Random thoughts from the week
Posted : Saturday April 10th, 2010

I had a number of thoughts this week that at some point I thought could sprout into blog posts but it turned out that no, they really couldn't. On their own at least. So here is just a collection of random thoughts that occurred to me during the past week...

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Sometimes MySQL drives me bonkers. It's not a terrible database but it sure does have issues that prevent it from being a good one. Earlier this week I made a boo-boo and wrote a query that made MySQL try and make a cartesian join on three tables containing roughly 4000, 200 and 100 records and so attempting to build a cursor of about 80 million records.

It was quite the scene.

And yeah it was my fault but it proved to be impossible to get MySQL back (it had to be humanely put down) and that shouldn't be.

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I really dislike the word artisan. I mean the word itself is okay but it seems everything now is artisan. There was a time that it was confined largely to bread and while a bit pretentious I could live with that but now apparently any foodstuff isn't worth anything if it isn't artisan. Enough already.

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I am personally not a huge twitter fan. I have tried. It's just not really "me". But having said that if you and/or your business isn't on twitter you're doing yourself a *huge* disservice.

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Sometimes people are scared of numbers. It's puzzling to me at times. How can you measure for success or failure, or to know where you are in relation to those if you don't have real numbers? And refuse to do anything about it?

I attribute this fear to a fear of what the real numbers actually are. I suppose that in that case you can safely assume you're well entrenched on the path to ruin.

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If you have a full-blown web application then you *must* provide decent online documentation on how it works. And decent can in some cases mean "it exists".

Look, I'm sure you feel your app is so simple a brain dead monkey could figure it out but I don't understand the terminology you use and so I can't get started. A simple glossary of the terms you use and how they fit together in your little world would be excellent. "Projects", "Lists" and "Campaigns" are too generic as terms for me to discern the subtle means they have when it relates to your software.

Tags

MySQL  random  thoughts 

Categories

Technical  Business  Personal 

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