Using an Excavator As a DIY Water Park Ride Is Death Defying Fun

It’s the middle of August. It’s hot. You want to break open every fire hydrant you see. You view ice cubes as a precious resource. You see air conditioning as the greatest invention ever created. You can’t wait to forget that you are a sweaty pig. You are jealous of these three guys in Russia who have hitched themselves to the insides of an excavator that dunks, swings, re-dunks, re-swings, re-re-re-dunks and keeps dunking them in a lake. Who cares if it looks dirty. Who cares if it looks like you’d probably drown. It looks like a hell of a good time. [TurkeyEuropechannel via Geekosystem]

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via Gizmodo Using an Excavator As a DIY Water Park Ride Is Death Defying Fun

Watch People Get Flung at a Mountain by a Giant Human Slingshot

What a great summer tradition this is. Every so often, these wonderful folks plop down a gigantic human slingshot and fire people at stuff. Sometimes it’s down a slip and slide and into a lake, sometimes it’s that, just double. This time it’s at a mountain, while eating pizza. It still looks like a lot of fun. [YouTube]

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via Gizmodo Watch People Get Flung at a Mountain by a Giant Human Slingshot

If The X-Men Lived In Medieval Times

x-men-feat

If the X-Men existed in medieval times, would they be casted as demons or witches? Or perhaps some of them would be worshiped as magical beings? Would a leader emerge amongst them? Illustrator Nate Hallinan explored the idea, which resulted in ‘The Order of X’. This is a personal fan-fiction variation on the X-Men. I thought it would be a fun exercise to do the X-Men in an alternate medieval/fantasy reality. Prejudice and discrimination were rampant in our history. Being a darker and less civilized time, fear and hatred ran deeper making it an interesting setting for the X-Men. The…

Read the full article: If The X-Men Lived In Medieval Times


via MakeUseOf If The X-Men Lived In Medieval Times

How Much Does It Really Cost to Be Batman?

In what is quite possibly the most comprehensive look at the financial cost of being Batman, Movieclips Trailers analyzed the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy and compared Batman’s gear to current market prices to come up with the definitive price it would take to be the dark knight. The final tally? $79,237,480.98. Not too expensive for a billionaire, right?

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via Gizmodo How Much Does It Really Cost to Be Batman?

common_schema 2.2: better QueryScript isolation & cleanup; TokuDB; table_rotate, split params

common_schema 2.2 is released. This is shortly after the 2.1 release; it was only meant as bug fixes release but some interesting things came up, leading to new functionality.
Highlights of the 2.2 release:
Better QueryScript isolation & cleanup: isolation improved across replication topology, cleanup done even on error
Added TokuDB related views
split with “index” hint (Ike, this is for you)
table_rotate(): a logrotate-like mechanism for tables
better throw()
Drill down:
Better QueryScript isolation & cleanup
common_schema 2.1 introduced persistent tables for QueryScript. This also introduced the problem of isolating concurrent scripts, all reading from and writing to shared tables. In 2.1 isolation was based on session id. However although unique per machine, collisions were possible across replication topology: a script could be issued on master, another on slave (I have such use cases) and both use same (local) session id.
With 2.2 isolation is based on server_id & session id combination; this is unique across a replication topology.
Until 2.1, QueryScript used temporary tables. This meant any error would just break the script, and the tables were left (isolated as they were, and auto-destroyed in time). With persistent tables a script throwing an error meant legacy code piling up. With common_schema 2.2 and on MySQL >= 5.5 all exceptions are caught, cleanup is made, leaving exceptions to be RESIGNALled.
TokuDB views
A couple TokuDB related views help out in converting to TokuDB and in figuring out tables status on disk:
sql_alter_table_tokudb will help you out to generate the complex ALTER statement to TokuDB engine if you happen to used COMPRESSED InnoDB tables with KEY_BLOCK_SIZE specified. The view generates a complex DROP KEYs & ADD KEYs statementl this is due to bug …
tokudb_file_map simplifies the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.Tokudb_file_map table: the original view is not normalized and is difficult to interpret and follow when your table had many indexes or is partitioned (I will write more on this shortly). with common_schema’s tokudb_file_map you get, per table, the list of files representing that table, along with a couple Shell commands to tell you the thing you want to know most: “what is the size of my TokuDB table on disk?”
split
QueryScript’s split device now supports the “index” parameter (or hint), which instructs the split() operation to use an explicitly named index. If used, the index must exist and must be UNIQUE.
table_rotate()
Rotate your tables a-la logrotate with table_rotate(): generate a new, identical, empty table, version your table, pushing older versions along the line; optionally drop older versions. You get the picture. Got some nice use case behind this on cleaning up a test database.
throw()
On MySQL >= 5.5 throw() uses SIGNAL. No more weird “table `Unknown column ‘$t’ in ‘field list’` does not exist” messages. Just plain old:
ERROR 1054 (42S22): Unknown column ‘$t’ in ‘field list’
Get it
common_schema is free and open source. It is licensed under GPL v2. This is where you can find and download latest common_schema release.
Your input is welcome! Please submit your bugs, or otherwise share your experience with common_schema.

via Planet MySQL common_schema 2.2: better QueryScript isolation & cleanup; TokuDB; table_rotate, split params

The Special Effects of Game of Thrones Are Still Unbelievably Amazing

For a TV show, Game of Thrones has clearly mastered the art of special effects. The quality of its visuals is simply spectacular. From the beautiful castles and boorish giants and nipple cutting we already know are fake to the amazing tricks of turning day into a bustling night camp and making snow impossibly glisten, the world they are able to create is simply amazing. And so damn real. This reel from SpinVFX shows some of the special effects used in Game of Thrones Season 3. [SpinVFX, Jose Antonio Espejo via The Mary Sue]

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via Gizmodo The Special Effects of Game of Thrones Are Still Unbelievably Amazing

How to Make a Rope Swing and Fly Like Tarzan: An Illustrated Guide

Summer is swiftly coming to an end. One of the ways to enjoy the last of the warm weather weekends is to take an afternoon by the lake or river and make a rope swing. Safety is paramount, and close behind is gaining maximum height and velocity. We show you how to do both. See […]


    





via The Art of Manliness How to Make a Rope Swing and Fly Like Tarzan: An Illustrated Guide

Getty Museum releases 4,689 artworks as digital download, more to come

The renowned Getty Museum today launched an effort to “make available all images of public domain artworks in the Gettyís collections.” The museum has released 4,689 high-resolution images of the collection free to use, modify, and publish for any purpose. In exchange for the download, the museum requests a description of how the image will be used….

    





via MacNN | The Macintosh News Network Getty Museum releases 4,689 artworks as digital download, more to come