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20030909 Tuesday September 09, 2003

Doin' the Netflix thing I got inspired by Matt's post about Netflix and I signed up on Sunday. 3 DVDs arrived in the mail today. Nice! That was quick. The question is - will they have the same new releases that Blockbuster does? Posted in General at Sep 09 2003, 10:38:06 PM MDT 4 Comments

HowTo: Using XDoclet's StrutsForm and a 41KB j2ee.jar To generate Struts' ActionForms using XDoclet, you need to have j2ee.jar in your classpath. Did you know you can trim it down to 41 KB and get all the functionality you need? Learn more... Posted in Java at Sep 09 2003, 04:45:30 PM MDT 2 Comments

My tips o' the day I found an easy way to update a MySQL database with new columns this morning. The traditional way is to create an ALTER_TABLE script and run it. However, I had added more than 30 columns, and creating this script sounded like a pain in the ass. Keep in mind that I use Hibernate to create my database from scratch - tables, and all. If you're familiar with appfuse, you might be able to use this stuff.

  • Dump the existing (production) database using "mysqldump -c database > database.sql". Edit this file, replacing CREATE TABLE with CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS. The "-c" option includes column names in the insert statement.
  • Create an empty database (appfuse: ant db-init) and export (mysqldump database > create-tables.sql) it.
  • Drop all the tables in the production database (backup first!), mysql < create-tables.sql followed by mysql < database.sql.

Of course, other suggestions are welcome - I'd love to see a mysql diff tool that generates the ALTER script for me!

My other tip is how to start/stop Windows services from the command line - don't know why I haven't used this sooner. 

net start "$serviceName"

Where $serviceName is something like "Apache Tomcat 4.1" - use "net start" to see all currently started services. Posted in General at Sep 09 2003, 02:07:31 PM MDT 2 Comments