Brent’s Blog

For my day job, I work on large, proprietary databases that are gigabytes and gigabytes. Nothing is worse for these files than them being fragmented. The same can be said of Mysql’s .myd files or sqlite’s all-in-one database files.

Disk defragment is good, but we’ve all been mad seeing it shift the entire hard drive over a few sectors to make the whole thing contiguous. The process for a large drive takes hours, and your disk will soon be fragmented afterwards as any file block allocations will come from the beginning of the free space, which is now gigabytes away. My point in the previous sentence is that lots of time is wasted.

Contig is a sysinternals tool that will defragment individual files or recurse through directories so that they are contiguous on disk. This takes much less time. The only caveat is that it can’t work on files that are open for exclusive write. If you have application databases for apps that always keep their databases open, you won’t be able to run this while the database server is up.

From the command line, here is how to run contig on your windows system folder:

contig -s c:\windows\system32\*.dll

Or if you want to run it on mysql’s database files

contig -s c:\mysql\data\

It’s a very helpful tool. Download it here

I see that the forge was down for a couple days and continues to be slower than the usual turtle pace. Here’s a mirror of BSQ Sitestats 2.2.3 and JoomlaLib 1.3.1.

BSQ Sitestats 2.2.3

JoomlaLib 1.3.1

Sh*t week is a name I came up with in college for the first week in February. Why? No matter how many scarves or hats you put on, the cold just penetrates to your bones. This morning was -17 F (-27 C). It was so cold that my exposed hands burned as I turned the key to lock the inside door of my 3-season porch….so cold that my car didn’t start putting out heat until I was 10 miles down the highway. You get the picture.

Minneapolis is actually in the southern part of the state. Northern parts (Hi Bro!) got as low as -38 F. Winnipeg, Manitoba, which is an hour north of the Minnesota/Canadian border, was at -52 F.

What’s good about sh*t week? The sun is out an hour more than it was on the solstice (Dec 21st), so at least seasonally-affected people can get some sunlight outside of work. Plus, we’re all thinking about March, when it turns 40 degrees out during the day, and we’re all in our T-shirts. Don’t believe me? Come up here in March :).

Then, mountain biking season starts as soon as the ground is dry. It’ll be 70 F during the day by the end of April and 100 F by the end of July. 115 degree swing.

This video makes me sad we just sat around and ate cake at my wedding. We did have a dance/karaoke party a month later, but this vid is way better than a bunch of drunk guys singing off-key Bon Jovi.

[youtube OPmYbP0F4Zw]

I couldn’t sleep last night, so I thought I’d watch some Comedy Central stand-up. Instead, I stayed up entirely too late watching Demitri Martin. It’s great how he can stand up there with a straight face, just talk, and make you fall out of your seat laughing. Check it out

[youtube -2qro0HbJ1o]

[youtube UnUCdQEoCQ0]

[youtube qfYspe3yHvM]