Archive for April, 2011

Mapping Roscrea – with hindsight set to 20/20.

Thursday, April 21st, 2011

So, I had the opportunity earlier on this week, to spend an hour or two ‘micromapping’ a portion of Roscrea town. Deciding to focus on Castle Street, Glebe View (previously not on the map), Gaol Road, Abbey Street and back up to Castle Street via Rosemary Street and some of Main Street, I’ve added quite a few POIs; including *three* fast food emporiums with the word ‘Tasty’ in their names!

Walking around with a notepad and pen, along with a little black box with flashing lights on (my gps ‘mouse’ for which I should get a spare battery) aroused some interest; between some people telling me of their favourite walks and at least one man telling me that what I was doing was very strange indeed I think, after the fact of course (hindsight always being 20-20), I should have brought a few OSM pamphlets or leaflets with me – not wanting to stick out too much I’d left my openstreetmap hi-viz vest behind in the car.

What, if anything, do you bring along when mapping – both for the act of mapping itself and for ‘spreading the word’?

Adding colour to your mysql prompt

Wednesday, April 20th, 2011

I almost made a critical mistake on the production mysql database for one of my projects yesterday, which definitely would not have been a Good Thing if it had happened; even though I do have a custom prompt set up for mysql – when they’re all so similar you don’t always take heed.

So now, along with having the mysql prompt defined as prompt=’\h@\u (\d) > ‘ in the [mysql] section of my ~/.my.cnf file (so host, username and database name are included in the prompt), I have also installed rlwrap and set up an alias in my .bashrc:


if [ -x /usr/bin/rlwrap ]; then
alias mysql='/usr/bin/rlwrap -a -pGREEN /usr/bin/mysql'
fi

This displays the mysql prompt in green, after checking that rlwrap is available, which I have configured for my development environment only – now I just need to train myself to be extra careful for when the prompt isn’t coloured.