SQL_BUFFER_RESULT may return stale result

Careful with SQL_BUFFER_RESULT in your mysql SELECT statement
While this may speed up the selects (sometimes by a lot), it will also get you the cached result, in some cases the result may be stale, not reflecting the changes that took place after the previous result was cached.

This was probably not intended to be like that, may be just a weird behavior when using PDO and somehow temporary table that was created for that BUFFER_RESULT was not removed. I don't know why, I am not a mysql developer, I just know what I see - when using SELECT HIGH_PRIORITY SQL_BUFFER_RESULT .... with php PDO class, the result may be stale.

MySQL table locks up

Another day, another total lockup of MySQL, when it locks up, it locks up and stays locked like a dead cunt - forewer.

Looks like memcached was freezing Apache 2.2

Very bad idea to have both php extensions - memcache and memcached to be loaded at the same time.

I think this was causing the unexplained freezing of Apache 2.2

It was very difficult to track down the cause of Apache just freezing - no timeout error, no errors at all, just sitting there waiting forever for page to load.

After trying everything else, I decided to comment out loading memcached php extension and only load and use the good old reliable memcache extension.

Some tests claim that memcached is faster than memcache, but the difference is basically in single milliseconds, like who cares.... Not important when you usually saving couple of seconds worth of complex sql selects (some long sql selects that have several LEFT JOINS sometimes take 15 seconds when mysql has to create temporary table).

Anyway, I don't know if the problem was that some of the sites on the server were using memcache and some were using memcached, so I needed to load both extensions in php.ini

After ditching the memcached and only using memcache, the problems with Apache seemed to go away. Keeping my fingers crossed, so far so good.

Eclipse PDT freezes like a cunt

The eclipse PDT freezes on my brand new Windows 7 PC the same way it used to freeze on XP, just like a good old CUNT it is.

Google friend connect integration thoughts

When you have value of fcauth cookie from Google Friend Connect
but user has unjoined your site, then when you
request the data from gfc server you get the 401 error status with this message:

Anonymous requests are not allowed to fetch data
Error 401

This is an easy way to know that the fcauth cookie is not good anymore and you should delete it from the table in case you are storing that value in a table.

It also indicates that user is not a member of your site via his GFC thingy.

What is the best way to auto-login GFC user to your site? The oblivious choice is via fcauth cookie, get data from GFC server and login/create oViewer object.
But this can slow down the page load in case the GFC server is slow to respond.

A faster choice is to log him in via your own uid cookie, then add some DIV tag to your page and then have JavaScript on your page to make ajax call back to your server, on your server check with GFC server and upon success return a couple of links to the browser. The links will be to 'Friend connect settings' and 'invite friends', then have your JavaScript callback to add these links to the page

If GFC auth in unsuccessful then remove fcauth cookie from user record, indicating that user in not subscribed to your site anymore. In this case have your http response to delete the fcauth cookie so you don't have to go through this again.

The downside to this is that you have to make an extra request to server right after the page renders (via ajax this time)

php setcookie for array of cookie

On the php manual page for setcookie() function
is says you can use setcookie() to set array of cookies

http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.setcookie.php

This is convenient, but also a bit misleading. It leads you to believe that you are setting just one cookie with the array of values, but in fact the browser actually setting new cookie for each new array element.

So you may be setting 10 different cookies and not even knowing about it. A better solution is to set just one cookie with the name/value pairs like
userid=12331&name=john&group=admins&firstvisit=20091010

You can use http_build_query() to build a string that will then become your cookie value.

See, it looks similar to url.

To get values from the cookie, just get the cookie using the
$val = $_COOKIE['cookiename'];
and then:
parse_str($val, $aVars);
now the $aVars contains the name => value pairs
Just treat the values with caution just like any other user-passed variables. Validate, sanitize, whatever you normally do with values passed by user.

username-less paradigm

Just found out that on Facebook the username is optional
Everyone is known by their real first and last name. So Facebook API in most cases does not return value for username because it's optional and most people never set it up.
I just find this unusual but at the same time they may be on to something.
This makes it so much easier to integrate the Facebook Connect into your existing login system - because there could not be any name collisions with existing users in your database