In the same vein as Deleting saved form entries on Firefox, I’ve noticed a bad habit I’ve developed recently of typing my password when no password is needed.
Most recently, and most tragically, I was mindlessly leaving a comment on a friend’s blog, a typical WordPress install that requires a name, email, and url. Except my fingertips apparently thought I was logging into Gmail and typed my name, email, and password—and then immediately hit submit! Ugh. Suddenly there’s my strong password sitting out in the open, live on the web for all to see (as if it was my blog’s URL), e.g. http://myp4ssw0rd!/
Now chances are anyone who stumbled upon that would have seen a jumbled array of characters and thought I sneezed instead of entering my URL. But I didn’t want to risk one clever or curious person who might have tried to use it to login to my Gmail account, or my blog, or about 5 other places I used that password—all of which I’ve now changed.
I also find myself mindlessly entering my password at the command line in Ubuntu. I’ve gotten so used to sudoing commands, that sometimes I forget I’ve already sudoed, and I’ll enter my password at the command line right after running a sudo command. Oops. There’s probably a lot of mineable passwords in the .bash_historys of the world. I wonder what my sysadmin friends do/recommend when that happens…
Databases are supposed to be these monolithic paragons of correctness and uniformity. So it’s a little unsettling to discover a database that returns grossly incorrect results. At least I wouldn’t expect WordPress to put version 5 of MySQL through its paces.
Here’s the scenario. Dreamhost, my webhost, is running MySQL Server v5.0.24a, released in August 2006. On my laptop I’m running MySQL Server v5.0.51a, released in January 2008. The difference between the two is a year and a half of bugfixes and performance improvements.
On each I’ve got a copy of the same database table, wp_posts, from my WordPress 2.5.1 install for Justinsomnia. And on each system I’ve got a copy of the giant SQL select statement generated by WordPress that returns the first 8 blog posts that should appear on my homepage. The unusual thing about this particular query is that it contains an insanely long NOT IN () list to filter out my neatlinks from the main column.
SELECT SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS wp_posts.*
FROM wp_posts
WHERE 1=1
AND wp_posts.ID NOT IN ('876', '877', '878', '879', '880'...'5456', '5458', '5460', '5461', '5462', '5463')
AND wp_posts.post_type = 'post'
AND (wp_posts.post_status = 'publish')
GROUP BY wp_posts.ID
ORDER BY wp_posts.post_date DESC
LIMIT 0, 8
The problem is that running the same SQL statement on each server returns different results—and I wanted to figure out why.
So I prefixed the query with EXPLAIN, to see what each version of MySQL would tell me about how they were dealing with the same query. I expected the results to be the same. They turned out to be quite different.
MySQL 5.0.24a:
+----+-------------+----------+-------+--------------------------------------+---------+---------+------+------+----------------------------------------------+
| id | select_type | table | type | possible_keys | key | key_len | ref | rows | Extra |
+----+-------------+----------+-------+--------------------------------------+---------+---------+------+------+----------------------------------------------+
| 1 | SIMPLE | wp_posts | range | PRIMARY,post_status,type_status_date | PRIMARY | 4 | NULL | 611 | Using where; Using temporary; Using filesort |
+----+-------------+----------+-------+--------------------------------------+---------+---------+------+------+----------------------------------------------+
MySQL 5.0.51a:
+----+-------------+----------+------+--------------------------------------+------------------+---------+-------------+------+-------------+
| id | select_type | table | type | possible_keys | key | key_len | ref | rows | Extra |
+----+-------------+----------+------+--------------------------------------+------------------+---------+-------------+------+-------------+
| 1 | SIMPLE | wp_posts | ref | PRIMARY,post_status,type_status_date | type_status_date | 25 | const,const | 5350 | Using where |
+----+-------------+----------+------+--------------------------------------+------------------+---------+-------------+------+-------------+
As you scroll to the right, you can see that v5.0.24a chose the PRIMARY key to find the most recent posts, while v5.0.51a opted for type_status_date. I’m not quite sure what that means, except that v5.0.24a obviously made the wrong choice. Which gave me an idea for an interim solution (while I wait for Dreamhost to upgrade MySQL): index hints.
If I could force MySQL to ignore the PRIMARY key, maybe it would “fix” my blog. So I added IGNORE INDEX (PRIMARY) to the query that selects posts, and voila, my blog homepage started working again! Here’s the diff of the code change I made. Luckily I have WordPress “installed” via Subversion, so any changes I make to core files get carried over with each upgrade.
Jason Griffey, an LS friend of mine from grad school (part of our original blogging cabal) has just written a book called Library Blogging. How friggin’ cool is that?
That should probably get him into the SILS alumni hall of fame!
After three weeks in not-so-stealth-mode, it’s time to take the wraps off a new joint venture between me and Stephanie, which we’re calling White Noise Lounge.
It all started about a month ago when we were joking with each other about the idea of an internet radio station that broadcast nothing but white noise—24 hours a day. At some point this joke crossed over into the realm of possibility, and we started working on it like a real project, albeit in the form of an audio blog.
The format is pretty simple. Every post is built around a short audio track that we’ve recorded from our environment. The sound could be anything, we’ve got a long list of ideas, but usually something continuous, rhythmic, and ambient. Every post contains a black and white photo of the sound’s source, in keeping with the site’s monochromatic color scheme (a nod to the “snow” of video static). As this is a blog at heart, we’ll also write something about the place or the sound.
Our goal is to post something new at least once a week, so please feel free to add the feed to your feedreader or audio podcast fetcher. We’ve submitted the site to iTunes, but haven’t heard back yet.
When I worked at O’Reilly Media, the Online Publishing Group (OPG) had this external-facing blog they called “From the Belly of the Beasts”, a reference to O’Reilly’s famous animal-branded technical books. The blog lived at blogs.oreillynet.com/beasts/.
It was started in October 2004 by Terrie Miller, the group’s manager. I arrived in May 2005, hired partly to assist with O’Reilly’s blog and feed projects. I loved that our group had a blog of its own, so I started posting to it within days of my arrival.
In order to justify blogging at work (to myself), I treated it as a knowledge sharing tool. I’d usually post useful things I found online and then pass the URL around to my co-workers. Frequently I’d refer back to an old post to jog my memory (or someone else’s). It was also a place to be a little silly, to lighten the mood. I posted there frequently until I left O’Reilly in June 2006. After my last post only two more posts appeared, one by Mark and one by Terrie, and from that point on the blog has lain dormant. Update:Terrie left O’Reilly in March 2008.
I’ve always been a little surprised, and of course happy that those old posts still exist out there on the web. They come from a special time in my life, my first year in California, my first job outside of the university. I definitely felt I was leaving behind something dear when I left O’Reilly. I expected the blog to just cease to exist one day, presumably after someone unplugged some dusty server in the corner that happened to be blogs.oreillynet.com.
Anyway yesterday I heard from Mark that the Beasts blog is indeed getting “unplugged”, and he wanted to know whether I wanted to save anything beforehand. Yikes, yes! So I’m going to recreate each of the posts I wrote there on Justinsomnia, categorize them in such a way that they can be pulled out together, and postdate them appropriately. I’m actually really excited about this, to me it’s like getting back a piece of myself for my archives.
