Windows 10 "fall creators update" 2017, more precisely known as Windows 10 version 1709, brings with it a new version of the windows console.
This is the terminal that is used to display cmd.exe and PowerShell commandline environments.

Now the new version is nice, amongst other things it has is variable transparency, but it turns off processing terminal escape sequences from Python (and probably a load of other things) by default.

This is how to turn on the processing of terminal escape sequences in Win10 console V2.

Using RegEdit add "VirtualTerminalLevel" as a DWORD to ‘HKCU\Console’ set to value 0x1

I've been playing around with react-native for a week or so, and I'm liking it.
If you don't know what it is, its basically a toolkit for building mobile apps with, one that makes it easy to achieve good looking apps that integrate with your phone without you having to learn low-level details about how phones work (yay for that!).
One of the great things is that, with Android at least, you can use your own favourite editing tools and the Android SDK and react-native will build your app, install it on your phone, start it running, and attach a debugger to the app and the developer tools in your web browser.
All from one simple command:

react-native run-android

adb shell input keyevent 82 

We have just copied a big chunk of files off a broken home NAS by mounting the hdd in a windows PC. Luckily this one has a windows format partition on it, the other one doesn't so I'll need to make a bootable Linux USB dongle, probably via https://www.pendrivelinux.com/ and boot from that.

icacls .\ /reset /T /C /L

takeown.exe /F .\ /R

So these are two commands to mount shared folder in a linux host on a linux guest so that the guest has full permission in the shared folders.

This first command should be executed on the guest VM

sudo mount -t vboxsf SHARE_NAME /MOUNT_POINT/ -o rw,users,umask=0000

VBoxManage setextradata VM_NAME VBoxInternal2/SharedFoldersEnableSymlinksCreate/SHARE_NAME 1 

I have recently been messing around with a raspberry pi at work (a Pi2 model B) for driving display screens for our In-Venue product of which I am the product owner. And very exciting it is too, because the real world is the new frontier (this pdf is also a good primer). If you see what I mean, but more on that another time.

So.. I had to overclock the Pi to improve browser performance to even get near to acceptable speed and smoothness of animations. Pro Tip, the Pi is not a graphics device! Having done this and got acceptable results for a clunky prototype to demo with, and load averages that stayed on the sane side of normal I thought I'd better see if I was frying the CPU. And because I will inevitably forget this useful command I'm saving it here for posterity. Here's how I got the temperature reading..

/opt/vc/bin/vcgencmd measure_temp

I'm writing a technical document using google docs, and I want to put code snippets into it.
I thought this would be hard, before I discovered http://hilite.me/

This awesome, and awesomely simple, web app converts snippets of code into coloured HTML.
It can format a comprehensive range of languages and apply an equally impressive variety of styles.

Here's a snip of javascript, I just copied and pasted it straight in here, so it doesn't handle the overflow well, but you have to admit that its pretty cool for something that has a quick copy/paste/click/copy/paste workflow:

for (var i = 0; i < dataObj.eventData.children.length; i++) {
  if (dataObj.isProduction){
   dataObj.eventData.children[2].outcome.coupling = "1";
  }
  if (dataObj.eventData.children[i].outcome.coupling.length > 0) { 
    outcomeData = dataObj.eventData.children[i].outcome;
    priceBoost[counter] = Object.create(priceBoostObject);
    priceBoost[counter].createPriceBoostHTML(outcomeData);
    priceBoost[counter].applyPriceBoost(outcomeData);
    priceBoost[counter].applyExtraCss(outcomeData);
    priceBoost[counter].initialiseAnimatedImages('animated-' + outcomeData.id, 'images/test.png', 'test.html');
    priceBoost[counter].checkTextWidth(outcomeData.id);
    counter++;
  }
}

Google Glass Explorer Program Shuts Down

I tried to install a couple of updates on my work laptop, running Ubuntu 12.04, a minute or two ago when prompted by the update manager, and I got the "requires installation of untrusted packages" error. I've since dicovered that there are two ways round this, one is to allow untrusted packages by doing the update as root or via sudo, and saying "y" when asked

Install these packages without verification [y/N]?

sudo apt-get clean
cd /var/lib/apt
sudo mv lists lists.old
sudo mkdir -p lists/partial
sudo apt-get clean 
sudo apt-get update

Googles "indoor streetview" is pretty cool, but when you stray away from the city centre there are some less glamourous locations that are a lot more fun, here are my five faves

Number Five, London's least exciting Art Gallery

Number four, A garage in a railway arch

At Three we have.. A Caff

At Number TWO, Two guys in a post office

My ALL Time Number ONE: Battersea Auto Stop!

Ars Technica ran this story last month
“Stop the Cyborgs” launches public campaign against Google Glass ,

Its about a group who think we should resist Google Glass, There are some thought provoking points raised:

As soon as we got inside however, the employees at Starbucks asked us to stop filming. Sure, no problem. But I kept the Glass’ video recorder going, all the way through 

"Google Glass is possibly the most significant technological threat to 'privacy in public' I've seen," Woodrow Hartzog, an affiliate scholar at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, told Ars.

 The law has yet to figure out how to unravel the fact that there are many situations where individuals expect privacy in public. So perhaps the best approach to this, at least initially, is a vocal, context-based opposition

I'm becoming increasingly disturbed by the possibility of what I call "MAC address stalking", where people could be located if their WiFi is on and if you can associate their phone number with the phone's MAC address. So imagine my horror this week when I saw these instructions for accessing free WiFi in ASDA stores..

Registering for Asda Wi-Fi couldn’t be easier with just a few simple steps:
1. Select Asda Free Wi-Fi from your network list on your phone
2. Enter your mobile number
3. Receive a text message with your access code
...

"By signing up to the WiFi service, you agree for us to share your information with ASDA and ASDA group companies for them to use this information for marketing and analytics purposes" 

They're going to do this to it..

The Power Station has been one of my favourite London landmarks ever since I went to the funfair as a young kid, and was scared out of my wits by the roller coaster in the early seventies. In fact I didn't go on a roller coaster again for about ten years.

It was permanently closed down after five children were killed and thirteen others injured in an accident on 30 May 1972 when one of the trains became detached from the haulage rope, before rolling back to the station (the anti-rollback mechanism having also failed) and colliding with the other train. This is the worst accident in history of themeparks.

There's been a lot of talk about the Oracle vs Google court case, and I was reading this when it occurred to me that I have a few reservations about the strength of Google's argument, and perhaps you'd like to hear them.

If you know about the technology you might want to skip ahead a bit, but I have to cover off some background, so we all know what we're talking about.

My thinking first took shape when the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), of which I am a member, was making its initial steps towards developing a Java Virtual Machine(JVM). At its most simple abstraction the JVM is the thing that runs on your computer, and in its turn it executes the java programs, they are loaded into it. The JVM "hides" the differences between operating systems from the Java programs. For example Mac's and Windows might have different ways for a program to interact with memory, the JVM provides memory management which is the same for all java programs, to make this happen a Windows JVM will be different "inside" than a Mac one.

So Apache were attempting to create an Open Source JVM called Harmony, and it was during early discussions about the "Java Mail API" which I was involved in that I first ran into the issue which is being tested in court right now. (we will ignore the definition of an API at the moment, because we come to that a bit later, it stands for "Application Program Interface" but you don't need to know what that means)

 I was PMC Chair of Apache James, a 100% Java email application server, and I had got chatting to the Harmony folks about one thing and another when the subject came up about whether an ASF licenced version of the JavaMail API  would have a more natural home amongst the java email fanbois of the James project because it is a framework that allows people to write java programs that handle email more easily.

So I started to think about what this would mean from a code perspective, and began to untangle things in my head, here's where I get to the point, stop skipping!

The thing that we call "JavaMail" is composed of three parts, and this is true for many other Java API's including the ones in the court case, and in fact much of the JVM itself. Those parts are:

i) A specification or definition, this part is the API specification.

b) An internal component which makes one half of the software, This part is the API interface.

2a) An example of the other half that you are free to use, or to replace with an implementation of your own. This part is an implementation of the API, whoever wrote it.
 
If we use an analogy here, to avoid getting bogged down in abstract descriptions of computer science ideas, we can imagine that an airliner manufacturer would manufacture the floor in such a way as a seat manufacturer could manufacture seats which could be installed after the plane is built, without the plane having to be adapted.

In order for this to happen the specification for the floor connections would be published and made available to seat manufacturers, who would then compete their little hearts out to make the best/cheapest/lightest seats on the market compatible with the floor specification, and sell them directly to the owners of the planes to be installed after the plane is delivered.

The airliner manufacturer will make floors and install them in customers planes.

The specification is a piece of intellectual property, it has taken time to produce and does have some intrinsic value.

The situation in the Oracle v Google case would be analogous to the situation in which a rival airline manufacturer has published an identical copy of the specification of the floor, manufactured compatible floors and is wooing customers and seat manufacturers from the originator of the specification with the promise of compatibility for all the seats and tooling and expertise that they have invested in.

What Oracle are contending, or trying to, or failing to, or *ought to be* saying, is that the specification is not in the public domain, it is their intellectual property and they are within their rights to restrict its use to allow people to implement the replaceable parts (the implementations, the seats), and not the internal part (the interfaces, the floor). In other words, not only is it breach of copyright (as the court has recently determined) but it is also probably not "Fair Use" (which they are still to decide upon) for Google to produce an API of their own to Oracle's specification. If it is, then people are going to very quickly stop publishing API's that allow competitors to benefit from years of research and development.

Of course this is then masked by a big shit-storm of FUD and misdirection by both sides, trying to veer off the subject onto other more easily determined areas of IP law where they believe they have an edge, such as:

The "field of use" restrictions, which are important but not directly relevant to the API arguments.

Patent infringement, of course, which is the modern lawyer's soup-of-the-day for the whole decade and IMHO totally irrelevant here.

And the distracting but easy to comprehend copy'n'paste IP crime where code appears to have been copied from somewhere that it couldn't have been legally.

The last one is the worst FUD of the lot because that is copyright infringement, as is the case where the specification is used in contradiction to the terms of its licence, but its a different crime, a separate incident, qualitatively something else altogether .

From this point of view I don't think Google's position is as solid as they might want it to be, or as solid as the judgements may suggest, but the truth of the matter is that Sun caused this whole debacle by vacillating over the legal status of Java, the API's the JVM, the TCK and a raft of other things that they thought morally *ought* to be open source and free for people to use for any purpose but weren't in law, because they never made it clear enough what was being explicitly permitted and what was being benignly tolerated.

And that is why I have mixed feelings about the merit of Google's case, and some grudging understanding of Oracle's position, and a bad taste in the mouth about Sun's failed attempts to be Machiavellian with the IP laws.

And if you're wondering what happened to James and the JavaMail API, we never did take it on, its a very poorly designed API and would have brought us a lot of work with precious little benefit.

So, yesterday a patent troll in the form of a company called Kelora Systems, LLC came to my attention, for reasons which need not concern us at the moment. And having followed up on it a bit  I can now understand why so many companies are involved in the aparently insane pastime of suing and counter suing each other through nearly every court in the world. I'll tell you why in a minute, but forst to kelora.

What staggered me is that they claim that they hold a patent, 6,275,821, known rather familiarly as '821, which covers "a method and system for executing a guided parametric search"

What is that? I'll tell you in a few short lines what the patent takes pages to painfully struggle to express:

In order to help people select a product from a catalogue the system displays a list of products and product attibutes.
Then, on the user selecting values the list of products is filtered to show only matching products, and the available attribute values are filtered to only show ones which still apply to the subset of products.

Or more simply still, if your system shows a list of products and gives the user the ability to filter this list by price, or size, or colour, you are potentially infringing the patent. My favourite example can be seen in the left hand column of this page (on a website which isn't within the jurisdiction of the US courts).

I hear you, you just said OMGWTF, didn't you? Yeah, so did I.

So I dug into it a bit and uncovered some interesting bits and pieces, first of all these trolls are gunning for just about everyone you could imagine, and a whole lot of other folks too. And it seems like there are legal challenges afoot by a number of big hitters to get the patent overturned, this from last year which was only partially sucessful and another move in the federal courts to be heard in November (2011).

I know theres a lot of talk about software patents, but for someone to be allowed to use a patent for something as self evident as the "method" and as dated and stuck in the 90's as the "system" is a total indictment of the whole notion. I could understand the intention (but not necessarily agree with it!) if the company had invented a useful product which was differentiated on the basis of the method, and sought to protect their investment, and if it was limited to the field of use originally intended, but this is little more than a patent on the application of common sense to a well recognised pattern of problem (how do you let people browse an online catalogue).

If the US patent office allows people to patent things as non specific as this its little wonder the courts are filled with patent cases, this isn't protecting your R&D this is a land grab for the common sense of the future. And if the courts continue to uphold patents like this, and the patent offices of the world carry on granting them we may find ourselves in a situation where innovation is held to ransom by lawyers and patent trolls.

I spent a while figuring out how to get a list of email recipient addresses from the maillog, without duplicates, for a specific day on RHEL. In the end I distilled it into to one line.

I'm sure I will have to do it again, so I'm making a note of it here, meantime if you need to extract recipient addresses from maillog you're welcome to try it. just paste it onto the command line and hit the go button, its surpisingly quick.

cat /var/log/maillog | grep "Oct 19" |\
grep to= |cut -f5 -d":" | cut -f2 -d"=" | cut -f1 -d"," | \
sed 's/<//' | sed 's/>//' | \
sort | uniq > addresses.txt

In my ongoing quest to keep you up to date with these important developments here's another one..
Penis Seen From Space  For the other stories check out seen-from-space

Update The original article mentioned in this post is no longer available, but if you are still interested in query profiling in MySQL, check out this http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/show-profiles.html
I will write up an quick start guide to profiling myself here, one day.
 
-- original post
this article is a great way to get started using the mysql query profiler.

If you've never used it before take some time to check it out, it will change the way you think about the database forever.

Use these two commands to get the top ten and top ten repeaters from MySQL's slow query log.

mysqldumpslow -t 10 ./slow-log > /home/danny/top_ten_slow_query.txt

mysqldumpslow -a -s c -t 10 ./slow-log > /home/danny/top_ten_repeat_slow_query.txt