Sunday, October 23, 2011

Steve Jobs

Much have already been said about the recent death of Steve Jobs, Apple's co-founder. I don't really have much to add. I admire him for what he has done for the tech industry, movies (Pixar), music (iTunes, iPod), typography (fonts), telecommunications (iPhone), etc. Young and Simon's iCon is one of the best biographies I've ever read.

But strangely -- I've never been an Apple fan. I've bought an iPod for Cols before, but that's it. I don't personally own any Apple product myself. I have never lusted for an iPhone. I bought a Samsung Galaxy Android phone instead. I have no plans of getting an iPad, but a Galaxy Tab is in my shopping list this month-end at Singapore. I do love Pixar movies though.

I cannot deny the fact though that products like the Android phones or the Galaxy Tab would not have seen the light of the day were it not for Steve Jobs' creations.

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Database Mishap

My database file has been growing big making backups rather slow. I decided to delete old records but things took an unexpected downward turn when I punched in the wrong query. What I wanted was:

delete from table1 where (cond1 or cond2) and cond3;

But the problem was I did not include the parenthesis and that completely changed the logic:

delete from table1 where cond1 or cond2 and cond3;

Crap! Had to spent the whole day restoring lost records. Luckily, my daily backups actually work. I was able to restore all data as of 2am. Just had to reconstruct the last few hundred records from 2am to around 11am when the disaster happened.

Thank goodness too for FBExport which significantly helped in the reconstruction. I should look more into this tool for doing incremental backups. The default gbak utility does not have that capability making backups of large Firebird files over-the-network really slow.