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I’ve been receiving unexpected surprises for the past few days. I’m not someone who likes surprises but for these, I make an exception.

The first surprise is that I noticed my short URL generator has been receiving a lot of traffic for the past few weeks… and that’s only part of the surprise. shlnk.com has also been receiving daily AdSense clicks for almost a whole week! For almost an entire year before that, it only had two or three clicks total. So this is a welcome improvement.

I’ve also noticed that it has attained a PageRank of 3; this is of no importance for a URL chopper but it’s appreciated nonetheless; thanks to shlnk.com’s users, linkers and Google

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Sultan Abu Bakar Mosque is one of the most famous landmarks in Johor Bahru. Constructed between 1892 and 1900 and named after the person who commissioned it, Almarhum Sultan Abu Bakar, its architecture is influenced by Moorish design. It’s blue roofing and black tipped minarets grab the attention of many motorists plying Jalan Skudai.

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These days, you can’t browse the web without finding a link to Twitter. It seems everyone has a Twitter account… yes, I do to. The only reason I registered for Twitter account is to find out what the fuss is about.

For those of you who last got on the net in 2005, let’s just recap what Twitter is.

Twitter’s official definition of itself is as follows:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Wikipedia calls Twitter:

…a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users’ updates known as tweets”.

Personally, I find Twitter to be a highly overrated product with minimal if not zero innovation value. In it’s very essence, Twitter is nothing more than a global short message broadcasting system sandwiched between the social networking loaves of being followed and following others.

After Googling more about Twitter; I’ve been converted from a skeptic to a die hard believer. I’m absolutely certain that Twitter is the best thing that happened to mankind since rubber tires. Read on to find out why.

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You got to hand it to Oracle, they have managed to do what IBM failed merely two weeks ago: Oracle has bought Sun for $7.4 billion. That’s just under six percent more than what IBM offered in the now collapsed talk.

This deal is definitely an industry-defining event as mentioned in the linked BusinessWeek article. The massive potential of the combined IT giants will be a force to be reckoned with.

Nevertheless, I still worry for the future of MySQL; the popular open source database platform Sun acquired in 2008. It now has to compete internally with Oracle’s own database engine which drives a significant bulk of its revenue. My fear is that instead of building on the MySQL technology, Oracle may just choose to let it dwindle into obscurity. To add to worries, Oracle already has its own open source database platform in the form of Berkeley DB.

The silver lining is that MySQL is just too big to be ignored. It is without a doubt, the most widely deployed database engine in the world. Its significance in the web hosting industry cannot be overstated. So eventhough I worry about MySQL’s future within the Oracle camp, I’m sure that basic economics and the wonderful way in which open source works will, in the end, prevail.

Congrats to Oracle; you’ve definitely got a potential winner in your hands now. Let’s see what you do with it

This article has been long overdue; so I apologize to newbie who orignally asked how to do duplicate key checking before inserting Excel data into a MySQL database.

I got a few minutes of free time today, so I decided to draft a sample workbook that will demonstrate this process. You can download the sample workbook here. Standard disclaimer: This file has been found to be virus-free when uploaded. However, you are highly recommended to scan the file again with an up to date anti-virus software before opening it.

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