There seemed to be many ways of comparing the schema of two databases, but nothing to compare the changes in data (unless I was looking in the wrong places). I decided to write something that would help me out and have released it publicly.

You provide the connection details of two databases (server, username, password, name),  select the tables you would like to compare and hit “Compare”. The resulting page is a list of all schema and data changes.

There are plans to style the application (at the moment its simple blocks and tables) and more importantly, allow you to select which differences you would like to apply before creating a .sql diff file.

If its something you’re interested in, trying check out the google code page for the project. Its currently in beta with better performance, stability and functionality to come!

phpMyDiff at Google Code

One change worth mentioning for 2.0.11 is that the tinymce plugin no longer calls wp_head. This should fix a number of compatibility issues with other plugins! Download it now at WP Plugins: RB Internal Links.

So, to change the effect the volume keys have:

1. Press Alt+F2 to bring up the “Run” box.
2. Type in “gconf-editor” and press enter.
3. Select “Apps > gnome_settings_daemon“
4. On the right hand side you’ll have a single option named “volume_step“
5. Change the numerical value (6 by default) to a lower one (3 seems pretty good)

Simples!

I looked up the poem Invictus when I got back, the poem Nelson Mandela gives to Francois Pienaar in the film. Although Mandela did have a copy of the poem in his cell, he actually gave Francois an except from a speech by Teddy Roosevelt. Both are great pieces, but I think I prefer the speech. Not sure why the film had to mix it all up, I guess ‘Invictus’ is better than ‘The Man in the Arena’ as a film title.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Teddy Roosevelt

After reinstalling gstreamer and rhythmbox a few times I turned to the Ubuntu Forums. The answer is in the following thread, but I missed it on first glance so thought I’d post it here: [ubuntu] rhythmbox 9.10 mp3

To save you reading through all the posts, to fix the problem after upgrading to 9.10 (not from a clean install), you need to delete your gstream preferences. Open up the terminal and type the following:

rm -rf ~/.gconf/system/gstreamer
rm -rf ~/.gstreamer-0.10

If you log off and back on again now, you should have mp3 playback in rhythmbox again. If that doesn’t work, take a look at the other suggestions in the ubuntu forum thread.

The change log:

v2.0.7 (17/11/2009)

• Fixed conflict with WP-Super-Cache
• Fixed encoding issues with preselected text, particularly foreign characters
• Moved js and css for tinymce plugin to seperate files
• Temporary work around for wp_enqueue_script with tiny_mce_popup.js
• Post, page and category names printed using _e on tinymce plugin

I’ve also updated the support forum to bbPress, after wasting an hour trying to delete spam posts from phpBB. Sorry to anyone that has posted on the old forum, hopefully bbPress will do a better job (it seems a little toooo simple). If you need help or just want to say hi, check out the RB Internal Link support forums.

The idea was to scatter faded logos of the different websites around the page and as the user draws their mouse closer to the logo, the opacity increases and the logo gets brighter. I think it looks good, although I guess I could be confused with cheesy? I like it, I’m keeping it. :p

So, if you’d like to do something similar yourself I’d suggest you take the shortcut I discovered after coding up my own class, and just download this jquery plugin: jQuery approach

But if you were interested in the logic behind it, this is the core of the code:

$().mousemove(function(e){
elements.each(function(i, element){
var box = $(element);
var distance = parseInt(Math.sqrt(Math.pow(e.pageX-element.center.x,2) + Math.pow(e.pageY-element.center.y,2)));
var distanceRatio = (settings.distance - distance) / settings.distance;
 
if(distance <= settings.distance)
{
var percentage = distanceRatio + settings.minimum;
box.css('opacity', percentage);
}
 
});
 
});

To save calculating the center on each mouse update, I calculate those on page load and store them on the element object using this code:

elements.each(function(i, element){
var box = $(element);
var offset = box.offset();
var center = { x: (offset.left + (box.width()/2)), y: (offset.top + (box.height()/2)) };
element.center = center;
});

RB Internal Links

Not had a chance to update the plugin with any cool features yet. As far as I know, the only thing people are waiting on is better language/encoding support. I will get round to this soon!

Work

Works been busy but fun, we’ve just launched a new product. It’s a financial content management system (yes, shameless plug) that accepts fund data in a variety of formats and produces graphs and statistics etc. Its also bundled with the usual suite of CMS features, all tailored to the financial sector.

We’re also thinking of moving offices soon, got our eye on a very nice place not too far away. After this summer the lure of air conditioning in every office was just too tempting. It’s also got its own datacenter which will house our development server nicely!

Play

Just got back from a tranquil week away in the south of France. Got to take the new car with me, was a lot of fun! I took a picture on my phone one morning when we went to get breakfast, came out a little blurry.

My C30 in Monfort

When working on the UI of a web application text would often get selected by the browser incorrectly, for example while dragging an element, or clicking on an element with an onclick event.

If you are using jquery already; download it, include it, then use:

$(‘.elementsToDisableSelectFor’).disableTextSelect();

If you need this functionality without including the whole of jquery, take a look at the source code for the plugin. It’s only about 20 lines long. It uses a different method for Firefox and Internet Explorer, with a fallback for everything else but it should be easy to convert in to native JS or another javascript framework.

Anyway, just thought I’d mention a blog that I set up for a friend of mine, using wordpress of course! It took literally 15 minutes to setup – it looks good and I got all the features I needed from plugins – was really impressed. Its at http://www.rachelinkenya.com, as you may have guessed, Rachel is in Kenya.. volunteering at a local Hospital and staying at an orphanage. Sounds exciting!

Found something cool yesterday too, its a wordpress app for the blackberry. Its still in beta but seems to work pretty well. Glad to see people are making an effort to support blackberrys, I was starting to fear an iPhone monopoly! You can install it by pointing your blackberry to http://blackberry.wordpress.org/install