Icebergist

Today I had to import 3GB of InnoDB tables in MySQL. Unfortunately, while importing the server run out of disk space - which caused whole server to grind to a halt. Naively I tried to delete imported data to free up space… I was in for an unpleasant surprise.

By default when MySQL uses InnoDB engine it stores most of the information in single file called ibdata1. One downside is that once ibdata1 file grows it cannot shrink - even if you delete all InnoDB tables. For some reason MySQL is set to use single file instead of per-table tablespaces similar to MyISAM.

Enabling per-table tablespaces is easy just add innodb_file_per_table to my.cnf file. Problem is that all newly created tables, only new tables, will be in separate files. It seems that there’s no easy way to convert old tables and reclaim the space taken by ibdata1.

There are 3 ways and two are basically export-drop-delete-import type of solutions:

1. Convert all InnoDB tables to MyISAM
2. Export only InnoDB tables, drop them, delete ibdata1 and import InnoDB tables.
3. Export all databases, delete ibdata1 and import everything back.

I choose option 2 because I luckily had only 40 InnoDB tables and much more using MyISAM. For details on how to apply each solution and down/up sides of each read MySQL: Reducing ibdata1.

• What’s New in Edge Rails: Easy Join Table Conditions.
• Faces of Millions - Art project which aims to gather one million photos of people faces and create 10m x 10m photo mosaic.
• Uni-Form is an attempt to standardize form markup (xhtml) and css.
• Mac OS X full screen QuickLook shortcut.
• A guide to CSS support in Email.

[condensed from 'this should be interesting' tumblelog]

One thing that always annoyed me when rendering collection partials is that a local var in partial is named same as a partial template name. So, to go around this I always created another local variable in partial and gave it a more meaningful name.

No longer… As the Ryan says from now on in the Edge Rails you can specify the name of the local variable in which each collection element will be exposed within a partial. You will can do this:

render :partial => 'employees', :collection => @workers, :as => :person

It’s a simple thing, but it’s just one of the things that bugged me. I am glad it’s gone now.

This is the first weekly condensed edition of my “This should be interesting” tumblelog. Every Sunday I will re-post most interesting posts here on the Icebergist.

• Free Book: “Ruby on Rails 2.1 - What’s new”
• Better Blockquotes - blockquotes CSS styling examples
• Slife - free automatic time tracking for Mac
• unfocus-history-keeper - back button enabling, deep linking, event driven Javascrpt/DHTML/Ajax Library (works for Flash too)

Today I tried to upgrade my Mac from 10.5.3 to 10.5.4 using normal Software Update. That didn’t go as planned as installation hanged at “Configuring Installation” and only thing I could do is shutdown the computer.

After some research and few unsuccessful retries I have finally managed to solve the upgrade problem by downloading standalone 10.5.4 update from Apple download section; booting in safe mode (hold shift key when booting) and then installing the update.

SproutCore is a javascript framework which tries to enable developers to build web apps that look and act more like a desktop apps.

It steps away from a classic web app model by moving a lot of app into the browser itself, which then interacts with server via AJAX. As it says on the SproutCore site:

After lots of testing, we have found that the most efficient way to server a SproutCore application is as a …. static web page!

This means that a “simple” static HTML page (which is easily served by Apache) makes browser do most of the work (i.e. server doesn’t have to generate the pages) which frees up server to respond only to AJAX initiated requests.

SproutCore is written in Ruby, but once you build the app it will generate a set of HTML, JS and CSS files, so you don’t need to know Ruby in order to use it. As the site says:

The code you write with SproutCore will resemble a desktop app written in Cocoa more than it will a web application written in Rails.

Another great thing about SproutCore is that it can be hooked up with any backend as long as it can communicate with it using HTTP. It can be anything: Rails, PHP, Perl, Java, ASP…

Actions speak louder than words, so take a look at the SproutCore demos which shows you exactly what it’s all about.

• SproutCore based photo gallery - iPhoto anyone?
• SproutCore sample controls - demonstrates what kind of controls are already available in SproutCore.

In next few days I will try to build a sample application powered by SproutCore and Rails to see how it goes. I will post my impressions here. After all if it’s something Apple used for Mobile.me - well, it can’t be that bad.

Welcome to an icebergist blog. The Icebergist will be a blog about both technical and business stuff I deal with daily. From Ruby on Rails programming to time organizing, everything that’s important in my daily work as a freelance developer.

As you can see I just setup the Icebergist blog, so at the moment it’s content-free. While I write some posts you can checkout my posts from my previous blog AS Workshop.

Also I maintain a tumble log called “this should be interesting” where I post small bits of information which I find useful or interesting.

If that’s not enough for you then check out my Twitter feed where I ramble daily (unless I am to lazy or too busy to do so).