Quick and Dirty Miscellaneous Bits

Kind of rushed this morning on different projects so not as much as I'd like. 

From Halley I see:

Boston Bloggers Beach Bash

Save the date. We'll convene at Woodman's on Saturday May 10 at noon, up on the North Shore for lunch and then anyone interested can retire to Crane Beach if you like. Need a ride, drop me an email. More...

I'll try and get there.  Woodman's is excellent -- fried clams to die for (of course, the amount of grease involved, you die shortly there after anyway).

Via Richard:

The Boston Globe article has some good info. One of the lessons from Jared Diamond's classic book, Guns, Germs and Steel, was its convincing proposition that many of our most common illnesses came from the domestication of animals (i.e. smallpox). Zoonosis is an easy route for viruses to hop to a new niche. Until our immune systems adapt, they can cause huge problems. Pandemics always look like they appear from nowhere. That is the power of exponential growth.

And there's this humor from Richard. 

Phil Greenspun's blog just gets better and better on a regular basis.  I don't always agree with him but he stretches the brain.

I like CTData but whenever I want to link to something I have to remember that on that blog "Add a Comment" means "Here's the Permalink".  Still its a good read.

Jeremy has tips on MySQL dump:

The -q option to mysqldump is poorly documented and misunderstood as a result.

Several folks at Yahoo have been having trouble with mysqldump running out of memory. At first I figured it was some odd problem, specific to one person's setup. But after it happened again, I started to look into it.

I did a bit of testing and found that when dumping really big tables, mysqldump was using up large amounts of memory. It was very good about freeing up the memory when it moved from table to table, but eventually it'd hit The Big One and die.  More ...

I actually hit this last night and worked around it with the -w option which lets you add a where clause so you can dump portions of a table at one time.  Very useful workaround although Jeremy's way is better.

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