Month: February 2015

Adopted by the United States Marine Corps in 2009, the M40A5 bolt action sniper rifle supersedes the M40A3 (both are still in use by active duty Marines).  The Marine Corps is unique among the services since it actually builds its own sniper rifles.  The legendary …
via Rifleshooter.com
USMC M40A5 Build- Part 1: Gathering the Parts

The Apple 1 is the most sought after collector piece of computing hardware. It is the Action Comics No. 1 of retro computing. The first appearance of Superman. The one that started it all. But if there was to be a No. 2, it would be this guy—the Commodore 65.

Although it doesn’t have the meteoric sales numbers like the Apple 1, it is almost on par in rarity. Only 50 to 200 Commodore 65 (also known as Commodore 64DX) still exist. This prototype, created in 1990, "was intended to be the last great 8-bit system," according to Hackaday’s Brian Benchoff, who spotted the original eBay listing.

The C65 start screen

The Commodore 65 in action

The C65 was meant to be backwards compatible with the C64 but also provide Amiga-level features of the time. The project began in late 1990 but was soon canceled. When Commodore was liquidated years later, some C65 computers were sold to the public, mostly likely the same machines circulating on auction websites today.

You can read more about this tech relic from this dedicated page (which looks like it’s as old as the computer itself). [Hackday]

via Gizmodo
This 25-Year-Old Computer Just Sold for $23,000 on eBay

Sometimes we all go a little too nuts on making folders inside of folders and you just need to flatten the whole thing down to one. OS X Daily shows off a handy Terminal command for just that.

When you have directories inside of other directories, you end up losing track of files pretty quickly. To smash the whole thing down into one directory, a simple Terminal command is all you need. In this example, TargetDirectory is the subdirectory you want to move the contents from:

find TargetDirectory/ -mindepth 2 -type f -exec mv -i '{}' TargetDirectory/ ';'

With that, all the files located in TargetDirectory will be moved up into the higher directory. Head over to OS X Daily for a few more examples of how it works.

Flatten a Nested Directory & File Hierarchy from Command Line of OS X | OS X Daily

via Lifehacker
Instantly Flatten a Directory in OS X with a Terminal Command

The site Slightly Warped Curiosities has posted this wonderful, rare gallery of close-up photos of the Industrial Light & Magic spaceship models used in the first Star Wars trilogy. Anyone who scratch-builds models knows the importance of “grebble” — that’s the baroque surface detail–usually cool-looking bits “kit-bashed” from other models–added to […]

Read more on MAKE

via Make:
Explore This Rare Gallery of Hyper Detailed Star Wars Models

Breaking and unbreaking your data
Recently at FOSDEM, Maciej presented “Breaking and unbreaking your data”, a presentation about the potential problems you can incur regarding character encoding whilst working with MySQL. In short, there are a myriad of places where character encoding can be controlled, which gives ample opportunity for the system to break and for text to become unrecoverable.
The slides from the presentation are available on slideshare.
Character Encoding – MySQL DevRoom – FOSDEM 2015 from mushupl Since slides don’t tell the whole story, we decided to create a series of blog posts to demonstrate how easy it is to go wrong, how to fix some of the issues and how to avoid such issues in the future.
What is character encoding?
The encoding is the binary representation of glyphs, where each character can be represented by 1 or more bytes. Popular schemes include ASCII and Unicode, and can include language specific character sets such as Latin US, Latin1, Latin2 which are commonly used in America and Europe and EUC-KR or GB18030 which support language characters with an Asian origin. Each character can be associated by several different codes, and one code may correspond to several different characters, depending on the encoding scheme used.
Where do you set character sets in MySQL?
Here is the core of the problem, the character encoding can be controlled from the application, database or even on a per table or column basis. Together with a set of rules regarding inheritance, it is easy to have one layer of the system configured for one character set whilst the actual data being introduced is using a different character set.
In MySQL the following area, the following settings can all affect the character encoding used.
Session settings
character_set_server
character_set_client
character_set_connection
character_set_database
character_set_result
Schema level defaults
Table level defaults
Column charsets
Character encoding in MySQL.
As Maciej pointed out in the presentation, where MySQL is concerned we are all born Swedish, as MySQL starts configured for the Latin1 character set and collation set to latin1_swedish_ci. This is even the case in MySQL 5.7, meaning by default your system expects only characters in the latin1 set and will when comparing characters it will assume the Swedish language is being used.
Lets look at how this manifests itself in a new application, where server, client and table are set to the default latin1.

mysql> SELECT @@global.character_set_server, @@session.character_set_client;
+——————————-+——————————–+
| @@global.character_set_server | @@session.character_set_client |
+——————————-+——————————–+
| latin1 | latin1 |
+——————————-+——————————–+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
mysql> CREATE SCHEMA fosdem;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
mysql> USE fosdem;
mysql> CREATE TABLE locations (city VARCHAR(30) NOT NULL); Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.15 sec);
mysql> SHOW CREATE TABLE locations\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
Table: locations
Create Table: CREATE TABLE `locations` (
`city` varchar(30) NOT NULL
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 1 row in set (0.00 sec)
So what happens when you try to save some data that is not latin1 encoded.
 
The city of Tokyo is displayed.
The application returned and rendered the new city correctly, however inside the database there is some confusion.
mysql> SET NAMES utf8;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
mysql> select * from locations;
+——————–+
| city |
+——————–+
| Berlin |
| KrakÃ3w |
| 東äo¬éƒ1⁄2 |
+——————–+
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)
The data being saved was UTF8 encoded, however if an application attempts to query the database as UTF8 it receives garbage. Instead the application must ask for Latin1 to receive the original data.
mysql> SET NAMES latin1;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
mysql> select
+———–+
| city |
+———–+
| Berlin |
| Kraków |
| 東京都 |
+———–+
3 rows in set
* from locations;
(0.00 sec)
The new city was saved and from the application the result looked correct, however what is happening here is that the connection to the database has saved the binary data without any manipulation. Hence it returned the same data, and the browser was able to do the right thing and display it correctly, as did the terminal which was set to UTF8. Inside the database though, it is not able to understand the data in the correct context.
In the next blog post we will look at how to correctly configure character sets, as well as demonstrating some of the problems we have encountered in production systems and how we fixed those.
via Planet MySQL
MySQL Character encoding – part 1

Hitting the snooze button is generally understood to be bad for you—the extra sleep you’re getting isn’t of a very good quality, and on top of that you have to choose between missing breakfast and missing your bus. If you really can’t resist the temptation to take another twenty minutes under the covers on your own, here are some ideas and apps to help you break out of the habit.

1. Get moving

It’s a lot more difficult to get back to sleep once you’re up and about and talking to the cat about how much work to have to get done today. There are quite a few alarm clock apps out there that won’t shut up until you’ve actually clambered out of bed and walked a few steps: SpinMe Alarm Clock ($1.99 on iOS, free on Android) is worth investigating if you need something like this and so is Step Out Of Bed! ($1.99 on iOS). By the time you’ve staggered all the way to the door you should be able to escape the clutches of sleep successfully.

2. Talk to a stranger

You have to hand it to Wakie for a novel idea—tapping into the app’s community of users so you can have a stranger from somewhere else in the world wake you up at a specified time (and vice versa, if you so wish). It’s anonymous and free (because everyone’s volunteering), and the calls are automatically cut off after one minute, so the awkward small talk is kept to a minimum. Get up on time, and meet someone new as well, all before breakfast. The app is available for Android, iOS and Windows Phone.

3. Wake up naturally

There are a ton of apps and gizmos to pick from if you want to be woken up with a slow increase in light or sound that’s more soothing than a shrill, piercing, robotic ringtone. If you need help choosing, we’d suggest Sleep Cycle ($0.99 on Android and iOS) for giving you a nudge at the right point in your circadian rhythm, Rise ($1.99 on iOS) for waking up to a more relaxing set of sounds, and the Philips HF3500/60 Wake-Up Light ($69.99) or something similar for slowly filling your room with light to ease you into the day.

4. Exercise your brain

Your brain might think it wants another ten minutes in bed, but it doesn’t—not really. Make sure your pre-sleep common sense wins out by setting yourself a task to complete before your alarm will switch off: I Can’t Wake Up! (free on Android, free with in-app purchases on iOS) lets you set one of eight tasks first thing in the morning, from matching pairs of words to doing maths equations. It may seem like the most annoying app in the world the first few times you use it, but you’ll soon be grateful for its help in smoothing out your sleep cycle.

5. Use a wearable

Almost any fitness tracker or smartwatch worth its salt has a vibrate alarm feature, from the Jawbone UP24 ($129.99) to the Fitbit Charge (four cents cheaper at $129.95)—if you’re in the market for a new wearable, make sure it has a smart or silent alarm feature if you’re going to find it useful. There are new products coming out all the time, such as the Kickstarter-funded Sense (also, oddly, $129) — it monitors the atmosphere in your room as well as your sleep patterns to help you get up and moving at the right time.

Image by PrinceOfLove/Shutterstock

via Gizmodo
5 Apps and Gadgets to Help Get You Out of Bed

MySQL Installation Process Checklist
All DBAs, regardless of experience level, should follow a written process when setting up a new server.  There are just too many steps to neglect doing so and many of the steps you are likely to forget have little to do with MySQL.
Naturally, every company has a different process.  The process we outline below is one we have used in the past and focuses on working through the Change Management process, setting up backups and monitoring, and focusing on good communication with team members and clients as well as ensuring documentation of your work.  Hopefully this article will give you some ideas on implementing your own process document.
Below are the steps we have documented in the past when creating a new installation of MySQL:
Initial Change Management Processes
Edit the ticket and set to Waiting on Customer
Send an email to the requestor with the new database questionnaire document
Once completed questionnaire is received and you are ready to start, set ticket status to “Work in Progress” and save ticket
Perform the MySQL installation as documented in your standards documents
Verify MySQL configuration is accurate and caches, logging, enabled as dictated by SOP
Install database schema as supplied by customer
Create user account(s) for app and any other users with minimal required privileges as requested by customer. Ensure that all passwords comply with your company’s Password Policy
Perform any requested loading of the database utilizing data or process outlined by customer
Test that database is accessible over the network with the created user account(s)
Setup Monitoring
Open the original request in your Change Management system. If this is Production, add a comment to the ticket stating that you are setting up monitoring user account.
Create a monitoring account with minimal privileges such as USAGE and a password conforming to your Password Standards.
Ensure that database monitoring thresholds are properly set in monitoring program
Setup Backups
Add a comment to the ticket stating that you are setting up backups
Once backup disk is mounted, install backup software (if needed), configure it, and perform a test backup to the new backup directory and test email functionality
Verify that the backup appears to be valid
Verify that backups are running as expected daily
PerformanceTesting
Use whatever tool you have at your disposal to test performance of the new server(s).  Tools such as sysbeench, mysqlslap, and more are easily available and configurable
Closing Activities for Change Management
Update Change Management ticket with a summary of what’s been done
Notify the requestor via email that the server is available for testing
Ask customer if it is acceptable to close the ticket
Documentation
Add the information about the server to your team’s documentation
If customer is okay with doing so, change status of ticket to “Closed” and save the ticket
via Planet MySQL
MySQL Installation Process Checklist

Encrypting your sensitive data is important, but not all encryption tools are the same. Last week we asked you for your favorites, and then we looked at the top five file encryption tools and put them head to head. Now it’s time to crown the community favorite.

VeraCrypt, the spiritual (and in many ways, including its code, actual) descendant of TrueCrypt, took the top spot by a wide margin, bringing home close to 41% of the overall vote. It’s free, (mostly) open source, cross-platform, offers strong encryption, and offers all of the great features TrueCrypt did before its developers abandoned it.

Second place with 20% of the overall vote was 7-Zip, a file compression tool that also has the ability to create encrypted archives. It’s also free and cross-platform, and easy to use. Third place with close to 16% of the vote went to GNU Privacy Guard—more a platform than a product, but one with tons of individual tools that support its preferred encryption method, PGP. In fourth place with over 15% of the votes cast was Microsoft’s BitLocker, built in to and already available in Windows Vista and Windows 7 (Ultimate and Enterprise), and into Windows 8 (Pro and Enterprise), as well as Windows Server (2008 and later). Bringing up the rear with just over 7% of the overall vote was AxCrypt.

For more on each of these and the honorable mentions not listed here, make sure to head back to our full Hive Five feature to read more.

The Hive Five is based on reader nominations. As with most Hive Five posts, if your favorite was left out, it didn’t get the nominations required in the call for contenders post to make the top five. We understand it’s a bit of a popularity contest. Have a suggestion for the Hive Five? Send us an email at tips+hivefive@lifehacker.com!

via Lifehacker
Most Popular File Encryption Tool: VeraCrypt