MySQL Workbench comes with a bunch of different default configurations for hooking up to a local or remote server. Whether you're on Windows (32 or 64 bit), *nix, or OSX, there are configurations to get you started... This is however, unless you have a setup with non-standard paths.

If you're on MAMP, XAMPP, WAMP, or any other similar distribution/installation of Apache/MySQL, your paths are jacked. If you're on OSX, your default paths may still be technically correct, but since you're using XAMPP (or similar), selecting the MacOS_X_(MySQL_Package) profile when adding an entry to the server administration area of MySQL Workbench, may not throw errors, but it'll be speaking to another MySQL install than the one you're intending to use.

I should note that there is an available profile called "Linux_(Custom)", however the UI doesn't provide you with any way to set the correct paths, so it still won't work for us.

Creating a new server profile in MySQL Workbench

First, we'll want to go to the Applicatons folder and control-click on MySQLWorkbench.app, in the context menu you'll select "Show Package Contents". This will open a new Finder window showing the contents of the file.

control-click, and select "Show Package Contents" to browse the contents of an application.

Next, navigate to Contents > Resources > mysql.profiles. This is where all of the profile that come packaged with MySQL Workbench are located.

Copy and paste the file MacOS_X_(MySQL_Package).xml and then rename your copy to MacOS_X_(XAMPP_Package).xml.

This is what your brand new XAMPP package file should look like.

Open MacOS_X_(XAMPP_Package).xml in your favorite text editor (I use TextMate) and edit to suit your environment. Here's my setup for XAMPP's default paths.

If MySQL is running, you should now be able to add and connect to it under the Server Administration in MySQL Workbench.

A successfully added local instance of MySQL

i received my new television today, and I am beyond disappointed with the attention in which it was packed. four pieces of cardboard were all that were provided to hold the unit in the box with any sense of stability. the base/stand was not restrained inside of the box at all, and appeared to move around quite a bit. the television and screen itself however, which was inside of a plastic bag, had tons of individual (and flattened) styrofoam balls all over. not peanuts, but the 1-2mm balls themselves. they did a wonderful job of simply making a mess when i removed the plastic bag from the television.

the television itself was greasy, both on the screen, and on the (what should be) shiny black plastic border/frame. only after wiping it down with a brand new (i.e. clean) microfiber cloth, did i notice that the glossy black plastic border/frame of the television was covered with scratches, both very light in appearance (which give a hazy look) and others that can be easily felt with a fingernail.

after removing the base/stand from the box, wiping it down to remove dirt/grease/smudges i was able to see how badly the base/stand was scratched... some might even call it gorged.

it appears to me that this television either was a scratch and dent item (which was not in the product's description) sold to me as new or was damaged in shipping due to negligence on the seller's (woot.com's) behalf.

additionally, out of the four screws that are to be used to attach the television to the base/stand, one had a washer permanently affixed and locked onto the threads. as a result, the screw would not fit into the plastic recess around where it was to be screwed, rendering this fourth screw unusable. i was able to purchase a similar screw of the same diameter, thread pitch and length after two hours of searching through four different stores across Brooklyn.

photographs of the damage have been uploaded as a set to my Flickr account for reference and publicity http://www.flickr.com/photos/naterkane/sets/72157627150484664/with/5916992385/

there are plenty of ways this situation can be remedied, so i will very much look forward to a response. please note that your response will be made public.

due to the number of issues and complaints the sale of this product by woot.com seems to have caused, i would not be surprised if someone starts throwing around the term "class action" very soon. these other issues and complaints can be found on woot.com's site here: http://deals.woot.com/deals/details/15525d9b-89b1-4352-8f38-937939f565c7/element-40-1080p-lcd-hdtv

best,
nater kane

Yeah, that internal mic (or "those" in my case, as I have two of them in my iMac) just stops working.

If this happens to you, your system preferences won't help, you need the Audio MIDI Setup app. But don't worry, it's already in your utility folder.

The first time it happened it took days for me to track down where to fix the problem, and the second time, it only took a day or so to remember what I did the first time. Which is why i'm making a note of it here.

Under Applications > Utilities you'll find Audio MIDI Setup.app. Run it. Select Build-in Microphone, then at the bottom right, just make sure the checkbox(es) for Mute are unchecked. Now you're done.

The image below is for reference.

I haven't used this feature, well, not for anything important.

bulk unfollowing is, apparently, the wrong kind of automation

About two months ago or so the "bulk unfollow" functionality was removed and this friendly little note was posted to explain.

On January 15, 2010, Twitter instructed us to remove the "bulk unfollow" capability of Twitter Karma as it has been determined to violate their Automation Rules and Best Practices. We have done so in order to comply with their request. We apologize to you, our users, for having to make this change, but hope you will understand it is outside of our control.

Each profile listing still has it's own link to unfollow that user, but since Dossy removed the automation, I figured I'd recreate it with a super simple bookmarklet.

Twitter Karma Bulk Unfollow
Twitter Karma Bulk Unfollow

Just drag it up to your bookmark toolbar, and unfollow all the people on the page. I decided to not care if a user's profile checkbox is checked or not, so be warned.

*NOTE* I am very much aware of the irony in having written a bookmarklet to bulk unfollow users through a tool called Twitter Karma.

*UPDATE* I somehow managed to toss the alert() in the wrong place and didn't catch it somehow. The bookmarklet is now fixed, sorry if annoyed the hell out of you trying to use it.

Enjoy.

coffee and cigarettes from Nater Kane on Vimeo.

@womworldnokia, please send me to sxsxi from Nater Kane on Vimeo.

Friend FAQ is exactly like this, though for some reason I still decided to click through and check it out. Finding out who "said" what about you, however, does require you to spend 'points'. This is something that I do not plan on doing.

Some of what my friends "said" did however make me smile, and many of the answers were very nice, so I thought I'd share.

• Is Nater Kane fun to be around? Yes
• Would you travel the world with Nater Kane? No
• Do you think that Nater Kane lets the "yellow mellow"? Yes
• Is Nater Kane fun to be around? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane will do anything to get what they want? No
• Do you think that Nater Kane can do 20 pushups? Yes
• Would Nater Kane ever dress up in a mascot outfit and run around? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane knows what a fist pound is? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane grinds their teeth while sleeping? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane has ever used steroids? No
• Do you think that Nater Kane has ever given money to a homeless person? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane is a freak? No
• Do you think Nater Kane parties too much? No
• Do you think your first impression of Nater Kane was right? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane is mean? No
• Do you think that Nater Kane can eat more than 3 Big Macs at a time? No
• Would you travel the world with Nater Kane? Yes
• Do you think Nater Kane has ever pulled an all-nighter? Yes
• Find out who answered for 50 coins!Do you think that Nater Kane is a slacker? No
• Do you think that Nater Kane looks good in a bathing suit? No
• Do you think Nater Kane is a spaz? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane has showered today? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane 'plays with themselves'? No
• Does Nater Kane have a nice butt? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane watches the TV show "24"? Yes
• Have you ever had a crush on Nater Kane? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane has ever fooled around at work? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane has game? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane is cuter than Brad Pitt? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane puts 'hoes' before 'bros'? No
• Do you think that Nater Kane has ever played strip poker? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane knows what a fist pound is? No
• Do you think that Nater Kane is selfish? No
• Do you think that Nater Kane likes blue eyes? Yes
• Is Nater Kane fun to be around? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane voted for Obama? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane has a funny looking nose? No

This is book number two for Coda. NOM is currently working on a project built with Kohana, a framework originally based on CodeIgniter.

Their marketing copy reads something like this:

Kohana is a PHP 5 FRAMEWORK that uses the MODEL VIEW CONTROLLER architectural pattern. It aims to be SECURE, LIGHTWEIGHT, and EASY to use.

This book cover is much simpler than the one i produced for Subversion here. I quickly came to realize that there's no point at all in spending the time to make such a complicated image.

Book Title: Kohana
URL: http://docs.kohanaphp.com/
Simple cover: KohanaBook.png
Use for Mode: PHP-HTML
Search URL: http://docs.kohanaphp.com/?do=search&id=*

I was just reading through Adding more Coda Books, and thought that if you were going to add Subversion's documentation to Coda, it deserved an okay looking cover. I also thought that linking to the nightly documentation wouldn't be a bad idea either.

For SVN 1.6 nightlies

Book Title: Subversion 1.6
URL: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/nightly/en/svn-book.html
Simple cover: http://www.naterkane.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/SubversionBook.png
Use for Mode: None
Search URL: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:svnbook.red-bean.com%20*%20

For SVN 1.5

Book Title: Subversion 1.5
URL: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.5/svn-book.html
Simple cover: http://www.naterkane.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/SubversionBook-1.5.png
Use for Mode: None
Search URL: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:svnbook.red-bean.com%20*%20

So I posted a message on twitter to see if there's anyone who follows me who might be able to suggest a solution.

Then just a short 2 minutes later, Ryan Barr (@ryanbarr) came through and pointed me in the right direction.

cputhrottle is a small OS X command-line utility designed to limit the CPU usage of a process to which it attaches.

I found that even though I have a utility installed to increase the fan speed when CPU temperature increases, sometimes I would run jobs that maxed out the CPU for long periods -- and this caused my MacBook to get extremely hot. Within the space of a couple minutes, the temperature displayed had jumped by over 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

The utility takes a process ID (pid) and a percentage amount to limit. For example:

sudo ./cputhrottle 328 25

Running this command would limit process 328 to a maximum of 25% CPU usage.

Note that cputhrottle needs to be run with root privileges to be able to attach to the process to control. I recommend doing this via the sudo command.

Source code is below, as well as a pre-compiled binary (OS X 10.5.1, Intel). If there is any interest in a PPC version I would be willing to cross-compile one. The program requires that Boost 1.33.1 be installed to compile. Run make all to build cputhrottle and a test program.

The source hopefully will be interesting to those looking into how to manipulate processes in Mac OS via mach system calls. The code is a subset of code I was working on to create a simple debugger as an alternative to gdb. Obviously, this project was much simpler and ultimately more useful.

cputhrottle makes use of the task_info, task_suspend, and task_resume calls. task_info and task_threads are used to collect CPU usage statistics on the process, and the program then suspends/resumes the attached process appropriately until the CPU usage has stabilized. Any errors occurring are assumed to be a result of the attached process exiting, and result in cputhrottle also exiting. Control-C is intercepted, and the attached process allowed to resume gracefully before cputhrottle exits.

Source: cputhrottle.tar.gz

Binary: cputhrottle.gz

Note: Thanks to Nikolaj Schumacher for pointing out a race condition whereby a thread being sampled could have ceased to exist after having been enumerated as existing within the process. Specifically, he noticed this while throttling Handbrake, which creates/kills threads in rapid succession. I have applied his patch and the new sources and binary reflect his changes. I tested the fix and cputhrottle behaved as before (for my test case).

Contact email: nolanw, followed by an underbar and then the word "commerce" at willnolan dot com

http://www.willnolan.com/cputhrottle/cputhrottle.html.

I've been a fan of Aptana for quite awhile, through all of it's ups and down as it's development I've generally still managed to prefer it over other more common 'bare-bones' editors like TextMate. Admittedly, a lot of this has to do with Aptana's ease of install and support for Subclipse.

Public/stable builds of Aptana have been running on Eclipse 3.2 for what seems like forever, and one feature that I've always had want for, is bugtracking integration. Mylyn is a great Eclipse plugin that does just that, well, sort of. The versions of Mylyn that run on Eclipse 3.2 haven't seen an update in ages, and support little more than Mantis, Jira and Trak. When I had a decent number of projects that were using Trak or Mantis, I was in heaven; NOM's migration to relying on 3rd party SaaS tools has made administration of our ticketing software and repositories a snap, but I haven't had any way to integrate our preferred ticketing software (Lighthouse) into my personal workflow until now.

Since last november (at least) Lighthouse has now been able to be integrated with Eclipse with the Mylyn's Web Templates connector. The only catch... it's still requires at least Eclipse 3.3+. Fortunately, the next version of Aptana, currently called Apana Andretti Alpha is built on Eclipse 3.4, and though it seems to have some memory consumption issues (it is an alpha remember!), I was able to find a copy of it here and get everything sorted and working together nicely. And let me just say, my life has became a little bit easier.

Simen Brekekn was generous enough to post about his setup over on Lighthouse's support site here. Below is his info, with some added/updated information.

1. Make sure you're running Eclipse 3.4 or above (or grab a copy of Aptana's Andretti Alpha #3 here http://www.aptana.com/node/577Aptana 1.5 here)\
2. In Eclipse/Aptana install Mylyn from the Mylyn update site
   http://download.eclipse.org/tools/mylyn/update/e3.4 (Eclipse 3.4, 3.5, Galileo Packages)
   http://download.eclipse.org/tools/mylyn/update/e3.4 (Eclipse 3.3)
3. In Eclipse/Aptana install the "Mylyn Connector: Web Templates" form the Mylyn incubation update site ( http://download.eclipse.org/tools/mylyn/update/incubator )

Then add a new Task Repository and enter the following information:

Please note that the query pattern in this screenshot is incorrect.

• Enter the full url of your project, ie. http://foo.lighthouseapp.com/projects/123
• Give the task repository a Label
• Enter your authentication info (if it's a private project)

Then add the following settings under "Advanced Configuration":

• Task URL: ${serverUrl}/tickets/
• New Task URL: ${serverUrl}/tickets/new
• Query Request URL: ${serverUrl}/tickets.xml?q=${query}
• Query Pattern (make sure you enter it in one line):

UPDATE: I completely botched the regex that was previously posted, and now have it posted correctly. So very sorry for anyone who followed the instructions on this post and had it fail for them.

Next enable HTTP Authentication, enter your login (again), click Finish and you're all set!

unserializing an unserializable string

The easiest, and most popular way to check if a string is serialized is simple.

Quite a few very popular frameworks and apps do it this way, try to just simply pass the string to the unserialize method, make sure it isn't the boolean false, and prepend the method with an @ to suppress notice-level error output. Don't get me wrong, it works. But if you're logging your notice-level errors, then any time you're trying to check if a string is serialized in this way, it logs the notice that's generated. Storing data as a serialized hash in a key-value database (Tokyo Cabinet — which we've chosen to use for Nomcat, BerkeleyDB, CouchDB, Redis, etc.) magnifies the scenario and takes this wee-little_old Notice, and makes your logs fill up really fast. Since error logs are for tracking issues that a developer should really concern themselves with, logging all of these notices just wouldn't do, it's simply a waste of space and processing time to handle them over and over and over again.

As we've been building Nomcat over at NOM, we're often faced with dozens of reads from the data storage layer with each view that's generated, and recently while testing, we've run into log files that look something like this.

just set_error_handler to an empty method

Initially I tried a few different options to work around this annoying little problem.

1. Prepending the unserialize method with @ to suppress output, but it doesn't prevent logging.
2. Wrapping in a try-catch block doesn't do the trick
3. Wrapping it with error_reporting(0) and error_reporting(2) doesn't do the trick either
4. But creating an method to handle the error, have it to nothing, and wrapping the unserialize line with set_error_handler and restore_error_handler does the trick!

This is what I came up with.

If you noticed that I'm passing an array like this: set_error_handler(array('App_Model','unserialize_handler'));, you've got a good eye. This is how you can specify in which class to find the method you want to use as a callback, neither $this->methodname or Classname::methodname will work. However if you aren't writing object oriented code, you can simply pass the name of the method you want to use to handle the error as a string like this: set_error_handler('unserialize_handler');.

Let me know how it works for you.

Instead, here's a few things I think might be good advice for surviving this upcoming year if you "work in tech". It's a living list, so if you feel that I've overlooked something that might touch you, let me know and I'll add to it.

1. If you start a new company, don't make ad revenue it's core business model. If you're an adult, you should know better.
2. Don't take a word and add "TW" to the beginning of it, it's not cute and instead you'll be an annoying and uncreative schmuck. This is an updated rule from last year's "if the word ends in 'ER', don't leave out the 'E'".
3. Don't think for a second that people want to pay for content, they will however, pay for services. Now someone just needs to come up with better services.
4. If you build something, make sure it's ACTUALLY useful, and not just cool and trite.
5. If you work at an agency and enjoyed reading "Getting Real", please forget everything you read, those ideas work if you're on the product side, and not client services... that book is no good for you, get a refund.
6. There's no such thing as a social media expert. People can be experts in platforms and tactics and skills, but not in "social media". I however am an expert is calling people out on misusing and abusing ambiguous terms and buzzwords. Like most buzzwords, it's something most people don't understand... when talking about it, I use the term 'unmanaged (brand) communications' because it actually describes what's happening; people are talking about all sorts of stuff, sometimes it might be about you, and it sometimes happens on the internet.
7. SEO experts are a joke, you'll never need one if you have a good information architect, a copywriter and someone who knows how to write good, semantic markup.
8. If you "follow" more than a few hundred people on 'you-know-what', you're a dick and need to cut that crap out right now. It's actually impossible to track more than 1000 people whether online or in the physical world. Quit fronting like you pay attention.
9. If you're a strategist of some sort and don't have any actual or physical deliverables as part of your work, reevaluate how you actually are a benefit your clients or get a new career. I don't want to have to hunt you down and burn you at the stake, we don't need more people selling snake oil and practicing brand voodoo.
10. No individual person is worth more than $150 per hour tops, if you disagree then you must be greedy, fleecing your clients, fleecing our industry, or all three.
11. Don't waste your time getting excited about the new hot mobile device. They all suck, really. If you do need one, please recycle your old one and just buy the one that is the least painful for you to use.

It's one thing to manage, educate and cultivate relationships with existing clients; how important is it to educate a potential client, who you have already decided not to work with, as to why you aren't interested in working with them? (NOT why you aren't able, if you're simply unable)

So...

I have recently been working on starting a website called Democratus that will be a sort of "customer service platform for government" and provide a place for ideas for change to come directly from the people and be delivered directly to our representatives and press. We hope to be able to get this website off the ground by early next year, but in order to do that we're looking for some funding. Recently we applied for a grant from the Knight Foundation, who sponsor a contest for ideas like this, and we're very hopeful that this will provide the funding we need to launch the site, but we need your help to get the grant.

All you need to do is visit the website of the Knight Foundation and our page there, and register and vote on our idea. It should only take a minute or two and it would really help. If you want to read our application it is there on the website, and if you want to leave a comment on the proposal after reading it (something about how innovative and important this would be in your life, for instance) that would be even better.

Feel free to forward this post to other people that you think are interested in encouraging political participation and efforts to make our democracy more direct.

1) Register with the Knight Foundation: http://is.gd/6cTK

2) Vist our site: http://is.gd/6cU3

3) Vote and comment on our proposal (clicking on 5 stars won't hurt)

4) And then if you'd like, tell us what you think by sending us an email to Nate.Heasley@gmail.com or nater@naterkane.com

The best plugin that I could find that was already out there was Tero Piirainen's jquery.scrollable.js. If you check it out you'll quickly see that the markup that's used to generate the scrolling items could be improved upon. Nothing in my version of jquery.scrollable.js removes functionality from what Tero put together, and the improvements are basic.

1. make those items scrollable horizotally or vertically
2. decide how many items are visible at once
3. scroll elements with mouse, arrow keys and mousewheel (requires mousewheel.js)
4. make navigational buttons without programming
5. have programmatic actions: next, prev, nextPage, prevPage, seekTo, begin, end
6. need to know when list is scrolled with custom event listener
7. You can now start with semantic markup
8. I want this all in single js file that weights only 3.9 4.1 Kb minified!

First we start with simple & semantic markup

There's nothing fancy going on here at all, just a wrapping element, an anchor and an unordered list. Unfortunately due to the design requirements of this particular implementation, an additional <div> had to be added. If it wasn't for the creative constraint, and the lack of support for vertical-align: middle across many browsers, this extra <div> would have not been included.

Presentation

Now we add styling that makes it match the look & feel of the main site.

The css required to make this bit work for you will be different for every project, so take a look at the included styles and tweak as necessary.

And now for the behavior

If the user's browser allows javascript to run, we add some additional unobtrusive behavior (including mousewheel support)

This is the generated source we end up with... There's one thing you might notice, and that's the div class="__scrollable", though I initially placed that element outside of it's parent ol it did not work. It has something to do with how the xhtml 1.0 strict doctype is handled by the browsers. Though this may work in HTML 4.0 or various browser quirks modes, I haven't specifically tested all possible cases.

This build is currently in a non-public svn repository, but I will be moving it to google code or github shortly (depending on whether or not I feel like learning how to use Git)

Standalone Demo:

http://www.naterkane.com/sandbox/scrollable/

Download:

First you'll of course need jQuery v.1.2.6

jquery.scrollable.js (7.5k)

jquery.scrollable.min.js (4.1k)

scrolling-list.css – the stylesheet used for the example

You can also grab a copy of jquery.mousewheel.js here

it was time to update the very bogus & bad mark that we've been using for Nater Kane & Friends. comments are of course welcome.

Image borrowed from http://hoboken411.com/archives/11797

I thought I'd repost something that I just put up on everyone's favorite customer service site, Get Satisfaction.

"and the tech support i need anytime" is not available anytime

I have a dry-loop business DSL account. The telephone number associated with that dry loop account does not appear on any of my paper bills.

I call the verizon business tech support number, and am asked to either enter my number, or say "i don't have one" relying on their voice recognition.

if i call after 5pm, the telephone system instructs me to call back during normal business hours and then disconnects me. i understand sales being closed at 5pm, however tech support being closed is unacceptable.

my connection has been very spotty all day, and now i have to wait until monday to call to speak with their support staff to fix the problem? c'mon. this is supposed to be "business class" service (and support). I pay extra for it, expecting an extra level of support.

View the original post over here.

This rules. Thanks for helping the web move forward guys!