Many of my clients need a quick backup solution before we implement anything on a larger more permanent scale. I wrote this simple script that simply make a copy of a database and then created a timestamped tarball of the file.

#!bin/sh

date=`date +%Y-%m-%d_%Hh%M`

cd /my/path/for/backups/

mysqldump -umy_user -p”mypass” my_database > $date.sql

tar -zcvf $date.tgz *.sql

# uncomment this line to import the sql into another database, for example as a mirror
#mysql -umy_user -p”mypass” mirror_database < $date.sql

rm *.sql

Then, just setup a cron job to run this at whichever interval you want this to run.

It’s been a few years since I’ve released the first version of Bugzilla Changelog, and over those years many folks have been asking if I ever intend on making it open source. While essentially open anyway as it was a Perl script, I’m now accepting patches and new work from anyone else interested.

Those of you who have submitted patches over the years should be pretty excited. I’ll be tracking project updates, requests, fixes, etc, through sourceforge.

View Bugzilla Changelog at SourceForge.net.

It’s been about two weeks since I returned from San Fran, as I attended the full ZendCon 2007. Most of the tutorials/sessions were enjoyable and most of them gave me some ideas for new methods as well as pointing new tools out to me. A few have already come in handy, like cvs2svn.

However, several of the presentations had very poor descriptions and were not exactly what I was expecting. A few sessions were essentially waste of time because the presenters simply read their slides and failed to show any useful examples. Those sessions were simply a very expensive blog post, and I’ll be discouraging any and all conferences I go to from allowing that.

I met several folks from various projects and I was able to give feedback about some of their items. I had lunch with a few guys from Zend, who were involved in developing the Zend Studio IDE.

I also got to play around with the next version of the Studio app, which in my opinion is not quite ready (although it was a Beta). This new version is based off of the Eclipse project.

However, the new Adobe FlexBuilder2 is also built on eclipse, so it may eventually be easier for me to move to more eclipse-based projects.

Now it’s time for me to re-read some of slides from those presentations and see if I can re-brew for any new information.

I see huge potential for Flex and Air applications with some of my core clients, as well as a way to attract new clients. As time goes on I’ll be discussing new applications we’ve got going in Flex, but I wanted to start with a very basic application.

This basic application displays a chart with download statistics for applications I’ve released over the years on Botsko.net. I’ll be adding on to this basic example so that I have a better showcase of flex work. For example, I plan on adding some advanced data parameters including changing the year, seeing data points on the chart, and some improved visuals.

This application totals about 300k including the php code that produces the xml for the data. That number can be reduced further with optimizations, and by removing some extra support-related files.

While Flex can be used to build some amazing applications, it’s also going to be extremely handy when used within an existing web page. I’m excited to see where we end up when using Flex.

Take a look:

http://experiments.botsko.net/tests/flex/chart2/

I recently bought a new thumb drive that came with the infamous U3 System software. I hate this software to no end and I wanted it gone, but the typical system formatting process and the manual deletion process didn’t work. After doing some research, I found that U3 provides an uninstaller which is a pain.

Just google “u3 uninstall.exe” or visit u3.com/uninstall and follow their stupid download process.