A French woman has admitted attempting to open an airplane door mid-flight so that she could smoke a cigarette.

BBC NEWS | World | Asia-Pacific | Smoker tried to open plane door

Not much time left before the games today, but the password for the week of 16th November is SMALL.

This movie as absolutely brilliant, and sound is essential: feuerfreimovie.swf

This project posting on Freelancers.net is so well written I was almost tempted to put our company forward for it: gifta layout - Freelancers.net

Talking to Tim on MSN about having to look up really basic syntax in some languages, this gem of a 'joke' came up in conversation:

Tim says:
I do that in flash still!
Tim says:
well, acutally no...but sometimes I forget what the _xmouse syntax is
Karl says:
that's okay. _xmouse comes but once a year

Not actually my cat, but take a look at the site and you'll get the idea: it's a lot of stuff, balanced on various cats.

Stuff On My Cat

It's taken over a year but my blog has now reached its 200th post. As a special celebration, I'm making the 200th posting all about the great event itself. This includes a special photo of me writing the 200th post itself:

To commemorate this achievement I may also be going to the pub later.

This little desktop app allows you to write regular expressions and test them against a string to see if they're working - it's excellent.

The Regex Coach - interactive regular expressions

David Blunkett has just released the following statement regarding his resignation

...... ... . .... . ..... . . . . .... ... . ..... ....... . ...... . .... .. . ...... ..... . ...... . .. . ......... .. . . ..... ... ........ .. ........ .. ... . .... .. .... ... .. .... .. . . . ..... .. . ... . ... .... .. . .... . . . . . . ... . ... . . . . . . . . . .. .... . . ... . . .. . ..... ... . .... . ..... . . . . .... ... . . . ... ....... . ...... . .... .. . ...... ..... . ...... . . . .......... .. . . ..... . ........ .. ........ ..... . . .. .. .... ... .. .... .. . . . ..... .. . ... . ...

I couldn't find anything particularly useful about how to alter MySQL table structure in a situation where replication was being performed so I pretty much had to try something out to see if it worked.

What I found was that MySQL was remarkably clever at replicating changes through from one database to another. I don't know whether just running a straight 'ALTER TABLE' command would work or not but I took the added precaution of running a 'STOP SLAVE' command (on the slave) first. Then, once the new column had been added to the master, running 'START SLAVE' kicked it off and the database automatically picked up where it had left off by propagating the table alteration and then updating the data.

Replication in MySQL from the manual