Tuesday, May 26th, 2009
Our client contact from a Web Design Company we develop web applications and business websites for rang us late yesterday with a problem they had encountered. They were migrating a database from one MySQL database server to another and noticed that question marks and other strange characters such as aeons or blackbox question marks are appearing everywhere.
How did this happen?
This happens because the test server’s character set (utf8) did not match the production servers client (which is set to latin1 by default) this is what does all the importing and since UTF8 Unicode has some characters that are missing or are different to latin1, they are replaced with a question mark.
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Monday, May 18th, 2009
Ask and you shall receive… well… sort of. I called a meeting one morning regarding our “DevProducts on Blogger” project - I said that I did not want it to be so serious as our new Website is going to be and I asked for some fun elements to it along with updates on what we’re doing.
What I get is “The Developers… at Silverwater”!
The crazy gal I put in charge of the project came up with a witty cartoon comic strip based loosely on our web development company. Anyway, we’ve released our first episode of “The Developers … at Silverwater” called: Databases.
Check out the episode 1: databases on our blogger website: http://devproducts.blogspot.com/
Personally, I think it’s going to be a lot of fun and look forward to future episodes. We’d love to know what you think of the cartoon so leave us some feedback! good or bad.
Thursday, May 14th, 2009
As mentioned on my previous post, I’ve started using NSS Backup as my primary backup solution for my mobile workstation which runs Ubuntu Linux. I gotta say, it’s running pretty well, although recently I’ve had issues with Ubuntu recognising the mountable external hard disc I’ve been using as a back-up drive - save that story for another time - but yeah, it’s running pretty well. As mentioned I had asked the question. One of the development team members answered the question and requested that I open a ticket.
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Friday, April 24th, 2009
Wonderful, I’ve somehow found an itch to do an IQ test due to a link I followed from a test I did discussed at:
http://blog.rvdavid.net/great-so-now-im-a-paranoid-narcissist/
My IQ is apparently 133 and labels me as a “Visual Mathematician” based on the “absolutely accurate” online IQ test (of course I’m being sarcastic) found at http://www.testq.com/
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Tuesday, April 21st, 2009
During a brief period of procrastination brought on by an email from my wife accusing me of being a Narcissist based on a paragraph that she came accross, I found myself doing a quick disorder test.
In reply to her email I wrote saying that the paragraph she had sent was wrong and did not at all match the true meaning of the word. But after replying to the email, I thought, “hang on… maybe I’ll double check” and do one of those personality test things since they are so accurate.
A quick google led me to the “reputable” personality test web page: http://www.4degreez.com/disorder/index.html
I gotta say… after answering the questions truthfully and clicking on the submit button for my test, my wife is right… it was good to know that she was thinking about me though… … I think?! :P
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Tuesday, April 21st, 2009
It’s taken a good part of an hour trying to find how to disable the administrator or front end template for Joomla.
So I thought I’d just make a post in an effort to turn this frustrated energy into something positive.
To display only the contents of the view on the page without being framed by a template, the tmpl variable needs to be set to “component”.
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Saturday, March 21st, 2009
So a while ago, some time at close of business, I was doing some final tests for the fourth phase of project achilles when all of a sudden, I’ve been struck with some random mysql errors. “Data source not available” and other similar errors with other etc.
This is some crazy s#it which I didn’t need, deadlines coming at me left, right and centre, this is the last thing you want!
I thought it may have been a memory issue so I did a du:
du -s * | sort -nr | head
This reported that my fricking hard disk was full!!!!
How? why?! … HOW?!?!?
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Tuesday, March 17th, 2009
Just a quick update to an old post I made: Disabling IPV6 to tweak network connectivity. The tweak mentioned on the post will only work for kernel versions prior to 2.6.28-4 as discussed on the following bug report: IPV6 causes slow internet access. Sorry for those who have tried to apply this tweak and failed. If you are using kernels prior to 2.6.28-4, this will still work.