My 11 Favorite Eponymous Laws

Amara’s law — “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run”. Brooks’ law: “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” Conway’s Law : “Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it.” Edwards’ law: “You cannot apply …

Are Some RSS Formats More Reliable/Faster than Others?

via Twitter, I was asked the above question. It’s a good question, cutting to the core of my ambivalence over the religious wars between RSS, Atom, etc. The flavor of XML a feed is published in shouldn’t matter. Neither to the publisher nor the receiver. Any parser able to handle multiple flavors should be able …

Snippet: Copy MySQL Databases Over SSH

I needed to copy a database and the idea of backing it up just to re-import1 seemed like double the work. Here’s a snippet to pipe a mysqldump into a remote database. Keep an eye on the user names and passwords – you’ll need 3 sets; one for the database your copying, one to get …