Excluding "hidden" directories from Time Machine

I noticed I was making .75GB Time Machine backups when I hadn't really created any new content.  I don't back up my system, just my personal files and data.  I back up my dev stuff, even though it's in some sort of off-site, cloud-based source control.

I found this great tool, TimeTracker.app, that opens your Time Machine backups and tells you quickly what's in each.  I realized TM was backing up some homebrew directories (/var, /opt, /private) and some other system stuff.  The problem was that when I went to exclude them from the Time Machine preferences, the finder couldn't see these directories.  So I tracked down the plist file that stores all the TM prefs.  It was in

 /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist

I tried to edit that file, but it's a compressed/encrypted plist file.  I didn't want to mess with the uncompress/edit/compress process for every change.  I did find out that TextWrangler will edit compressed plist files.

Then I stumbled upon tmutil, a command line tool that will make changes to that file.  For example...

sudo tmutil addexclusion -p "/opt"

added that file to the exclude list.  Them can be removed with "removeexclusion".  You can even check if a single file or directory will be excluded with

sudo tmutil isexcluded "/Users/scott/bin"

Left join returns too many rows. Need to combine certain columns

Saw this in a forum post on the MySQL web site...

Here's an example of the set up I'm using:
TITLES
id
name
DIRECTORS
id
name
ACTORS
id
name
MOVIES
id
movie_id
director_id
There can be several actors to a movie, so I use another join table:
MOVIES_ACTORS
id
movie_id
actor_id
This all works fine, except for one problem... i get several rows for one movie. So it comes out like this:
Star Wars - George Lucas - Harrison Ford
Star Wars - George Lucas - James Earl Jones
Star Wars - George Lucas - Yoda
King Kong - Peter Jackson - Jack Black
School of Rock - NULL - Jack Black
This is a problem because I don't want 3 results for Star Wars, I want one result row with 3 columns for the actors. Have three separate rows causes problems because:
1. If I were to limit the results to say, 3 I would only get Star Wars as a result.
2. When I display the results with PHP I have to build an elaborate array and loop through the result set 3 times just to avoid showing more than one result for the same movie in the list.
Here's my query:
SELECT
m.id, t.name, dir.name, act.name
FROM movies m
JOIN titles t ON t.id = m.title_id
LEFT OUTER JOIN directors dir ON dir.id = m.director_id
LEFT OUTER JOIN movies_actors ma ON ma.movie_id = m.id
LEFT OUTER JOIN actors a ON ma.actor_id = a.id


---------------------------------------------------------------
The solution is a GROUP_CONCAT on the terms you want to combine

SELECT m.id, t.name,
group_concat(dir.name) AS directors, group_concat(act.name) AS actors
FROM movies             AS m 
JOIN titles             AS t   ON t.id = m.title_id 
LEFT JOIN directors     AS dir ON dir.id = m.director_id 
LEFT JOIN movies_actors AS ma  ON ma.movie_id = m.id 
LEFT JOIN actors        AS a   ON ma.actor_id = a.id
GROUP BY t.name

It combines those columns as a comma-separated list.  You can also define a

separator...

GROUP_CONCAT(dir.name SEPARATOR '; ')

ESC characters in git diff output

You could change the pager to more, or just use the following to process the raw characters in less...

git config --global core.pager "less -r"

Reading from a file into MySQL

Basic load, there's lots more options for column delimiters, line delimiters, etc...

LOAD DATA INFILE '/tmp/mydata.txt' INTO TABLE Test;

MySQL select on date range

Using date ranges in mysql...
 
select * from sale where date_begin between '2016-08-01' AND '2016-08-31';

Editing in hex mode in Vim

Native Vim doesn’t have a hex editing mode built in, however it is possible to edit a file in hex by converting the file back and forth using xxd. To do this, open your file in Vim and run :%!xxd. From here you can change the hex values and, when you’re done, run :%!xxd -r to convert back.

MySQL pager setting in ~/.my.cnf

I like setting the pager to less for the mysql client.  When I do it in my ~/.my.cnf file, thus...

[client]
pager=less

I get an error when running mysql dump...

mysqldump: unknown variable 'pager=less'

Turns out mysqldump also reads the [client] section of the file, as well as [mysqldump].  Using the following works...

[mysql]
pager=less