• Canadian Tech Roundup Going Strong

    The podcast that I do along with Trevor Percy is better than ever. If you’re not subscribed you should check it out. We talk tech with a uniquely Canadian voice. Episodes out more or less weekly.

    The Website is here.

    Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes here.

    Also follow us on Twitter.


  • Siri Can’t Map Canada

    My desk neighbour showed up to work this morning with a brand new iPhone 4S. He let me play around with Siri a bit.

    Looks like Siri is not fully functional in Canada.

    Referencing location (eg. “Where am I?”) results in an error message stating that directions and maps are unavailable in Canada.

    Update: Now with a screenshot.


  • MySQL Full-Text Search Is Broken!

    …and has been for 8 years.

    I came across MySQL bug #2095 today:

    full-text search for words containing hyphens won't work
    Submitted: 11 Dec 2003 6:15
    Hyphen '-' characters break literals at the moment.
    A search for something like "GATA-D22S690" finds
    all entries containing GATA and not the full 
    hyphenated text.

    ~ Link

    MySQL disputes the fact that this is a bug.

    But in reality – as the submitters points out – there are many cases where hyphens are part of words. The example I ran into tonight was product model numbers (eg. “00-17” or “j-35”).

    The MySQL docs recommend recompiling or modifying one of two system files.  None of these options are feasible in a shared hosting environment.

    I can’t believe this bug exists. As far as I’m concerned this is a complete and utter deal breaker for any application that needs to search non-word strings containing hyphens. I’ve been exclusively using MySQL for my entire career and I now know that a bunch of sites I’ve worked on in the past 10 years were launched with this bug.