It occurred to me last night, as I was debugging some particularly tangly Javascript and Java running in several frames, that programming a complex web application that uses frames is essentially developing a multi-threaded application. You have the synchronisation issues that you get with multiple threads, albeit on a lesser scale as you usually have many more threads than frames.

On top of that, because the round-trip time to the server is so much higher than access times for threads running locally, you just can't use a lot of the typical techniques for solving sync problems. Also, as the frames are meant to act as a coherent whole, you have to ensure that they dance together properly. They can communicate with each other and they can communicate with the server, but only in the most basic ways.

Sometimes, this makes things hard.

I've been working ridiculous hours this week. I've gone to bed as Louise has been getting up every day. Then I don't get up until at least two. Today it was three.

The silly thing is that I've been working really well and not just sitting around staring at my computer the whole time.

Ridiculous.

The overall effect is like listening to a strobe light.

I can't do better than that review, it's ace. Indeed, <irony>Adult. DIGIROCK!</irony>

My foot hurts from tapping.

The EU parliament decides that software patents are a good thing, but in what way? It seems that the draft directive that was actually passed had been declawed somewhat, relying on the phrase "true inventions" to come to the aid of the OSS community and others. Sounds like it's not as bad as it could have been, but that the end result is probably a fair amount of confusion. Weird.

That and I'm not eschewing Lisp yet. Scary. I download Paul Graham's On Lisp in PDF form. I just read the introduction and I think I'm starting to get it. I think the thing that everybody loves is that Lisp is programmable. Instead of writing a program in it, you end up customising the language until that program is trivial. This is demonstrated by Graham by implementing Prolog in 200 lines. I wonder how many brackets he used. Fuck loads probably.

I use a shell script run as a cron job to back up this database and the Hype database. To do this the scripts needed the correct passwords to get to the data. In an ideal world I might have set up an account with select-only access, but it's a shared server and I only have one account per database. I was specifying the username and password for MySQL on the command line and anyone else could see it with a simple ps.

The much better way is to create a defaults configuration file. MySQL cnf files can consist of any option specified as a command line argument. They are organised by application, e.g.

[client]
user=myname
password=mypassword
host=mysql.com

The password option has exactly the same effect of putting --password=mypassword on the command line to the MySQL client. You can have sections for mysqld, mysqldump and so on.

By default the MySQL apps will look in several files for these kinds of settings. However, you can point it to a particular file with --default-extras-file. This loads your file after the global defaults. I use this to point mysqldump at two different databases.

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Last updated at 11:32, Wednesday June 18th, 2008. All times are shown in 24-hour clock format and are BST.

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