The homepage of Chris Tate-Davies
IT
ThreadSMS – Review
Jul 28th
My Nokia doesn’t have threaded SMS view – and its very annoying. So, after searching about for a suitable application for this, I came across ThreadSMS by eHandySoft (http://ehandysoft.com/threadsms.htm)
Functionality:
Quick to load, and quick to navigate. On my N97 mini the scrolling was very smooth and precise. The threads are loaded with contact pictures next to the corresponding people (if you have contact pictures assigned). Clicking on a thread will open it up in a sort of bubble outline. Here you can read the flow of the thread easily.
If you want to reply, you have to click on a message, and then a text entry box appears. It would seem better to me to have the box always there, or at least an option to choose.
There’s even a method of locking your SMS so that prying eyes cannot view them (if you’re upto no good)
If you regularly receive spam SMS messages, then you can filter these out, and silence them. Another great idea.
Looks:
I looks very slick. There are around 7 bubble themes you can choose, that changes the design of the thread view.
The different threads are grouped by sender, so in the main window you get a list of your contacts with their little pictures, ordered by the most recent first. Logically.
Overall:
A good bit of software that expands the Nokia’s limited SMS functionality.
Reading the MySQL binary log
Jul 27th
Having MySQL dumping out binary logs is a very good failsafe for backup redundancy. But, how do you get any of the information out of them?
If you know a time span that you need to investigate, then you can easily use the mysqlbinlog utility:
mysqlbinlog --start-datetime="2010-07-27 14:30:00" --stop-datetime="2010-07-27 15:00:00" > backup.txt
This will export all the recorded SQL Statements performed between 2:30pm and 3pm on the 27th July 2010 to the text file “backup.txt”. I can then browse at my convenience.
If you need to re-create any of the statements, you can copy and paste into your MySQL client of choice.
Getting Ant to run on Windows 7 (64bit)
Apr 23rd
If like me, you use Ant to deploy builds, etc, and you have migrated to Windows 7 – you may well have troubles getting ant to run.
It all worked flawlessly under Ubuntu, but Windows is a different beast – here’s a step by step guide to getting it working.
Remove svn folders from Ubuntu
Apr 9th
When backing up a source code working copy, you don’t always want all the little .svn folders everywhere.
You can “export” the working copy, or if you forgot, you have remove them all.
Change the the folder containing the working copy (this is very important*)
cd /home/username/www/sitename/
And then remove them all, recursively with this command:
find -name "\.svn" -exec rm -rf {} \;
This will find all .svn files/folders in the current folder, and remove them and everything in them.
*if you do not ensure you are in the right folder, this command will remove all recursive folders, so if you are in the web root, it will remove all the svn information from all your sites… This is very important (that’s twice I’ve said that, so it must be)