Seth Keiper

Today, Krugman told me that "Governments don’t have to pay back their debt…" because "we" own "our" debt. In reality, the "We" is the U.S. government (and Federal Reserve [11%]) and the "our" are people like Bill Gross, one of the world’s most closely followed bond fund managers.

Guess what? People like Bill Gross are "selling Treasuries because they have little value within the context of a $75 trillion total debt burden."

Why is he selling his Treasuries? Bill Gross states "inflation, currency devaluation, and low to negative real interest rates." GASP

I guess we should trust Krugman since, you know, he teaches Economics. We shouldn't trust people like Bill Gross because he is "part of the 1%" and makes his living from actually being a bond fund manager.

Ever want to drop all MySQL Stored Procedures?

Here is how you can do it:

USE <DATABASENAME>;

SELECT
  CONCAT_WS("",
    "DROP PROCEDURE IF EXISTS ",
    `R`.`SPECIFIC_NAME`
  ) AS DeleteStorePrecedure
  FROM `information_schema`.`ROUTINES` AS R
  WHERE `R`.`ROUTINE_TYPE` = "PROCEDURE"
  AND `R`.`ROUTINE_SCHEMA` = DATABASE()
;

Alternatively, you can load this data into an outputted file:

USE <DATABASENAME>;

SELECT
  CONCAT_WS("",
    "DROP PROCEDURE IF EXISTS ",
    `R`.`SPECIFIC_NAME`
  ) INTO OUTFILE '/tmp/drop_procedures.sql'
  FROM `information_schema`.`ROUTINES` AS R
  WHERE `R`.`ROUTINE_TYPE` = "PROCEDURE"
  AND `R`.`ROUTINE_SCHEMA` = DATABASE()
;

Then, you can source the drop statements:

source /tmp/drop_procedures.sql

There is buzz about a possible million man march, or human wave, into Israel on May 15, 2011. Also, the Ministry of Interior in Egypt demanded organizers of the March on Israel to cancel.

For some odd reason, the Western Media is not reporting on this, yet.

Here is a view of Google Realtime (as an example):

In firefox, open the firefox advanced preferences by visiting:

about:config

Then search for: browser.tabs.animate

Right click and either toggle or switch to false.

Now, here is a nice little GIF for you to enjoy since you accomplished this small task:

Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. — Mark Twain (aka. Samuel Clemens)

Oracle made a maintenance update release of Oracle VM VirtualBox version 4.0.2 today. You can download it now, or read about the changes in the ChangeLog.

Major Richard Winters died on January 2, 2011 at 92 years young. He wanted a private, unannounced funeral. Let's not forget this great man.

This will revolutionize everything about DNA. Imagine the implications at hand.

From gizmag:

Sequencing an entire genome is currently a highly complex, time-consuming process – the DNA must be broken down into segments and replicated, utilizing chemicals that destroy the original sample. Scientists from Imperial College London, however, have just announced the development of a prototype device that could lead to technology capable of sequencing a human genome within minutes, at a cost of just a few dollars. By contrast, when sequencing of the genome of Dr. James Watson (co-discoverer of the structure of DNA) was completed in 2007, it had taken two years and cost US$1 million.

At the heart of the Imperial College device is a silicon chip, with a 50-nanometer nanopore bored through it. DNA strands are propelled at high speed through this hole, and get their coding sequence read by a “tunneling electrode junction” as they come out the other side. This junction consists of a 2-nanometer gap between two platinum wires, with an electrical current passing between them, across the gap. The current interacts with the unique electrical signal given off by each of the DNA strand’s base codes, and the resulting data is then processed by a computer to determine the complete genome sequence.

The chips are reportedly quite durable, standing up to repeated uses and washings with no loss in performance.

“We haven't tried it on a whole genome yet, but our initial experiments suggest that you could theoretically do a complete scan of the 3,165 million bases in the human genome within minutes, providing huge benefits for medical tests, or DNA profiles for police and security work,” said study co-author Dr. Joshua Edel. “It should be significantly faster and more reliable, and would be easy to scale up to create a device with the capacity to read up to 10 million bases per second, versus the typical 10 bases per second you get with the present day single molecule real-time techniques.”

While passing DNA strands through nanopores has shown promise as a genome-sequencing technique for some time now, this is reportedly the first time it has been paired up with such a fast and accurate reading system – the American creators of a similar system announced this August, however, might dispute that claim. In any case, a practical commercial device could still be up to ten years away.

“The next step will be to differentiate between different DNA samples and, ultimately, between individual bases within the DNA strand,” said study co-author Dr. Tim Albrecht. “I think we know the way forward, but it is a challenging project and we have to make many more incremental steps before our vision can be realized.”

The research was recently published in the journal Nano Letters.

From time to time, I tend to forget simple things, such as the exact syntax for creating a UTF8 database in MySQL.

Here is an example:

CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS `database_name` CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;


There we go.

Of course, you could just write your own spider/search engine. Not overly complex nor deeply involved. But what if you need it *now*?

Enter in Sphider. Sphider is a lightweight web spider and search engine written in PHP, using MySQL as its back end database. Also the html is templatable. And kicker: it is free and open source under the GPL license.

How to set this screaming application up? Very simple instructions for GNU/Linux:

1. wget http://www.sphider.eu/sphider-1.3.4.zip
2. unzip sphider-1.3.4.zip
3. mv sphider-1.3.4/ search/
4. edit the file: search/settings/database.php to use your database credentials and in mysql console, run: CREATE DATABASE `sphider`;
5. So the config file is writable: chmod 666 search/settings/conf.php
6. As a personal touch, I like to do: ln -s search/search.php search/index.php
7. You will need to edit the username and password defaults in search/admin/auth.php on lines 3 and 4, respectively.
8. Then in your favorite web browser, point to: http://yoursite.com/search/admin/install.php. This creates the SQL tables for the sphider database.
9. Follow the link to: http://yoursite.com/search/admin/admin.php.
10. Log in with your credentials.
11. Select the Settings tab.
12. Some of the key items to change on this are:
    • Administrator e-mail address
    • Temporary directory (this will need to be writable if you are not running under the www-data user)
    • Indexing settings:
      • PDF:
        1. Check the Index PDF files
        2. Input /usr/bin/pdftotext for Full executable path to PDF converter (check if you have this by doing: which pdftotext
      • Microsoft DOC:
        1. Check the Index DOC files
        2. Input /usr/bin/catdoc for Full executable path to catdoc converter (check if you have this by doing: which catdoc
      • XLS:
        1. Check the Index XLS files
        2. Input /usr/bin/xls2csv for Full executable path to XLS converter (check if you have this by doing: which xls2csv
      • PPT:
        1. Check the Index PPT files
        2. Input /usr/bin/catppt for Full executable path to PPT converter (check if you have this by doing: which catppt
    • Change the User agent string to your own desired setting. Most of the time, I set this to the domain name or landing URL for people who see your search engine in their logs.
    • Do not forget to select the Save settings submit button
13. Select the Index tab
14. Input your site's domain name. Remember, www.yoursite.com is not the same as subdomain.yoursite.com. Both have to be indexed separately.
15. Full indices seem to be the best, so I use that, personally.
16. Start Indexing!
17. Now you have a search engine that you can templatize. Take the search form and put it anywhere on your site or include it through php's include() for ever page.
18. More information is available for sphider in their documentation.