You can use it to connect to your local MAMP and also to remote LAMP mysql servers (via SSH). Why is this so awesome?

Well, not only is it 100 times faster than that phpMyAdmin, but you can edit your DB super easily, like a spreadsheet. It is a snap to filter/search/order a table for viewing and editing.

Caveat emptor: what I am about to show you can do tremendous damage. You can accidentally kill your entire application, so BACK YOUR DATABASES UP! Test on a copy first.

You can do simple things like turn 1’s to 0’s and quickly disable a drupal module faster than drush can (but watch out if you don’t know your dependencies).

Edit your system table in Sequel Pro

I had this interesting and daunting problem:
I am working on this site for a soccer league that has a couple hundred teams and I realize that I need to modify a whole slew of node titles based on values that appear in their CCK fields.
Many of the Organic Group Group nodes (each team is a group)
Views Bulk Operations gets me part, but not all the way quickly enough for this one-time operation.

I’m not crafty enough to write a join and update statement across all these tables, but I do already have a view listing Teams and CCK fields for Division and Type.

Hey, if I scroll down to the bottom of the view, I can copy the query right from views into Sequel Pro!

Holy Moly. It just works. As it should.

Edit the result of a sequel statement created with views

Now I can just go down the list and edit my node titles.
Sweet.

Because there was a pattern here, I ended up using  the fabulous auto nodetitle module and tokens. I temporarliy added a pattern to the node titles of my team content type and used views bulk operations to update some of my node titles. After the update, i set the pattern to be used only if the title was blank.

Even though I solved my use case another way, I can see plenty of use for this technique in the future. Great way to fix typos in content, for example.

I’ve been told that the organizers that about 100,000 people tuned in to the live stream (though not simultaneously), which kinda turned upside down my whole perception of the event and my experience with audience.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Other artists in the presentation: Machiko Kusahara, Ryota Kuwakubo, Toshio Iwai, Theo Jansen, Sachiko Kodama, Maywa Denki.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Off World is a 24-hour, month-long interactive public installation part of the 2009 Contact Toronto Photography Festival. It is an exhibition of photographs and video by filmmaker Mateo Guez and commissioned by curator Sanaz Mazinani, realized in situ as a 24-hour interactive public installation by me, Andrew Mallis.

The exhibition ran all of May 2009 at CAMERA, an extension of the Stephen Bulger Gallery, located at 1028 Queen Street West, in Toronto, Canada.

the video is intended to be played vertically. Just tilt your head.

Using the Processing language, an image of da Vinci’s La Jaconde – the most reproduced image in the world – is corrupted over time. With each conversion between image formats, a frame is recorded. The title coyly references Marcel Duchamp’s 1919 readymade.

Simulations of reality are prevalent in the video games and cinematic effects that substitute for the immersive space once offered exclusively by painting. As mental landscapes adjust themselves to these new realities, painting offers a visual language established through historical precedent that favors contemplation.

Interaction with digital technology is, for most of us, an important part of our everyday experience. The post-industrial economy has shifted the worker from the factory to the office desk, from the lever to the mouse.

In an age of almost exclusively digital reproduction, the last bastions of analog recording are visibly fading. In recent years, Kodak has imploded buildings previously dedicated to paper operations, signaling not the timely death of the analog, but rather its deliberate annihilation.

With what fidelity are we reproducing our environ- ment? What impact does the pixelization of the visible spectrum have on our perception? Lossy compression reduces file size by sacrificing pixel fidelity for an ap- proximation, for pre-determined patterns.

YouTube’s phenomenal popularity is unhindered by the poor resolution and low sound quality of the site’s (massive) video archive. This speaks to a wetted appetite for content, story, meaning over glamour, high production value, and form. In the context of our everyday experience becoming increasingly mediated, we must to ask ourselves: how lossy do we want our reality?

the Duchamp original, circa 1919

“Visual culture of the modern period, from painting to cinema, is characterized by an intriguing phenomenon: the existence of another virtual space, another three-dimensional world enclosed by a frame and situated inside our normal space.”

Lev Manovich, An Archeology of a Computer Screen
NewMediaTopia. Moscow, Soros Center for the Contemporary Art, 1995

Many modern painters actively use digital photographic sources for photo reference, even painting along side their computer screens. The “live model” is in this case dead, frozen in screen-space even before it is observed by the painter. The subject-object relationship implodes as the artist involves themselves in an act of media translation. The artist’s mark is left on the image like artifacts in JPEG compression.

Commonly, users need to create subheadings in their posts. Markup should always be privileged over wrapping content in classes. For example, it is much better, both from a structural and a maintenance perspective, to use an h2 tag to create a title, rather than adding a class of, say, .title to a paragraph tag, then forcing the paragraph to look like an h2. It will make a mess of your stylesheet, plus render your site less accessible to screen readers and search engines.

It is most often advisable to create a new Input profile called “Rich Text” or “Graphical HTML Editor”, but we can also edit the “Full HTML” input format.

Our wysiwyg profiles will be listed at  [ /admin/settings/wysiwyg/profile ]  where we edit the profile to which we’ve assigned the TinyMCE editor. Under Buttons and plugins, we enable the following buttons:

1. HTML block format
2. Font style
3. Source code (not necessary, but useful for checking what we’ve done)

Under the CSS fieldset, we limit the number of block tags available, i.e.

  p,h2,h3,h4

and set the Editor CSS to use the theme CSS. By default, this will generate a lot list of classes from our theme’s style.css. Now, you can create a separate stylesheet just for the wysiwyg, but coordinating changes across them can be a hassle. Instead, we open up only a subset of the classes in our stylesheet using the CSS classes textarea, following the [title]=[class] format (this will seem familiar if you’ve ever used webform module):

  intro text=intro
  description text=description
  read more link=more-link

This is great because we can now provide a more meaningful list of styles to the user, and also a limited set of structural markup tags. The downside is that we have 2 dropdown lists and have to provide the tiniest bit of eduction.

Net Change is a week-long event designed to explore how social technology can bolster social change, presented by the Social Innovation Generation team at MaRS.

I heard about an art competition over email, entered, and ended up winning. I really don’t think they should have called it an “Art Show”, as it ended up being more of a branding experience for the event. Nevertheless, it was really nice to be associated with such a great event, many of whose participants are also my colleagues at the CSI.

Read about the art competition on netchangeweek.ca

I’m going to show you how to use phpMyAdmin to back up and restore MySQL databases. In my next post, I’ll show you how to graduate to doing the same thing using the command line.

I use MAMP to develop websites locally. I’ve written about this before here. The examples I’ll be showing come from the phpMyAdmin packaged with MAMP, but apply just as well to any other environment.

phpMyAdmin without the MAMP frame

First things first. Let’s work so we can see what we’re doing.I’m going to assume that you’re able to download and install MAMP or MAMP Pro on your own. The phpMyAdmin URL that you from the MAMP default webstart page gets you to the URL:

http://localhost/MAMP/frame.php?src=%2FphpMyAdmin%2F%3Flang%3Den-iso-8859-1&language=English

which looks gives you a framed version of the phpMyAdmin. The framing takes up a lot of screen real estate.

Instead, use http://localhost/phpMyAdmin and you’ll get something that looks much more pleasing:

dumping a database with phpMyAdmin

Select a database from the drop-down menu on the left hand side of phpMyAdmin. Or, Navigate to “home” by clicking the little house under the phpMyAdmin logo in the top left and hit the blue Databases link in the longish list there.

Ok, so now we see the tables in our database. Press the Export tab at the top. We’re going to export this database.

Let’s review the options you should select to get nice, compact, and legible SQL.

The first column, in the Export fieldset, is pretty straight forward. By default all the tables in your database will be selected. SQL is the format you want too.

“Disable foreign key checks” isn’t always necessary. I do a lot of CiviCRM work. Restoring a CiviCRM database will fail unless this option is enabled in your export.

“Add DROP TABLE / DROP VIEW” will delete your table on import before recreating it.

Extended inserts and Complete insterts gives you a smaller file and more compacted, easy to read view.

Click “Save as file” and use “gzipped” compression for the smallest files.

In the File name template, I add %D, which spits out today’s date. I add a little hypen before to seperate it from the database name and MAMP after, so I know it was a local dump and not from my live server. This format would give me a file like: mysql-06_02_09_MAMP.sql.gz

To restore your databse, click on the import tab, click the browse button, select your file, press go. I’ll spare you the screenshot.