This software has been out there for a while now, but has always been useful for those that needed a quick and easy way to install PHP, MySQL, phpMyAdmin and Apache on a Windows machine. PHPTriad is now pretty far along in versions (2.11) and even has modules designed for it to add functionality. One of the authros over on Evolt.org has written up a simple little review on his experience installing. Thankfully, it went nice and easy - the only snag he hit was not having a user set up for the MySQL install that he had.

DevArticles.com has a new article this morning also dealing with Backing Up Your MySQL Databases With MySQLDump. For those that haven't used this tool (and if you use MySQL at all, I'm sure you have), it's a great way to get your data out of the database and safe somewhere so that you can back it up later if need be. It's also really useful for copying a database over to a different machine (as I had to do with this site). This article covers some of the basics about using this command, including some of the cooler features - like being able to gzip up the resulting dump file, and the "opt" parameter that should give the fastest possible database dump that you can get.