Earlier this year I was working on a project and needed a quick way to tie an sql table to the web. I ended up going with dadabik and I don’t regret it, it’s worked out well. But today I stumbled across an interesting alternative – MyDBO. It takes a very different approach to a similar problem. It’s basically an extensible code generation framework and is much more flexible than solutions like dadabik. At first blush I thought it would end up being more complex to work with than dadabik, but having tinkered a bit I think we would have actually had an easier time of it on the census project if we had used MyDBO – we ended up making a significant number of changes behind the scenes with dadabik which we wouldn’t have had to do with MyDBO. This is worth a look if you do a lot of mysql-php-webwork.

It doesn’t get much more convenient than this. I just had to do this today and went looking for a tool. xls2mysql is a free php script that takes the data from your excel file and converts it into tables in a mysql server. It’s not perfect – it cannot detect field types and the maximum file upload size over http that your server allows will limit the size of the data set you can import, but for lots of simple tasks this is a handy script. Of course you can do this already with phpmyadmin if you export your data out to csv, but if you’re not running that and don’t see yourself getting it going, this is an alternative.

Only a few days after I mention a GUI for Synergy on OSX, I find an even better one. This one runs on OSX and Linux and comes with everything you need – download, run and you’re all set. If you need to share a mouse and keyboard amongst multiple machines, Synergy is the stuff, and if you’re doing it on a mac, Quicksynergy is going to make it as easy as it’s going to get to get it up and running.

Apple in its wisdom created launchd. They had good reasons for doing so, but there are downsides. One of them is they’ve replaced what used to be a single line of text in the crontab which usually had less than a few dozen characters into a 20 or more line xml file. They’re sort of a pain in the ass to write. Enter Lingon, a graphical user interface that greatly eases the creation and installation of the launchd configuration files. Free, open source, and works like a charm. Next time you’re trying to automate stuff on your mac and get frustrated with launchd, check this out, it will save you a lot of trouble.

Check out mp3tunes.com, a new business from the guy behind mp3.com and other dot.coms. For $40 a year you get unlimited file storage and unlimited throughput on 128k streaming from their site – upload your entire music collection and listen to it no matter where you are. If you’re not already running your own home streaming solution, this is a really interesting option. Granted, 128k is on the low end but for the price it’s incredible, especially when coupled with unlimited storage. They also have a synching tool to help you migrate your music collection to their servers. This is really a pretty good deal for anyone interested in having their music collection hosted online who doesn’t have the means to bring up their own hosting solution. There’s also a free version of the service which is limited to 56k streams, which might be worth testing for podcasts and other material where sound clarity is not as much of an issue. I’m left wondering how long it will take the RIAA to get steamed about this and call out the lawyers, I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

Check out the wikimatrix.org, which has tools that allow you to compare the feature sets of the most popular wiki engines. It’s hardly comprehensive (compare it to c2’s list of known wiki engines for example), but it has the major ones and even a few I wasn’t familiar with, and the site’s brand new so hopefully they’ll be adding more engines over time. If you’re in the market for a wiki, this is a useful resource.

Yeah, I know – news of this is all over the web, and you all knew it already. Except most of the regular readers are not neccesarily quick on the new version uptake, so here’s a friendly poke – go update to the latest firefox. Just the changes to how tabs work make it worthwhile (you can now drag and reorder them without using a buggy extension). And here’s something fun for you to check out after you’ve updated – an interactive demo using svg.

[demo found via digg]

I found a handy little resource today – check out html-kit’s favicon generator – simply upload a pic to their site and they’ll give you back the pic reformatted as a favicon. I finally got a placeholder icon up today thanks to this site. Free, simple as pie, and it works as advertised.

I’m off from work for a couple of days and working on this website, meaning things could get a little wonky here. So far I’ve taken care of a number of things, including upgrading from gallery to gallery2. I’ve said it a number of times – gallery is one of the finest open source projects around. While the upgrade process wasn’t quite as smooth as some of my earlier 1.x upgrades, in the end I managed it and it took me less than two hours. This means once again some image gallery links will be a bit of a mess, short term. If you find something amiss, let me know and I’ll fix it.

I’ve also got another potential candidate for kick ass open source project, gregarius. I’ll write more about it and link to my instance once I’ve got it fully configured. So far so great though.

I also got sitebar up and running again, once I’ve finished configuring it I’ll link to my instance of that as well.

I’ll post more info as I continue working on things.

I linked to a desktop version of the superb wiki engine moinmoin for the mac some time ago. I noticed today that this is now also available for the PC. If you’re looking to experiment with wikis after hearing me babble about them endlessly over the past couple of years, this is one of the easiest ways to go about it, and one of the best. Moinmoin ranks up there amongst the best of the available wiki engines – it’s super featureful, well thought out, and relatively easy to use. It doesn’t get any easier to get your own knowledgebase going on your machine.