Category: Sysadmin

System administration is a special are of IT. It also has a special place in my heart. It is an interesting mixture of all the other disciplines, both common across the whole industry, and at the same time unique for each person, company, and geographical location. When I have something to say or share about system administration, I use this category.

How to Synchronize WordPress Live and Development Databases

SitePoint runs through a few options that one can use to synchronize WordPress live and development databases.  I’ve linked to  some of these options before, but it’s nice to have them all conveniently together.  The solutions discussed include WordPress-specific tools:

as well as generic tools, such mysqldump, mysqlpump, rsync, and git.

Overall, it’s a pretty complete list of tools.  The one I’d like to add though is WP CLI, which allows a great deal of automation when it comes to WordPress, including things like database imports and exports, post and option management, and more.

 

Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective

Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective is a rather old article on how gay marriage (and other types of marriages) can affect technology, but somehow I missed it for all these years.

It’s interesting from a variety of perspectives – technical, social, and cultural.  It’s also somewhat tongue in cheek, yet insightful and thought-provoking.  Irrelevant of your views on the subject, I recommend this read.  Where else will you find 14 database schema designs trying to solve the same problem.

The legal ramifications of what I’m about to describe are unguessable. I have no idea what rights a civil union like the ones which would be possible below would have, nor do I have any idea what kind of transhuman universe would require so complex a system. This is the marriage database schema to take us up to the thirty-first century, people.

If databases are that difficult to adjust, I can’t even imagine the effort needed for humans…

Google Open Source Website

Google announced its new Open Source website:

Today, we’re launching opensource.google.com, a new website for Google Open Source that ties together all of our initiatives with information on how we use, release, and support open source.

This new site showcases the breadth and depth of our love for open source. It will contain the expected things: our programs, organizations we support, and a comprehensive list of open source projects we’ve released. But it also contains something unexpected: a look under the hood at how we “do” open source.

The site currently features over 2,000 open source projects that Google has released and contributes to.

Dependency Management and WordPress: A Proposal

I came across this article – “Dependency Management and WordPress: A Proposal“, which provides an excellent overview of some of the recent developments and discussions in the area of composer integration with WordPress, and even more generically, some of the issues around dependency management in an ecosystem as large and complex as that of WordPress.

It’s been a while since I checked what’s going on in this area.  A couple of years back, I linked to an article that shows a way to use composer with WordPress, and since then I’ve built something similar for our use at work.

But it’s good to see that the problem is not tossed and forgotten, and that there are some very smart people still trying to work it out.