Just a few days before leaving for South Africa, the latest version af Ubuntu was released. I really didn’t have the nerve to try and upgrade before my vacation, but today was the day.

Ubuntu is an operating system – like windows – but based upon (Debian) Linux. It can probably do everything you need – and it’s free. With the packaging done to Linux by the Ubuntu team(s), it’s a complete user-friendly and easy to use alternative for most computer users, and it has worked pretty well for me for the quite some time.

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Placing your documents online, does require trust in the online service you choose to use. I usually have a pretty solid trust in google. They do however from time to time have some glitches. After getting the message in the screenshot for an hour, I did start to get the chills, as the document as long and didn’t exist anywhere else. After an hour or so, it did however reappear. phew.

It seems there are two camps when it comes to SQL and how to do database optimizations - the “generic camp” and “the specialist camp”. While I don’t consider myself an extremist, I am absolutely in the specialist camp and this little post is an explanation of why.

SQL is a generic database langauge . There are a few different standards in use (the language has progressed over time), but the core of the SQL language is pretty much the standard in most databases. It’s probably also standard - in any database - that the SQL standard has been extended with database-specific extensions which provides optimizations, functions or other options not available in the SQL standard.

I just discovered O’Reilly CodeZoo today. What a cool idea – ”Find good code, use it quickly”. The net is just littered with bad code samples and finding a place where a high quality standard is set might be a great idea. Only problem is that the (probably) two most used languages on the net - PHP and Perl - aren’t allowed in (so far). Too bad, while good Perl code can be found, it’s hardly impossible to find any quality PHP code samples anywhere.

With Perl you can do many interesting transformations of IP-numbers. Below is two small examples allowing conversions from “IP quad” (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx) format to a single decimal and back. The decimal format may be more convenient and efficient to store in a database.

  sub ip2dec ($) {
    return unpack N => pack CCCC => split /\\./ => shift;
  }

  sub dec2ip ($) {
    return join '.' => map { ($\_\[0\] >> 8\*(3-$\_)) % 256 } 0 .. 3;
  }

In CPAN you can find many modules aimed at using and manipulating IP-addressees.