I came across a couple of quick bits of information this week at Raincity Studios and I thought might be good to share.

SCP in Mac OS X for a database

First I found that the documentation surrounding SCP on Mac OS X is somewhat limited and that tracking down a concrete example can be tricky. My use case was to download a database dump from a server which I only have SSH access to. On the server I created a database dump by running this command in the admin user's home directory (/home/admin):

$ mysqldump -u admin -p database > database.sql

After that I returned to my local machine and ran:

$ scp admin@server.com:database.sql ./

This downloads the file to the current directory. Since I'm logging in with the admin user (and I haven't passed an absolute path) SCP searches for the file in the home directory at /home/admin. Also, you might need to install the Apple developer tools to get SCP in OS X.

YouTube RSS feed per user search for tags

I found that this is not as simple as one would expect mostly because Flickr makes it easy to find. YouTube has this information buried away here in their API for developers. To get an RSS feed of search keywords per user, use the following URL:

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?author=username&orderby=published&vq=key+words

There are lots of other options for structuring this query, so visit the API for more information.

Other than that, this week I've been test driving a Nokia N81 for Roland Tanglao. Great phone so far and I'll have a more specific evaluation coming up soon. Here's a photo I took the other day on the bus from work: