I've developed a little script over the years that dumps production databases, and loads them locally on demand, and its been very handy.

However, it was taking ages to load a database on a Virtualbox ubuntu environment I use for debugging with Zend.

A quick look into it, and I found that i'd put

--skip-extended-insert

on the mysqldump command sometime in the past.

I changed that to

--add-locks --extended-insert

and the loading has gone from over 12 hours (I was asleep, not waiting for it ;-) down to 30 minutes.

If you've updated to the latest firefox, you might have noticed the "Switch to tab" feature, which checks if you have a website alreay open, and switches to that existing one if you have.

What a stupid thing!

If I open a new tab, its because I want a new tab! It even does it across seperate windows.

To remove this "feature", just install this excellent add-on - Switch to Tab no more.

Phew, back to reasonable web browsing again.

Booted into Windows yesterday to play the awesome new Dirt3, and Adobe flash wants to update itself.

It seems that between the 4 or 5 PC's I regularly visit, that I'm always updating the cruddy flash player.

And all I need it for is youtube video.

Bring on HTML5 and lets stop this Flash upgrade madness!

Why do they have to mess with window decorations? You know, the title bars, close, minimise buttons etc.

Microsoft must spend millions making things look pretty, then people making software for Windows go and screw it up.

Why bother overriding the Window decorations from the standard windows default.

Don't pretend it makes your software "sexier". It doesn't.

Drats, I missed my drupal.org 10th birthday!

http://drupal.org/user/143

I was actually using Drupal before drupal.org existed, and my http://dirtbike.ws website - currently re-branding as http://mydirtbike.com - would be amongst the longest running Drupal based sites there is.

Some shell magic to rename all files within a directory.

for JPG in `find /path -type f -name \*.JPG` ; do mv $JPG ${JPG/JPG/jpg} ; done

Thanks to: http://www.unix.com/shell-programming-scripting/135178-rename-all-jpg-f…

Had a BBQ for Martin V from Slovakia over the weekend, and since we had 12 people coming I thought we'd try extending our table.

At first, we were just going to push our old and new dining tables together, but then I thought i'd grab some "spare" 2400x1200 8mm MDF boards I had lying around for table tops.

That worked a treat, they are thick enough not to bend, despite hanging over the edge of the tables underneath by quite a bit.

We've not been able to get back to do the second sleeper wall for ages, as the second lot of sleepers were very warped when the arrived, and we decided to go and pick the next lot out ourselves.

We did that yesterday and then got to work on Sunday and finalised almost all the base level for the second sleeper wall.

We still need to put the second row of sleepers on, level it up a bit and fill all the holes in, but those bits are all easy.

We ordered 70 sleepers, have had 52 delivered, and used 48 of them.

Still need to put the pavers into the step areas, and get a bobcat to level things out, but the actual wall is basically finished.

Phew!

We were sick of things being all over the place, and I was inspired by my Father and Brother in-law's sheds when we visited earlier in the week.