^(almost) murphy.de

TL;DR If you want to truncate a SQLite table, use DELETE FROM table; VACUUM.

While cleaning up my blog (backend, frontend and everything) for the new year, I noticed that the SQLite database I use to store its data had become quite huge — 28 MB huge to be exact. Since I could not dream of having written this much text, I had no idea what happened.

Since I despise writing SQL to inspect tables, I first searched for a simple, free graphical SQLite client (for OS X). No success in the Mac App Store. What I found then was a Firefox plugin called “SQLite Manager”. It’s horrible (Windows 3.1 style icons and poor interface design), but it did its job: After it hung up when I tried to look at the “sessions” table (connecting over SFTP wasn’t such a good idea), the culprit was found: ActiveRecord was storing sessions for each visitor without ever cleaning them up.

*sigh*

So, back to SQL:

You may have noticed that my blog has been down for the last week. We have moved to another server, and I am updating to the latest Camping version, which sadly broke some of the old API.

Expect quirks and 500s for the next days until I’m finished with the port.

Oh, and by the way: I’m in New Zealand! Follow @murphy_nz to find out a lot more about that (with photos!).

Update: It’s fixed, and runs on Passenger now!

Yes. I’m sorry. I’m busy with:

• starting a new job at sofatutor
• friends
• Shadowrun
• reading/writing on Twitter
• preparing for my New Zealand trip from late October till New Year
• watching JAG, season 5 (in English)

Because of this, I could not find the time yet to write about

• rbJL’s Zucker gem
• the latest updates to the Schatten project
• CodeRay 1.0
• my new iMac
• my love for m&m‘s
• what I like/hate about Twitter

You can follow me on @murphy_karasu (manchmal schreibe ich dort auch Deutsch), and/or you can have a completely unrelated “motivational” poster:

Why did I name my blog “(almost) murphy.de”? Two reasons:

• My internet nickname is murphy, and I’m German. However, murphy.de was taken. I thought I could use that as an idea for the name.
• I’m an incomplete being. There’s a great Blues Brothers song called Almost (original by Downchild) which gave me the idea. I think “almost” is a nice word, too.

So, this is my explanation :) What about your blog’s name?

Piet leidet noch an globaler Erkältung.

^(almost) murphy.de hat zur Weihnachtszeit ein neues Layout.

• Die Farben habe ich mit ColorBurn ausgesucht (This Is On My Side, 14. Dezember).
• Der Hintergrund für die Titelzeile ist mit Inkscape gemacht – meine erste SVG-Grafik.
• Wem der neue Stil nicht gefällt, der kann auf den alten wechseln. Im Firefox geht das mit Ansicht / Webseiten-Stil / Original Style.¹
• Der Footer ist jetzt nicht mehr “fixed”, sondern einfach am Ende des Blogs – sieht besser aus so, und verwirrt Safari nicht.

¹ Sieht nicht so aus, als würde Safari alternative Stylesheets unterstützen…traurig.

Frohes Fest!

Camping sessions not working lately? Well, it’s a problem with Rails 2.1, to be more precise: ActiveRecord 2.1.0.

This took me at least 5 hours, but I finally got it: the latest version of AR does Dirty tracking and partial SQL updates. This means it only saves a new value when it thinks the attribute has changed. Nice, but it bugs Camping. So, here’s the patch:

Ich bin am Überlegen, ob ich das Blog englisch, deutsch oder zweisprachig machen soll. Was sind die Vor- und Nachteile?

I have a new blog :-)

Not much to say currently, but stay tuned…or linked.

History

I began writing the application that runs this blog on 2008-01-13, shortly after exploring Camping, _why’s extremely small web framework (which has only 4KB of code). I was amazed how easy it is to create a web application with it.

Seems to work…except for the fixed elements. What a PITA.

I decided to support only IE7+. I refuse to test this site on IE6, sorry. Update your browser or send me a patch :P

Update: I found out that IE6 and IE7 don’t accept Content-Type=application/xhtml+xml. How stupid can a browser be?

I’m testing my new blog. It’s very small (318 lines of Ruby code, about 130 lines of CSS), using Camping and Textile.

The source code and the style sheet are Public Domain.