Justin, about your juice fast: why bother to juice the veggies? Why not eat them as-is, i.e., as salads? It would take less time to prepare, more time to consume (= less likely to overeat), and leave you feeling fuller.

Here’s a fellow countryman of yours that should inspire you to get off your backside and go for a walk every now and then. 😉 Stephen Fry lost so much weight that I almost didn’t recognise him afterwards. His idea of using audio books to make walking more interesting does work. A really good book will have you doing extra miles just to find out what happens next. And don’t forget the little things that you can do every day to get some exercise. Take the stairs instead of the escalator. Walk instead of drive. If there’s more than one way to do something, do it the physically harder way.

Stripe is closed beta at the moment, but I just emailed their support and they sent me an invite.

Also, something worth mentioning is that if you have a form on your website for accepting credit card payment you become subject to PCI standards, which from all reports are a PITA! So redirecting to the payment processors site can be worth it for this reason alone.

The code is ugly, but it generates pretty clean entities.

Apple does have a dock now…. check out the Apple 27″ LED they just released:

http://www.apple.com/displays/

They have a bunch of ports now built into it allowing you to connect to all those connections with a single thunderbolt cable (including monitor and power)

@Manuel Lemos +1 to the recovery stuff. The same guys that had the above issue also had a problem where their database became corrupt. They didn’t have any recent backups and I was unable to recover the database even using the most aggressive settings for MyISAM. When I did eventually restore from an older backup I switched them over to InnoDB (and added a better backup strategy) and they have no had an issue since. Based on that and some other bad experiences I will never use MyISAM again, unless its a copy of an InnoDB table for fulltext indexing.

I had that problem in the past because I used a different database user for three databases in the same server, so PHP were using separate persistent MySQL connections per Apache process. That was making my server reboot in the peek of server load of the day. Thankfully it did not halt the server, it simply rebooted and since I use InnoDB it self-recovered all logged transactions.

To avoid the problem just go in /etc/my.cnf and make sure you have reasonable max_connections value (not too high) in the [mysqld] section.

BTW, MyISAM tables are bad for read-write sites. If you have a problem that needs to go through table recovery, in InnoDB it is automatic, but in MyISAM it isn’t. In your case, stay away from MyISAM tables.

My guess is that the table you were doing order by on was also in the where clause and the key you were ordering on was not the same as the one (or many) in the where clause. Unless you get really fancy MySQL will only use one index per referenced table.

I would switch back to InnoDB.

You should pop an explain in front of the query and see what the output is. If you have using temporary table or using where on 2m rows I would imagine it will kill you.

It basically looks like that:

$query = db_select('table', 'alias')
->fields('alias', array(
'fieldname',
'bar',
->orderBy('fieldname', 'ASC');

You can then fetch rows from $query, get the row count, iterate over it in foreach and so on.

One point is security:
No more SQL injection problems – unless a module chooses to use the lower level layer, which is still available.
Since then only 7% of the security issues are SQL injection issues, compared to 25% on the whole web* (and always the vulnerable modules were using a lower layer).

Abstraction is another point:
You can simply swap the database driver to what you need. MySQL and PostgreSQL are in Drupal core (both being SQL they were supported before dbtng).
But you could also use … say … MongoDB: http://www.examiner.com/ needs high performance for specific tables. I think they are the biggest live example of a site that is fully taking advantage of that new layer. Doug Green gave an interview about that as a podcast.

* Slide 15 and 16: http://growingventuresolutions.com/gvsfiles/Scout_XSS_CSRF_Security_Presentation_Chicago.pdf – 2009/2010, but you get the idea.

About wireless power, there was an interesting article a couple days ago about DARPA seeking (wireless power pack for recharging handhelds). Apple also seems interested in that (check the nice infographic explaining how witricity works).