Jan-Piet Mens

The Snow Leopard updates takes 45 minutes or 3/4 of an hour, depending on how you watch the progress bar and, apart from a small breathless moment, it went off without a hitch. (In case you haven't read it elsewhere, 10.6.1 is being delivered to your doorstep as we speak.)
My machine feels dramatically speedier, so [...]

Every three or four years, depending on how a company writes off its hardware, you have machines to replace. Now, replacing a box with a few cables on it isn't hard: you rip the old cords out of the wall and throw the lot on the dump. After that, you place the new boxes in [...]

I've
kept
this
quiet
until now, but since I'm approaching a point at which I can smell a "product", I might as well spill the beans: I'm writing a book.
It started off like this:

but I'm quickly approaching the 500-page mark, much to my astonishment.
I've always wanted to write a book but never thought I'd be able to create more [...]

User-defined functions are compiled as shared object files and then added to and removed from the MySQL server dynamically.
I hacked up a small test to demonstrate their implementation, although I'll only show you the results here.

CREATE TABLE u ( username varchar(20) );
INSERT INTO u VALUES ('jpm');
SELECT * FROM u;
+———-+
| username |
+———-+
| jpm [...]

Inspired by reading about it in Backup & Recovery I've been implementing Bacula in my SOHO.

Bacula is a multi-platform backup solution that supports Unix/Linux, Windows and Mac OS X and which, with a bit of help from the documentation, is very easy to implement: within a few hours I had a Bacula server running on [...]

MailScanner is incredibly powerful in that it can determine at run-time whether certain processing should be invoked on a per-message basis; it does this with rulesets, which define regular expressions that are applied to sender or recipient's email addresses, domains or IP addresses, in order for the program to decide whether a certain part [...]

Legislation in this country is forcing us to add footers to outgoing messages which specify the company details of the senders. Corporate details could of course be added with signatures, but that leaves the phrasing to end-users, and there'd be no method to enforce using them.
Instead, I've decided that the only possible point of [...]

I have a very old MySQL server (release 3.23.58) that is loosing its privilege information (i.e. the GRANTs).
I've performed a full dump of the tables in the mysql database and have restored them to a newly created database.

$ mysqladmin create p
$ mysqldump mysql | mysql p

After shutting down the server and switching the mysql and [...]