Pico's world

MySQL Creating user rookie mistakes

I created a user ‘monty’ in a MySQL DB using the following command

CREATE USER 'monty'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'some_pass';

Then tried to connect to it from the local computer:

mysql -u monty -password=some_pass

It never worked… I spent an hour trying to figure it out, the answer was on the page I was reading.

It is necessary to have both accounts for monty to be able to connect from anywhere as monty. Without thelocalhost account, the anonymous-user account for localhost that is created by mysql_install_db would take precedence when monty connects from the local host. As a result, monty would be treated as an anonymous user. The reason for this is that the anonymous-user account has a more specific Host column value than the'monty'@'%' account and thus comes earlier in the user table sort order. (user table sorting is discussed inSection 5.4.4, “Access Control, Stage 1: Connection Verification”.)

Not happy with myself right now =/

Do I need Windows anymore?

Ever since I got my hands on a free EC2 instance, I got a lot of exposure to Linux. I would ssh in to try things out, like deploying nginx and gunicorn, using vim to configure my settings, and writing code to get django up and running. I scoured the web looking to ‘pimp’ out my vim editor, found some excellent blog post such as this one from John Anderson. Trying to get his configuration from github to work on windows has proved very difficult, for one, command-t, needs to have vim compiled with ruby support. In linux you can get the source code and compile it it with ruby support, while it is possible in Windows, it’s just not something I want to do.

After seemingly getting a popup from windows asking me to update Windows Vista every other day, I got myself asking, what is stopping me from making the switch to Linux? It used to be games, but these days, when I do play, I play all my games on the PS3 or the Xbox360.

I will start the process to change my laptop’s OS from Windows to Ubuntu. I will need to backup my files, hopefully I won’t forget something!

Bitbucket + Mercurial

I recently found out that Bitbucket had free private repositories, this made me open to the idea of switching from Git to Mercurial. Afterall, using Git+Dropbox can’t possibly be better than using Mercurial+Bitbucket. After reading Joel Spolsky’s intro to Mercurial page, hginit.com, I decided to make the jump. I couldn’t be happier! I love the nice features that comes with Bitbucket (wiki, issue tracking). Bitbucket is probably not at the same level as GitHub in terms of features and UI goodness, but for recreational projects, free is best!

Rackspace cloud server

I just got myself a Rackspace cloud server yesterday, I was trying the following things on it:

1. Use it as a VPN server
2. Use it as a Git source repository
3. Have a server to play around with the new framework.

I am quite excited about this. I thought long and hard about going to Linode, Slicehost, or Rackspace. While Rackspace is the most expensive option if the server is deployed all month, I only plan on “using resources” or deploying my cloud server a few hours a month. I expect it to cost me a few bucks a month. I will use the Cloud File to store my images so I don’t lose all the configuration work that I’ve done setting up the systems. It is pretty cheap, about 15 cents / gig. I’ll try to post the steps I took for each tasks I did, maybe someone will find it useful.

Using google app engine as a source control

I have been too lazy/cheap to get myself a proper source control. So I’ve decided for the time being to use the new feature in app engine 1.4 that allows you to download deployed application.

The command is as follows:
python appcfg.py download_app -A <application name> -V <version number> <directory you want to code to be download>

So when I want to commit, I just deploy my application from the GAE tool. And if I want to retrieve an old version I use the command above.

I don’t suggest you use this for any big project, I am just playing around with Django python and app engine, so this works for me.

I will probably use GitHub if my project gets more serious.