Category Archives: Technical Notes

All about technical notes

MySQL 5.0: Recovering Crashed/Corrupted InnoDB Database

restore crashed InnoDBIf you are a frequent user of transactional database feature in MySQL, you must be familiar with InnoDB storage engine. Along with BDB, InnoDB provides transaction safe database within MySQL environment.

Nobody wants bad thing happens although it often does. Sometimes, power outage or internal system malfunction or even human error makes the database crashed or corrupted. This article will provide steps taken to recover corrupted InnoDB database based on real crash course experience within *NIX environment.

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In The Realm of Passwordless Authentication With OpenID (Featuring Vidoop)

How many sites do you visit regularly? How many times do you repeat the process of inputting username and password? Are you a regular visitor of “Forget your password?” link or you vehemently deny, saying you always remember all your passwords because they are all the same or follow the same pattern?

I Can Not Remember Passwords

You might say, “Are you kidding me, or you’re plainly a moron?” Yes, I probably am. During my early ages with internet, services offered were not that many and diverse like todays. I mainly used internet to check my email, hence remembering password was not a problem because I apparently used single password (or two for my other account).

Internet evolves, applications are built. New sites emerge everyday. I read news and article about new technology especially on websites and web apps. Another Joe said site A was cool because it offered yada-yada service. I dropped a visit, took a demo, and was eager to use the service offered. But it’s not free even it’s free (or it’s free with limitation if money is the term), i should be authenticated and authorized to use the service, hence registration (+payment) and another username-password pair.

After years, I found out that I had collected hundreds of username-password pairs. Hundreds? Yes, for sure. Credentials for e-payment should be different with the ones used in forums, emails, or other less critical service. Unfortunately,remembering which pair to be used in a site was and is always PITA. After being a regular patient of “Forget your password?”, I decided to organize login credentials so that I would never forget and could easily find out the username/password for a website/service. How?

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Zend Framework 1.0, First Stable Release For Your Commercial And Enterprise PHP Web Apps

zf_logo.pngJuly 1st, 2007 is a monumental day for Zend and their developers. It’s the day when Zend Framework 1.0, the first stable version of the framework, was released to public. What’s with the fuss?

It’s important for a business entity (eg. company) to make sure the business process run smoothly and profitable during the whole cycle. A lot of components are involved in company operation which determine company success, one of them is software (yes, we’re talking about modern companies). For technology-driven company, software provision and implementation is crucial. Software is not only for administration use, it solidifies and improves business process.

Now we’ll get the scope smaller by emphasizing software lifecycle processes on companies which provide web-based service or consider web existence as business image. Serious companies follow certain standard in its operation. By using standard, it will be able to measure the whole process and assess whether the operations succeeded and desired outcome achieved. Talking about software cycle, there are several evolving models used to reflect the software cycle, from the old Waterfall model to international standard ISO/IEC 12207.

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The GPL Myth: Opensource Is Free Of Charge

GNU Not Profitable?This is the first part of an article duo about open source. This article is inspired by recent policy stipulated by the Joomla team that all joomla modules and components must comply GPL license, the license Joomla has been using since the announcement of its first official release in 2005.

Personal Impressum

In 2004, I attended a one day seminar about GPL license and the spirit behind open source community entitled “Free Software: Past, Present and Future”. Richard Stallman, the father behind GNU, took the lead as a key speaker. It was an interesting session. Besides the material, Stallman himself was an eccentric person for me. He came and did speech with long hair, t-shirt, and torn jeans. He reflected the word “freedom” itself. Did you see a glimpse of the word “renegade” coincidentally?

Free Is Not Totally Free

The word free has different meanings. If one cares to look up all definitions in dictionary, free is limited to certain terms although it generally means no limitation. From this interesting fact, let’s dig what public assumption is about free software.

In daily practice, free software is often associated with freeware. In fact they are a bit different. Citing wikipedia, freeware is copyrighted computer software which is made available for use free of charge, for an unlimited time. The keyword here is “free of charge”. This is the critical point which oftentimes misleads users with free software.

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Zend Framework: A Gem in Less Than A Penny

I’ve been searching for robust PHP framework which does more than a set of classes. After playing with some frameworks available on the internet, I stumble upon Zend Framework, a framework provided by Zend.

Quoting Zend, this is their definition for Zend Framework

Zend Framework is a simple, straightforward, open-source software framework for PHP 5 designed to eliminate the tedious details of coding and let you focus on the big picture. Its strength is in its highly-modular MVC design, making your code more reusable and easier to maintain. Although it’s currently in preview release, take a look—you may be surprised.

I accentuate on the last phrase, and yes, i was surprised. ZF has clear logic and workflow for what a framework must posses. It has Zend_Loader for loading necessary class and Zend_Registry for keeping object singleton. Zend_View handles the viewer nicely from the MVC and uses PHP directly to parse variables and routines within templates (this is great since some template engines parse variables within templates thus increasing process time and give some overhead). Other features are also nice. You can find them by reading the documentation and manual.

Supported with good documentation, mailing list, and active community, ZF seems promising for being the most popular PHP framework in the future. Give ZF a try. It costs less than a penny.