Boat Race (by sarah)

I actually wrote this ages ago but what with the house being flooded I never got around to posting it!

This weekend as always we were busy busy busy, between Al working about 14 hrs on Saturday and visiting family, before Sunday which started with Alaric getting up at stupid o'clock to go and meet anyone who wanted to go on the Walk the District from our Cubs and Scouts - it was raining and early in the morning - no one turned up so a disheartened Al returned to the house were he work some more until it was time to go and start setting up the Paper Boat Race which was joint between the Scouts and the Village Feast comitee, both of which we abvoisly belong too.

We went down to the scout campsite in the village and set up tables and lit barbecues - this was an impressive affair with a home made sturdy stand, the actual bit of the barby being a modified oil drum! It arrived on the back of a tactor that was blasting music.

Also due to the rain we hastily assembled a tent thing over the tables with the paper for paper boat folding on. I ended up in charge of the prize table which the kids loved.

Quiet a few of the cubs turned up to this as did alot more of the village than we thought would have considering the weather!

We've been getting the kids to make their boats for weeks at our meetings so we had several different types which I've posted about on Salaric!

For the big race at the end there was a prize of a trip in a speed boat - I made dad enter as this used to be something we did when I was little but unfortunatly his Bad Luck Field as always was heightneded by my presance and his boat and Jeans were the only ones to get stranded a hands bredth from the starting line!

Jean loved paddling in the stream as she is obsessed with water at the moment - infact at this very moment she is attempting to mop the carpet with cries of torta!

It was quiet an exhusting weekend realy but as always fun!

The weekend as always was a busy one! (by sarah)

Last weekend as always was a busy one - but one that did happen to run a bit more smoothly than last weekend. We had yet another wedding to go to - Ella and Olivers from uni. I was a bit nervous as I thought we were having to go by trian and stuff and I had the wedding favours (the little presants of sugared almonds etc.. that the bride gives to the guests.) which I'd spent the last three days making after a load of hassel over losing the origonal stuff in the floods.

Fortunatly Charlee lent us her car which was a bit of a releif as we were going on to Gloucestershire after the wedding and didnt really fancy having to do that by public transport!

The wedding was lovely and there are already photos of it up on flicker so go and have a look 🙂 Apart from that we zoomed back to Gloucestershire for the village feast and to see Als Cousin and their family who were visiting Barabara.

Poor Al had decided that becuase we hadn't had the last Cub and Scouts of the year becuase of the flooding none of them would know to come in uniform so we decided not to go in uniform to the multi-denomial service held in the grave yard. And just becuase he was looking tired and scruffy he ended up carrying the village banner with its stags head emblazoned on it, at the head of the traditional procession up from the church, across the common and into the cricket club for teas and cakes.

We then organised the childrens sports (pickeled onion and spoon races - we didn't have any eggs ok) whilst the bell ringers held a minni cincert. Then the red barrows gave a sterling performance of formation wheel barrow sterring with coloured smoke and everything 🙂

This was actually lots and lots of fun 🙂 I will be posting photos soon I hope 🙂 We left the kids with a football and headed back to London exhusted.

MySQL Proxy: Oh, no… Why did they have to go and do that? (by alaric)

The MySQL folks have a new tool, MySQL Proxy, which looks like a MySQL server to clients, but actually just passes incoming queries to a user-supplied Lua script which can pass them on to other MySQL servers, process them itself, rewrite queries before passing them on then rewrite the results, etc.

Which is fine in and of itself. I can think of a few uses for such a thing: it'd be great for query logging during debugging, especially when you're examining the interactions of queries from several sources, so just logging on the client wouldn't help. And it'd be useful for distributed database stuff, too.

However, there's a tutorial prominently linked, Getting Started with MySQL Proxy.

And what examples of the uses of the proxy does it give?

• Pass it along unchanged (default)
• Fix spelling mistakes (ever written CRATE DATAABSE?)
• Filter it out, i.e., remove it altogether
• Rewrite the query according to some policy (enforcing strong passwords, forbidding empty ones)
• Add forgotten statements (autocommit is enabled and the user sent a BEGIN WORK? You can inject a SET AUTOCOMMIT = 0 before that)
• Much more: if you can think of it, it's probably already possible; if it isn't, blog about it: chances are that someone will make it happen

Am I the only person who feels that setting up a proxy in front of an SQL server to catch spelling mistakes and semantic errors and Do What I Mean rather than reporting an error so the developer fixes their code will just lead to endless pain... like every past DWIM system? And is an SQL query proxy really the place to enforce strong passwords, as opposed to in the application code or in the database itself?

I think proxies for just about any protocol can be useful, but condoning such practices as listed above is rather irresponsible...

Wiggly Pet Blog (by sarah)

The Wiggly pets have finially got round to proding me about the community blog I promised them about 2 years ago!

Its been running for a few weeks now 🙂

What do people think of it?

http://www.wigglypets.co.uk/

In London! (by alaric)

We're in London. After the last run of bad luck, a lovely client said "Come and work in my offices, so if any more bad luck happens, I can fix it, so you can keep working and get my project finished on time" 🙂

We'll be here for a couple of weeks.