Find Music by Humming - it really works! #midomi
We are sitting on the sofa at home at the moment discussing our holiday plans for the year and I got a song in my head that I started humming. Remembering the adverts on TV where you hold your phone up to a speaker and it tells you the song, I thought there must be one that you can hum to and it'll find the song. So I did a quick google and found Midomi, I hummed the song (and I can't really sing or even hum very well) and sure enough...it found the exact song, 2 results came back and it was the second! We're both amazed by how well it worked.
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MySQL and Binary(16) - The Reasons/Benefits/Drawbacks (#mysql)
I recently posted an article about using BINARY(16) for storing MD5's as unique identifiers instead of simple integer ID's (usually auto increment); in that article I touched on one of the benefits, reducing JOIN's, but there are other reasons for doing it too, so I thought I'd post an article discussing purely the reasons behind using BINARY(16).
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MySQL - Binary(16) and scalability
Over the past few months at work, we've seen our database grown from silly big to really silly big, it's still a way to go to get to the size of the big boys such as Facebook etc. but it's still a database stored in MySQL that most day-to-day PHP programmers would avoid like a midget cannibal.
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Avatar is a must see film - at IMAX in 3D
On Tuesday night we went to see Avatar at the IMAX in Bradford's National Museum of Film and Photography. I had semi high expectations for the film but had heard some bad press so how good it would be was left wide open. someone suggested we go to see it at the IMAX as it is vastly better, so that's what we did.
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Federal Court to determine constitutional legality of gay marriage
It seems like it's taken a long time for someone in the States to get up and do it, but someone seems to finally be ready to stand up in court and challenge the legality of banning same-sex marriage on a nationwide scale. The result of this trial should finally end the confusion the USA has had in it's divided states. If it is voted unconstitutional to ban the marriage of two people of the same sex, any state that currently denies it will no longer be able to, effectively ending one of the biggest remaining prejudices in the States; this is, of course, if it is then argued and taken to the Supreme Court for one final showdown. If it's voted constitutional, then my partner will be glad he's in the UK now and doesn't have to deal with a country that thinks it's OK to treat people that way.
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