gloomy.eu

National basketball team of Lithuania was quite weak from the first view, but at the end it moved to the 3rd place. Quite impressive – no one was expecting such a good result. More about the tournament in turkey: http://turkey2010.fiba.com/eng

This builds big hopes for all lithuanians for a year 2011 with European championship that will be hosted in Lithuania (-; See you in Kaunas hall (still under construction!).

A sad day in Lithuania – our national basketball team lost to Spain in a quarterfinals game.

Yesterday, reading PlanetMysql, i stumbled on an interesting piece of software: Chorizo scanner. It is an online tool that acts like a proxy and scans your website for vulnerabilities while you surf it. So far it lets you check only one site for free and i was unlucky to find any bugs on one of my projects. There is a link to Chorizo prezentation. If anyone cares to try, and maybe share if they were lucky to actually catch any site vulnerabilities, that would be very nice 😉

The tool is designed so you can scan only sites you own – you have to upload special signature file on your site to authenticate. But ofcourse dont play with sites that are very important to you 😉 who knows who own that Chorizo thing.

Comments would be nice.

Some short news from google front 😉

1. Few days ago Google launched free online open source project hosting platform. Ofcourse this was planned long before Microsoft launching its codeplex, but you can feel the fights for niches. Will Yahoo! join? And how this will affect the famous sourceforge?

2. Finaly google analytics doubled its site profile limit from 5 to 10. Many webmasters not google analytics, but some of who might like this little upgrade.

According to Yahoo! blog they have their new bot (Yahoo! Slurp) version in action that will reduce the number of requests and bandwidth consuption to crawled sites.

Almost at same time MSN renamed few its bots (they were named the same before) to help better distinguish them apart. So from now:
The MSN Shopping bot – msnbot-products
The MSN News bot – msnbot-news
The MSN Search bot – msnbot
The MSN Image Search bot – msnbot-media

This will help you better understand what is MSN doing on your site 😉

Some guy wrote simple 3D rendering PHP script. It is based on well known game called Wolfenstein 3D “raycaster” algorythm and is pretty simple. Funny is that you can combine that with AJAX to get some unseen results (let’s not think about server load and traffic yet).

Well, Microsoft has stepped even further into open source. Some time ago they have opened an open source community portal – codeplex.com – a nice place for those who are developing open source projects based on microsoft technology and for those who have interest in such projects. So grab a free copy of Visual studio Express 2005 and go coding. I have been using Visual Studio Express 2005 for a while and find codeplex combined with msdn quite useful.

How to make MySQL return a desired percentage of rows?

Some people time after time ask this question. Most of
them are migrating from MsSQL (Microsoft SQL Server 2xxx) that
has the ability to retrieve a desired percentage of rows. For example:

SELECT TOP 50 PERCENT * FROM table

This query will return 50% of rows. Nice. What do you do
in MySQL if you get a task “to return half of the records from a table”?
So far i found just one easy solution for MySQL 5.0.7+ version:

SELECT @percentage := ROUND(COUNT(*) * 50/100) FROM table;
PREPARE STMT FROM 'SELECT * FROM table LIMIT ?';
EXECUTE STMT USING @percentage;