Jeffrey Friedl, author of Mastering Regular Expressions, found his book in an odd place:

So some code that made it through QA without a hitch blew chunks in Production. Fingers were pointed in various directions, but fundamentally, the SQL queries were incredibly simple, doing a simple retrieval based on matching a unique index, like so:

select field1 from MYTABLE where phone = "12223334444"

Production insisted that the moment the new software was deployed, the dedicated slave DB was being pounded into the ground, and the culprit was large numbers of full table scans. But all of the queries we knew about were exactly like the one above: retrieve part of a single record based on an exact match of a primary key.

Their DB was bigger than ours, so I loaded up a few hundred thousand phony records and tried again. As I expected, my thrash script barely raised the load. Four copies of it spewing these queries as fast as they could barely raised the load. Then I turned on log_queries_not_using_indexes to see if I was getting the volume of full table scans they were, and of course I wasn’t.

Then a real query came in from the new software, and went right into the slow-query log as a full table scan. Why? Because it looked like this:

select field1 from MYTABLE where phone = 12223334444

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. MySQL silently converts the integer to a string and returns the right answer when you do this, but doesn’t use the index.

…apart from the fact that the show is actually pretty good, that is. First, the animation team from Mouretsu Pirates. Second, the voices of:

• Eris
• Ichika
• Show
• Manami/Gruelle
• San-daime
• and even Muttley

And the show’s actually pretty good, just in case I failed to mention that. Even the episodes without Haruka Tomatsu are decent. It helps to be familiar with MMO tropes and player stereotypes, and of course there’s a certain WSoD required to accept not just a virtual-reality MMO with real-life death, but, more significantly, an online service that manages to stay up for two years with no maintenance.

I just installed the latest Mac-native version of LibreOffice, and found that the HTML import is now mostly usable, not only correctly handling encodings and most CSS-based layout, but even recognizing Word-specific CSS and flagging it using the document-review functionality (sadly, it still ignores ruby tagging for furigana, but ruby is basically broken anyway). Also, the Draw module imports CorelDraw documents back to version 7, with most features intact (I still need version 3 and 4, but I can work around that with an old copy of 7 that I have running in a virtual).

The basic functionality has been there for a while, but quirkiness, lack of stability, and iffy interoperability were always problems, and it looks like the Libre team is serious about addressing them, which didn’t seem to be the case in the OpenOffice days.

Not safe for bikini-unfriendly workplaces…

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Maybe you should Think a little less Different, and put some checkout counters back in your stores. Then perhaps you wouldn’t need to have undercover security constantly scanning the crowd for incomplete PoS transactions that may or may not be shoplifting.

Arresting a customer because you can’t manage basic retail sales technology is not the work of a Genius.

In Frank Sinatra’s 1985 Tokyo concert at Budokan, the very first time he sings the title line of “Luck Be A Lady”, he clearly sings it as “ruck be a rady”.