeine you inject through the eardrum straight into your brain. It’s too much for some but just great if you’re a heavy user. Expect Flux Pavilion, Bassex, Emalkay, Niveau Zero and so much more.

Speaking of which, 16bit are too, and they are treating us with a free mix as well. Nice, nice, nice. Not as hard as the previous one, but you can’t drink coffee all day now can you. The playlist is up after the jump but to give you an idea (and get some extra search results) there’s some dope in there from Benga, Broken Note, Skream, The Outside Agency (omg!) and Original Nuttah. Yeah. From Shy FX! Can’t go wrong there right?

Photo by Dirty Bunny, cc-licensed.

bandcamp is full of awesome

n3wjack — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 20:21:53 +0000

Bandcamp is great. Not only because it allows artists from all over the earth to share their tunes and albums with the inhabitants of that same earth. No. There’s plenty of other ways to do that. Bandcamp is great because if you pay for the music, the artist gets most of the money directly. Not a record shop, their label or big-ass distribution companies. The artists get your money. Those guys that make the tunes. Sweet.

It’s like walking up to their door, ringing their doorbell, getting their latest record out of their hand and giving a crumpled-up banknote from your side pocket in exchange. It’s exactly like that! Except the walking up to their door, ringing their doorbell and getting a physical record part. But you are giving them your cash. In lots of cases you can even decide how much exactly. So that’s nice innit?

Here’s some cool stuff I noticed is up there. Even if you’re not willing to shell out one of those crumpled banknotes, there’s plenty of free stuff up for grabs too.

Older stuff from End-user for example. Expect some breakcore/drum’n'bass there. If you want more of that you can check out the Adnoiseam label who have most of their releases up there as well. More breakcore? Check out the mighty Venetian Snares, Ruby My Dear, or Gross Prophet. For the darker and broken beats check out Somatic Responses and CAPSLOCK. If you prefer it more jungle and ragga-core style then there’s always Peace-Off Records, or perhaps a bit of Bong-Ra if you can dig it. Harder style drum’n'bass is waiting at DJ Hidden‘s camp or at PRSPCT Recordings and of course the good old Tech Itch. Even if it was just for nostalgic reasons.

If you feel like spending more cash, you can always find a few gems by exploring some random tags.
You get the idea.

Photo by jermudgeon, cc-licensed.

some free breakcore albums and then some not

n3wjack — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 20:59:01 +0000

Free albums. Gotta love em.

If you like dark and glitchy soundscapes and broken distorted beats then Disruption of Space might be something for you. This free album by Somatic Responses has a range of tracks from 2009 to 2011 featuring their signature distorted sound. If you like it, there’s more of that for a small price here.

Also on bandcamp and with a number of free albums is an artist I hadn’t heard from before until recently called Gross Prophet. He fits in nicely with other artists I fancy though. If I’d have to stick some labels on there I’d say his music sounds like you’d take a few slices of Aphex Twin sounds, mix in a good shot of Venetian Snares beats, then add some Squarepusher bass licks to it and mix it all up nicely in a breakcore-blender for a few minutes. Serve with loud, hot speakers.
Original enough on its own with all these well-known influences? Well, yes, I think so indeed. If you love the 3 free albums he has up there, why not get his latest “Vague Memories of Self” as well and support the artist. Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside doesn’t it?

Photo by festerbme, cc-licensed.

catch.com makes a darn good bookmarking service

n3wjack — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 19:29:14 +0000

Still looking for a good bookmarking service after the Delicious takeover by Avos with their fishy policy changes? And the Trunkly takeover by Avos? With equally fishy policy changes? Cause it’s the same company?

So was I.

I didn’t care for the social bit too much or whatever other fuss services throw in these days when it comes to bookmarking. I just wanted to be able to easily save links, tag and search them. Anywhere. Yeah, not installing software to sync it over different browsers and platforms and stuff, just simple good old-fashioned web-based goodness which makes sure you can access it from anywhere, even from your bleeding edge smart phone, at work, at home, at a friends place. I think they call that “in the cloud” these days.

As it turns out I’m already using something called Catch Notes to (wait for it…) catch quick notes on my phone, and keep them synced with their cloud service. Yeah. Cloud Service. How hip is that!?
Anyway, they added something new a while ago called streams, which basically lets you group related stuff together. Stuff like links for example.

Tadaaaa!!

Indeed. I simply created a “Links” stream (I’m so original), dump interesting sites and pages in there either manually, or by using the Firefox add-on which auto-includes the link with your selected text. Really handy if you hate the tedious operation of copy-pasting and then *gasp* typing some description to go with it. Go figure.
The data is synched with my phone thanks to the Android app, so I also have my links handy there. Even better. I can add bookmarks from my phone using the Share function common to most apps, and read them later on my PC.

Searching? Tagging?
Yep. Can do all that. So it’s pretty damn sweet innit?

Photo by AndyFitz, cc-licensed.

gein & teknoist make a good sonic combo

n3wjack — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 20:59:41 +0000

It’s that time again to dump some hard beats and distorted sounds on your breakcore and dark-step loving asses.

How about some Gein? Hard & dark drum’n'bass producers who now started their own label Bad Chemistry Recordings. Of course they are hosting some promo mixes on their site. So go get em, cause they’re awesome. This 54 minute podcast is another free mix to check out, and as if that isn’t enough, their Soundcloud account has free tracks sprinkled all over it.

Not breakcory enough? How about a Filthcast featuring The Teknoist? You know it’s going to pop your eardrums when you see names like Bong-Ra, Broken Note, The Outside Agency and of course Donny on the track-list.

If you like this, stay tuned for some more of the finer harder electronics in the near future. In the meanwhile, it pays to keep an eye out on the core music weekly curated by yours truly.
Check it oooooooooooooooout!

Photo by Scabeater, cc-licensed.

don’t let the EU censor your internet: stop ACTA

n3wjack — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 10:50:49 +0000

You might have heard that SOPA got stopped (for now) in the USA, a bill to censor the internet and limit online freedom for everyone. An even worse deal is going down on our EU-side of the globe unfortunately, where ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) has already been signed, but not yet approved (luckily).

ACTA – a global treaty – could allow corporations to censor the Internet. Negotiated in secret by a small number of rich countries and corporate powers, it would set up a shadowy new anti-counterfeiting body to allow private interests to police everything that we do online and impose massive penalties — even prison sentences — against people they say have harmed their business.
- avaaz.org

So it’s about time to do something about this before this bill gets voted in the EU Parliament and gets adopted globally.
First you can start by reading about ACTA, find out what’s wrong with it, sign the petition and act against it.

For those in the US, you can go sign the White House petition. Do it, because this deal is worse than SOPA, as it spans beyond the internet and deals even with regulations on medication and food.

The oppressively strict regulations could mean people everywhere are punished for simple acts such as sharing a newspaper article or uploading a video of a party where copyrighted music is played. Sold as a trade agreement to protect copyrights, ACTA could also ban lifesaving generic drugs and threaten local farmers’ access to the seeds they need. And, amazingly, t he ACTA committee will have carte blanche to change its own rules and sanctions with no democratic scrutiny.
- avaaz.org

Spread the word, sign the petition, just do something so this is stopped just like SOPA was.

Afterwards, you can get back to your memes and lolcats. :)