For the last three weeks I’ve been creating a new query management system for the Comparables search engine at work, that means I changed the entire content of the component that returns the results. And that also means I haven’t checked in the files during this time, but today SOMEHOW I managed to delete the file from my local development environment. At this point I felt like my life was crashing, I immediately ran to the system administrators thinking that they can recover my deleted file. No luck, it seems that it’s very difficult to recover lost files from EXT3 partitions. I remembered that my boss asked for a printed copy of that file for code review, lucky me … but still the file was pretty big and I didn’t wanna spend my entire day rewriting the file. So I called to Robert a colleague of mine that works on a project that requires an image recognition application. I scanned the printed files and I sent the files to Robert which managed to deliver me the resulted file. The document was correct for about 90 % of its contents. Still I had to correct the file by hand but in about 30 minutes the file was completely restored.

I realized that I need a way to backup the local modified files to avoid these problems in the future, so I started thinking and working on a application that would do that automatically. The application will be in crontab and it will be set to run each hour. The application will execute the “svn status” command to obtain a list of the modified files, the resulted files will be than packed into an archive and delivered into a folder containing the date and time.

Anyway .. In conclusion I’m blaming all this shit on the daylight savings and on the fact that I had to sleep one hour less.

A few days ago me and Korny we started developing a .NET version of FuelGenerator. Which later on I will port it to Cocoa# (Mono and Cocoa). So far the project is going quite well and we managed to implement a minimal version just for MySql. Hopefully in a few weeks we will have a beta version of FuelGenerator for Windows. But until then we still have to setup the main website. Basically the application we have the same functionality as the Perl version except a much nicer interface and it will support custom project files. For integrating it with other data sources we will use plug-ins. At the moment we are still working to fit the bits and pieces of the application. Soon I will post some icons for the application and wait for suggestions.

Recently I re-installed my operating system and of course I had to re-configure my development environment. After installing all the tools I had to go ahead and retrieve the Perl packages for FuelGenerator. This is when I found a nasty bug with DBD::mysql and the Mac OS X Mysql distribution. First there was a problem with the ‘mysql_config’ path but I managed to fix that
by adding a symlink to it in ‘/usr/local/bin’. But after that I get this


Using DBI 1.54 (for perl 5.008006 on darwin-thread-multi-2level) installed in /Library/Perl/5.8.6/darwin-thread-multi-2level/auto/DBI/
Writing Makefile for DBD::mysql
Kriterium:/Users/tudor/Desktop/DBD-mysql-4.003 root# make
cc -c -I/Library/Perl/5.8.6/darwin-thread-multi-2level/auto/DBI -I/usr/local/mysql/include -Os -arch i386 -fno-common -DDBD_MYSQL_INSERT_ID_IS_GOOD -g -g -pipe -fno-common -DPERL_DARWIN -no-cpp-precomp -fno-strict-aliasing -I/usr/local/include -O3 -DVERSION=\"4.003\" -DXS_VERSION=\"4.003\" "-I/System/Library/Perl/5.8.6/darwin-thread-multi-2level/CORE" dbdimp.c
dbdimp.c: In function 'mysql_dr_connect':
dbdimp.c:1671: error: 'ulong' undeclared (first use in this function)
dbdimp.c:1671: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
dbdimp.c:1671: error: for each function it appears in.)
dbdimp.c:1671: error: parse error before numeric constant
make: *** [dbdimp.o] Error 1


For this one you actually have to edit ‘mysql_com.h’ in ‘/usr/local/mysql/includes’ and add:


typedef unsigned long ulong;


this should solve the problem. Although I had to do a little digging on that, I managed to have it working now. And FuelGenerator resumed it’s function.