• "Passing the salt will never be the same. We all knew it was inevitable. Passing the salt by hand just isn’t efficient enough in a world of bullet trains and pizza delivery and broadband. Luckily the condiments have come to life! They will waddle wherever you tell them to, so the next time someone wants the pepper, wind up the key, and pepper they shall have! Mercilessly marching towards them like the terminator, more of a threat to dull tastes than the human race." Not sure they're £20-good, but I do like this condiment set made of small robots.
  • "Here’s a complication of some common and useful time & date calculations and equations. Some, though very simple, are often misunderstood, leading to inefficient or incorrect implementations. There are many ways to solve such problems. I’ll present my favorites." These are, indeed, useful, and I've been using a few of them recently.

One thing I usually forget to do when I backup a computer is back up my MySQL databases. Partly, because they’re not stored in my Library (I don’t think); partly because I forget how many I have. mysqldump only backs up one database at a time, unfortunately. What would be great is something that dumps all of the databases in the system.

Anyhow, whilst on hold to my ISP this morning, I decided to solve this problem once and for all.

The end result is a pair of Ruby scripts which you can get from github.

The first will iterate over every db on your system (when run with an appropriate username and password) and spit out a .sql file with a filename corresponding to that database. The second look at a folder of .sql files named similarly, and for each one, drop a databases with that name, re-create it, and restore from the .sql file.

I’m sure I could do it just fine in a bash script, but it made sense to use the tool that comes most quickly to my hands, and that means Ruby. Once you’ve got Ruby installed, the rest is easy. Clone them, patch them, fix them; they’re basic, as maintenance goes, but handy.

Get the scripts from github.