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IBM DB2 patch for MediaWIki
MediaWiki is the software that powers sites like Wikipedia, Ubuntu Help Wiki, and many others. In my spare time, I’ve written a patch to add IBM DB2 support to the development trunk. Hopefully, it will be added to the official source soon. In the meantime: add_ibm_db2.diff — changes to existing files against r43499 of the…
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Make tickets by milestone useful in trac
Trac is a great bug tracking, work ticket, action item management environment. It integrates well with SVN and other source control repositories. Its Roadmap view conveniently order milestones by due date. However, the custom report queries it comes with order milestones by their name. Frankly, that’s much less useful. I understand that they are replacing…
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Install DB2 via the command line
I installed DB2 on an Ubuntu Linux server via SSH and the command line installer this morning. This is not particularly exotic, but is different from using the GUI installer on either platform. Still, I should jot down my steps: SSH to your server. On Windows, use Putty or the OpenSSL package in Cygwin. Open…
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pureXML in DB2
pureXML is the native XML storage capability in IBM DB2. It allows for whole XML documents to be stored in a DB2 table column, and for them to be easily queried via either SQL or XQuery or some combination of the two. Getting Started with DB2 has a decent introduction to both . There’s also…
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Community
October 1st is not just the anniversary of Alexander the Great’s triumph at Gaugamela. It’s not just the birthday of Jimmy Carter. It’s not just the National Day of the PRC. It’s also the online community action day. It is the day when we comment, we respond, we link, and we blog. It is the…
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Back
A month ago, Lisa and I returned from Germany. Along with Poland, Latvia, and Estonia, it was the site of our honeymoon. Germany was, of course, beautiful, but I was fascinated to see Latvia again. I hadn’t been back since I had left with my parents in 1995, and it has changed innumerably for the…
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Firebug
There’s now a version of Firebug that runs in IE, Safari, and Opera. It works as a bookmarklet or a javascript file. The profiling, debugging, and network sniffing features that make the full version of Firebug invaluable in Firefox aren’t there, but the DOM browsing feature alone makes the bookmarklet worth it. Opera Dragonfly and…
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Write to be read
In 1997, Jakob Nielsen wrote How Users Read on the Web. His organization conducted a formal study of usability and found: Concise text (half the words) is 58% more readable than rambling text. Scannable text (bullets) is 47% more readable than wall of text. Neutral language (facts) is 27% more readable than marketese. Nielsen added…
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ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
I ran into a tiny pickle while installing the ibm_db gem on Ubuntu: Select which gem to install for your platform (i486-linux) 1. ibm_db 0.9.5 (ruby) 2. ibm_db 0.9.5 (mswin32) 3. ibm_db 0.9.4 (ruby) 4. ibm_db 0.9.4 (mswin32) 5. Skip this gem 6. Cancel installation > 1 Building native extensions. This could take a while……
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Daily digest
I am looking for an online tool that takes a feed and then republishes in digest format — one entry per day. Feed Informer just does a straight, entry-for-entry republishing. Ditto for Feedburner. This is for a Twitter feed, and Twitter Digest claims to do what I want, but it appears defective and unprofessional overall.…