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Using MySQL in heterogeneous environments.

/ James Fitzsimons / Leave a comment

If like us you have a requirement to run MySQL in a mixed Windows and Linux environment and you want your database to be portable you will need to change the default case sensitive table name behaviour of MySQL on one of the operating systems. On Windows the default behaviour is case insensitive, on Linux the default behaviour is case sensitive.

I like my table names to stay in the same case I scripted them in so we chose to change Windows to be case sensitive. The fix is pretty simple – you just need to add the following line to your my.ini after [mysqld] and restart your mysql service.

lower_case_table_names = 0

Existing objects won’t suddenly change case, but any new tables you add to your database will appear in the same case you scripted it in. See the mysql documentation for more details.

Starting your own business is hard

/ James Fitzsimons / 1 Comment

No one said it would be easy

Along the way you will encounter all sorts of barriers, obstacles and challenges and you are going to have to dig deep to find the drive to carry on.

So when your server blows up, someone you were planning to partner with vanishes of the face of the Internet without warning, a new competitor beats you market, you’re working ridiculous hours, and everything looks like it’s going pear shaped – remember why you are doing it.

Why are you doing it?

That is a really important question. Be honest with yourself before you start, if your only motivation is money then you probably going to struggle. There are all sorts of reasons people have for wanting to start their own business, change of lifestyle, want to prove they can, the desire to share a really good idea.

I’m still on the journey, but if all I had to pull me through was the desire to make a buck I’d probably have given up by now.

Still, I plan on making plenty of bucks!

Who wouldn’t want to be Iron Man?

/ James Fitzsimons / Leave a comment

Or more specifically Tony Stark, I mean come on – the guy has everything a geek could dream of!

I saw the movie last night and although the super hero story and the wow factor of the suit definitely captured my imagination, my slightly geekier side couldn’t help but be almost equally impressed by stuff that would have slipped into the background for most of the audience.

Take Tony’s bachelor pad for example, how cool is that bedroom? Wake up in the morning and as you step out of bed, your room senses that you’re getting up and throws up the news, weather, your daily calendar on transparent screens built into massive windows while simultaneously filling you in verbally on the really important stuff – that’s cool. In fact, I thought it was so cool I did a little research thinking maybe there’s a fun project there, but alas it seems that transparent display technology is still a few years away yet.

But wait, what about that workshop? It was rammed full of enough hi-tech toys to make any geek wet their pants. A robotic arm that you can give verbal commands to – awesome. A holographic 3d modelling tool – yikes!

The really neat thing is that some of this stuff really isn’t that far off at all. Of course we are going to be waiting a wee while before we have a fully integrated AI in our homes…

Where’s the SEO advice for startups?

/ James Fitzsimons / Leave a comment

I read a blog post today that really resonated with me. Rand points out that a lot of startup advice doesn’t mention SEO. As someone trying to get a new startup off the ground I’ve been giving a lot of thought to how best to market it. Now we don’t have much money to spend on traditional marketing, and as we are a web based business it makes sense to do most of our marketing on the web. How come others don’t consider SEO when planning their marketing campaigns?

I’ve seen other online businesses cover every bus stop around with expensive advertising, plough money into radio and print, and still not rank on first page in google.

In the world of internet where there are such low barriers to entry (building a website is comparatively cheap compared to starting up a bricks and mortar business) and you are going to be playing in a crowded market place – what are your differentiators?

Will you be ignoring SEO?

The death of Spirit?

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In yet another example of mixed up priorities “NASA officials have directed the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) program to cut $4 million dollars from its approximately 20 million dollar budget this year” as reported here. The implications of this to program run on such a tight budget is that there will be staff cuts resulting in one of the rovers (Spirit) having to discontinue science operations and be put into hibernation mode.

Now I don’t know about you, but this makes me incredibly angry. The fact that such a valuable program will be so dramatically reduced because of such a paltry sum makes no sense at all. These two rovers have taught us enormous amounts about our one of our nearest planetary neighbours, not to mention the lessons learned in the development and running of such advanced robotic explorers.

Now, I’m not an American so these aren’t my tax dollars, but surely the average American can see that there are some real problems with the way their money is being spent. The Iraq war has cost $505.5 billion and change so far and what has it got the American people apart from 4000 dead soldiers and nearly 30,000 wounded?

I appreciate that maybe your average Joe in the street doesn’t feel as strongly about space exploration as I do, but wouldn’t you rather your money was spent on advancing human knowledge than killing other people?

How good is your content?

/ James Fitzsimons / Leave a comment

The market I am planning to play in is geographically constrained. Because of this there aren’t many competitors at this stage in the game which, initially you would think is a good thing. However this particular market can only support a small number of players, and because there are already established businesses operating and building brand recognition it will make my job as an SEO all that more difficult, but subsequently much more important.

I firmly believe that the defining factor will be the quality of the content provided. The value the customer perceives they are receiving by using one site vs another will ultimately dictate where their brand loyalty lies. Rand covers this quite well in this video.

Something web users are slowly coming to realise is that most markets are flooded with poor quality copies and once you find a site that produces quality content in the area you are interested in you stick with it.

SEO Newbie

/ James Fitzsimons / Leave a comment
I have a new super secret project I am working on and as a result I am learning a great deal of new skills. It is a web based project and to that end I have started reading up on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) with a view to applying these new skills in the near future.

The first thing that strikes you as a SEO newbie is where do I start? There seems to be a mountain of information out on the web, but as always sorting the wheat from the chaff is not easy. Also, a lot of the blogs assume quite a bit of domain knowledge. There don’t seem to be too many people answering the really simple questions like “what exactly is a keyword?” and what does SERP stand for? (Search Engine Results Page by the way).

To that end I am going to start posting any little tid bits of information that I think might be useful to a real SEO newbie in the hope that I might help someone short cut the whole process somewhat. To start off with, here is a list of blogs that I’ve found to be really useful and contain well written and insightful content:

Lots more to come on this topic, and hopefully I’ll be able to provide some insight on SEO considerations specific to ASP.NET development soon.

Finally got my patch committed!

/ James Fitzsimons / Leave a comment

I’m stoked. With the release of MonoDevelop 0.14 my class and member selectors are finally in the core MonoDevelop. I know it’s only a small contribution, but personally it’s a feature I find very useful so I hope other people are deriving some benefit from that work too. I do notice that most of the screen shots of MD I see have them enabled so I guess it’s not annoying people enough to turn it off!

Anyway, here is my little claim to fame:
http://www.monodevelop.com/Release_notes_for_MonoDevelop_0.14

subversion 1.4.3 on ubuntu Edgy amd64

/ James Fitzsimons / 2 Comments

Just went through a few dramas tonight to upgrade svn on my system from the old 1.3.2 version that is in the ubuntu repos to the latest 1.4.3.

I found this howto which gets you almost all the way there. Unfortunately amd64 uses will get a link error complaining that libneon.a needs to be compiled with the fPIC flag. This is easily fixed by changing the following line in neon/src/Makefile (line 28) after the configure step from this
CFLAGS = -g -O2
to
CFLAGS = -g -O2 -fPIC

then you make and install as per the howto.

HTH!