September 2007 Entries
While Mr. Haacked and company fight emergencies, I've been making some progress with Subtext's MySQL port. So here is what is done so far. All SQL has been converted to MySQL. The effort was actually pretty enormous, considering time constraints. There were 7 installation files full of CREATE TABLE scripts. And then there were 90 stored procedures. Two thirds of stored procs converted with minor tweaking. Some, particularly ones that fetch paged data were greatly simplified, thanks to MySQL LIMIT command. And a few had to be basically rewritten. All in all, good learning experience in MySQL. Compared to the original,...
After reading Scott Hanselman's Developer and Power User Tools List, I took inventory of my system and, surprisingly, found very little overlap. Other than the typical stuff, like SysInternals, of course. My list tends toward the developer productivity tools, the things that makes you lazy and make your life convenient. I actually have a lot more utilities, but these are totally essential, awesome and are in use every day. On to the list. Agent Ransack - the built in windows search is basically next to useless (particularly on Windows XP) when looking for some nugget of text. Agent Ransack makes it...
In the old country, before I came to US in 1988, I never saw a VCR. I vaguely heard of the concept, but never seen it nor knew anyone who had it. Given that I didn't know of a VCR, I didn't really have a desire to get one. The reason I mention this, is because I spent most of my professional and hobby programming life in the Microsoft world and have been more or less oblivious to advances in parallel universes like MySQL or Linux or Mac or whatever. As I've been porting Subtext to MySQL, it's...
If you are not using web server compression, you are needlessly paying for bandwidth. Or using bandwidth that could be used for something else. I've seen savings on the order of 50% to 90%. There is ZERO reasons not to use it. For some strange reason, enabling compression in IIS 6.0 is far too difficult. It was damn near impossible in IIS 5.0, so I thought they'd make it really easy in 6.0. So I made a batch file to make it stupid simple. Create a batch file, then copy and paste lines below into it. IISreset.exe /stop cscript...
The prelude Having ported an application from PHP to .NET, I strangely assumed (without looking at the code) that porting Subtext to MySQL will be similarly simple. After all, I reasoned, it's just a database port vs a language port that I've done earlier. I also thought that Subtext is organized along a traditional 3 tier pattern. In fact, Subtext is infinitely more complex. It has a remarkable amount of code for an application, the sole purpose of which is to list articles. But once you think about it, the code must support a ton of features for the engine...