The thing is though that I have used each of these systems on a daily basis. I’ve spotted annoyances in the application that I would fix or would add a feature that would get rid of that annoyance. For example, modal windows used the Enter and Escape keys to confirm or cancel. A server service tag would have an option to display the phonetic alphabet for when you would inevitably call the helpdesk in a foreign country.

Because I used these systems every day, I saw where they failed and fixed them. Unfortunately, it seems that developers don’t use the systems they program, they don’t see how they could make the UI faster and they don’t realise how people work with the system.

This is why I love the idea of DevOps. The people that will be using the system build the system. They know exactly what their target market is looking for because they are their target market. They know what they want and they fix those little annoyances.

You built it, You use it!

I took my camera out yesterday to find a massive crack across the screen on the back of the camera which started from a point that had obviously gotten a knock. My heart sank. I didn’t want to have to get this camera repaired already (not to mention not being able to afford it at the moment). Thankfully, I had the foresight to spent $5 on a screen protector. I peeled off the protector and gave the screen a rub et voila, the screen was perfect!

In other words, spend $5 to protect your $700 investment. It’s damn worth it!

I’d been stuck at 13 stone 12 for about 6 weeks now, even with going to festivals and consuming vast quantities of beer, cider and tasty tasty nachos. This morning, I hit 14 stone. Thats officially a very bad thing. I’ve fallen off the wagon big style recently with far too many take aways and tasty carbs but no more. Now, its back onto eggs and meat and vegetables. I’m also going to get back onto the supplements.

I’m going to win this war.

Due to the fact that you’re eating much more protein diet than you normally would while on this diet, you’ll naturally gain muscle. That’s without doing any exercise. Indeed, the book recommends you don’t do more exercise than normal while on this diet for a number of reasons. The issue with gaining muscle is that it weighs more than fat. So while you’re losing those fat cells, your weighing scale is telling you that you’re not losing weight. This is very disheartening, especially after the initial weight loss.

If the scale numbers aren’t useful, how can you measure your fat loss? Use a measuring tape! If you measure the circumferences of your thighs, waist, hips and biceps and add them together, you have a single number to remember. Measure them every week and they’ll give you a truer indication of the fat that you’re losing.

As always, comments are welcome below.

Tim Ferriss is probably best known for his other book, The 4 Hour Work Week, in which he explains how he has become very, very wealthy by adopting a hands off approach to companies. It’s definitely worth a read, if only to see some of the ideas he uses.

Anyway, I got T4WB at the start of this year and had a read through it. It covers a huge amount of information for both gaining and losing weight, getting perfect six packs and basically how to hack your body to do things without putting in huge amounts of work. However, the part that this post is concerned about is weight loss.

Ferriss’s approach to weight loss is the slow carb diet. In a nutshell, you remove the vast majority of carbs from your diet and replace them with ones that burn over the course of the day. That means no rice, pasta, bread, beer or anything that contains bread or wheat really. The slow carbs come from eating beans, lentils and other legumes. Because you’re cutting out a large portion of the bulk of the normal persons diet, you need to increase the amount of protein you eat so you’ll be eating lots of chicken, lean red meat and eggs as well as as many vegetables as you like, especially broccoli and cauliflower. On top of this reasonably strict diet, you take some supplements, specially garlic extract, green tea extract, alpha-lipoic acid and Policosanol (which isn’t available in Ireland so I had to leave it out). These are all very strong anti-oxidants which boost your metabolism which in turns makes you burn food faster – a very good thing.

The main difference to Ferriss’s method compared to say, the Atkins diet is the idea of a cheat day. This is one day a week, usually Saturday, where you can eat and drink anything. You eat as much chocolate and pizza and junk food and drink as much Coke and beer and whatever else you like until you almost make yourself sick. The idea behind this is two fold – the first is that you can save all your cravings from the week of dieting and eat so much that you don’t want to even think about it for another week and secondly, it makes your body think that there’s plenty of food around so that it doesn’t need to store fat.

Right, now that you understand the idea behind the diet I’ve been dabbling in, it’s time to give my experience about it. Frankly, it’s bloody awesome. I haven’t been overly strict on it. I have fallen off the wagon repeatedly. I’ve been to music festivals and drank beer and ate burgers. I’ve had the occasional take away outside of my cheat days and I’ve had my vice – venti vanilla lattes from Starbucks. Despite all that, I’m 2 pounds shy of 2 stone of weight loss in 3 months.

My daily diet at the moment is:

• Protein shake for breakfast
• Some form of unbreaded, unfried meat for lunch with vegetables and salad (especially broccoli)
• A 500ml bottle of Diet Coke
• 2-4 lattes
• Stir fried chicken with vegetables
• Occasionally a few glasses of red wine

so that’s what’s gonna happen (without the calling into work sick of course). This Saturday, 30th July 2011, I’m going to the zoo and I want everyone else to come along too! The plan (so far) is to meet inside the gates of Dublin Zoo (after you pay) at 1.30 and then stroll round the zoo, laughing at the monkeys and playing on the kids toys.

If you’d like to come along, you’re more than welcome but it’d be great if you could drop me a tweet @feylya so I know to keep an eye out for you. Apart from that, see ya on Saturday.

delete from SystemEvents where ReceivedAt < DATE_SUB(CURRENT_DATE(), INTERVAL 62 days);

It’s actually 62 days just incase there’s 2 months with 31 days back to back (the exact length of time wasn’t important!). So this ran for a while until I noticed an alert saying that the server’s DB partition was at 99%. Oh c**p. Que a quick log in and restart of the MySQL daemon and….nothing. The space stayed the same. It appears that MySQL won’t release the indices on deleted entries until you run

optimize table SystemEvents;

where SystemEvents is the table that’s effected. Once that’s run directly after the previous command, you should see your index file staying at a steady level. Of course, you can adjust the time frame depending on your needs. However, on my setup of about 20,000,000 records for 2 months worth of logs, it was taking upwards of 2 hours to complete the delete and optimize commands. This obviously isn’t a good solution – 2 hours where nothing can read from or write to your database? Maybe you could afford to run it at night or when your load is lowest but sometimes you just can’t afford to loose 2 hours of logs.

I did some investigating and it appears that the Delete function in MySQL does something similar to optimize tables in so much as it tries to organise the indices but without releasing the file system space. Enter delete quick!

By running:

delete quick from SystemEvents where ReceivedAt < DATE_SUB(CURRENT_DATE(), INTERVAL 62 days); optimize table SystemEvents;

you allow the delete function to just remove the data from the table and wait for the optimize function to clear out the indices. The performance increase for the simple keyword of ‘quick’ seems to be in the magnitude of 2000%! What once took 120 minutes now takes 6. That’s a pretty impressive increase and for an infrastructure that logs less than 100 per hour events at it’s low traffic time, it’s a much more acceptable time frame.

• Windows 7 (Or the newest beta/RC of whatever Microsoft are releasing)
• Firefox (Newest Version)
  • AdBlock Plus
  • British English Dictionary
  • DownThemAll!
  • Firebug
  • FireGestures
  • FirePHP
  • Greasemonkey
  • Tab Mix Plus
  • Web Developer
• Aptana (Or the newest Eclipse with the Aptana 1.5 plugin)
• VLC
• WinAmp
• uTorrent
• Putty
• WinSCP
• Adobe AIR
• Adobe Flash
• TweetDeck
• MSN Live Messenger
• Launchy
• Notepad++
• Google Chrome
• Adobe Reader
• FileZilla
• iTunes (A necessary evil)
• WinRar
• Guitar Pro

It’s a big list and a lot of stuff will get installed over time but that’s the general gist of what gets put on my machine. Feel free to leave suggestions/criticisms in the comments

select * from A where a_id not in (select b_id from B);

I wanted to clear up the table A by removing anything that wasn’t being referenced in table B. Quite a simple operation but for some reason, I was constantly getting zero results while running

select * from A where a_id in (select b_id from B);

returned many results. It appears that MySQL doesn’t like NULL values in sub selects and if it finds one, it just craps out. Easy way around this is:

select * from A where a_id not in (select b_id from table B where b_id is not null);

Simple eh?