Cisco VPN client on Windows 7 64bit
Posted on | April 8, 2010 | 1 Comment
If you’re trying to get Cisco VPN client installed on Windows 7 – 64bit then you may as well give up. I’ve tried just about every method discussed on the internet.
However, http://www.shrew.net/download have a VPN client that will allow you to import your PCF file and it works!
Export Thunderbird contacts to Outlook
Posted on | April 8, 2010 | No Comments
I wanted to export my Thunderbird Contacts to Microsoft Outlook 2010 beta.
Jesus, if that wasn’t the most stressful export ever! Thunderbird can only export as CSV or tab separated – or LDAP.
Outlook says it can import from CSV and Tab separated, however it just crashes with mapping errors.
I tried dragging them from TB and then dragging into Contacts on Outlook, but that just resulted in a new empty contact, with an attachment of the email address in a text file. Helpful.
Anyway, I found this Thunderbird Addon that will export to vCard (The standard Address Card I feel) and then I could drag these into Outlook.
http://nic-nac-project.de/~kaosmos/morecols-en.html
However, Outlook feels the need to open each vCard as a new Contact screen, so you then have the joys of closing as many screens as you have contacts just imported. So it could be hundred and hundreds!
I do wonder if the designers of these software packages ever have to use this functionality. Perhaps they should.
Programmers Excuses
Posted on | April 8, 2010 | 1 Comment
Programmers Excuses
Installing Tahoma font in Ubuntu
Posted on | April 6, 2010 | No Comments
The stylesheet of our intranet is primarily Tahoma, and Firefox on Ubuntu doesn’t look good.
To install the Microsoft Core Fonts package in Ubuntu, run the following in your terminal:
sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts
And then this should go away and get them. Lovely.
NB, if this doesn’t take immediate effect, you can rebuild the font cache by running
sudo fc-cache -fv
Now, the Tahoma font is excluded these days from this package, so you’ll need to install that one manually, by following the instructions found here
Regex – “The” searching
Posted on | March 26, 2010 | 10 Comments
Say you have a list of movie titles, and you want to either sort them, or search through them, and some of them have “The ” at the start, for example:
- The Simpsons
- Simpson Street
When doing a MySQL search:
SELECT * FROM movies WHERE title LIKE "The Simp%";
Would only return the first row. But if you are working in a company where there is no standard set, the movie title could be formatted as “Simpsons, The” – and then, it won’t be found.
To solve this, you could replace the “The ” letters with blank, and then sort out the field contents during the query:
$str_query = preg_replace("/(title like "(the )(.*)%")/i",
"REPLACE(LOWER(title), "the ", "") LIKE ("$3%")",
$str_query);
This will change :
"(title LIKE "The Simpsons")"
to,
"(title LIKE "Simpsons")"
But, the (the) in line 2 tells PHP to only replace it if starts with “The ” (case insenstive).
However, what if you want to search for “the” (not sure why you would…)
You need to do a negative lookahead, to tell the expression to only carry on, if the search phrase is not exactly “the”
if (preg_match("/(title like "(?!the)(.*)%")/i", $str_query)) {
The (?!the) is the readahead.
(.*) matches any string but it is greedy and you have to be carfeul that it doesn’t just accept everything to the end of $str_query. (but its okay in our case, as we are looking for % (the LIKE wildcard))
After all this, we can run:
SELECT * FROM movies WHERE $str_query;
But what about sorting? All the titles beginning with “The” will appear in the T section. Whereas really, we want the Simpsons to appear in the S section.
Add an easy ORDER BY clause here:
SELECT * FROM movies WHERE $str_query ORDER BY (REPLACE(title, "the ", "") ASC;
Sorted!
MySQL – Order by certain value first
Posted on | March 23, 2010 | 1 Comment
Ever wanted to sort a resultset of data, by value, but I wanted a couple of exceptions to appear at the top?
SELECT country, population, CASE country WHEN 'United Kingdom' THEN 0 WHEN 'United States' THEN 1 WHEN 'New Zealand" THEN 2 ELSE country END AS countrySort FROM countryList ORDER BY countrySort ASC;
This will sort the results by country, but with UK, US, NZ as the top three.
Javascript Language Translation
Posted on | March 18, 2010 | 2 Comments
On a project I am working on, I need to enable language translation. Thinking about it, turned into something quite complicated. But then I found the Google Language API which allows developers to hook into the Google Languages services.
So, I start a page – enabling UTF-8 character sets:
< meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="content-type">
And then hook into the Google API itself:
< script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>
Finally, a function that will pick up the text to translate. This function will automatically attempt to discover the source language for you.
< script type="text/javascript">
google.load("language", "1");
function translateLanguage() {
var sourceText = document.getElementById("sourceText").value;
google.language.detect(sourceText, function(lang) {
if (lang.language != '') {
document.getElementById('language').innerHTML = 'Source language: ' + lang.language;
google.language.translate(sourceText, lang.language, 'en', function(result) {
var translated = document.getElementById("translation");
if (result.translation) {
translated.innerHTML = result.translation;
}
});
}
});
}
</script>
MySQL Incorrect String value “x/80″
Posted on | March 18, 2010 | No Comments
MySQL Incorrect String value replication error.
We use ANT for releasing versions of our PHP applications. Its very smart and takes a lot of the problems related to releases out of the equation.
However, everytime we performed a release, our replication server would break, and I’d have to skip a load of database delta error messages with this command:
SET GLOBAL SQL_SLAVE_SKIP_COUNTER = 1
The error we received is:
Error 'Incorrect string value: 'x9CxF37x12[k...' for column 'applied_by' at row 1' on query. Default database: '<databasename>'.
Query: 'INSERT INTO changelog (change_number, delta_set, complete_dt, applied_by, description)
VALUES (35, 'Main', CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, USER(), '<database_delta_filename>')'.
I’d been getting these errors for a while.
Basically, the MySQL server was replicating the changelog table down to the slave, but for some reason it just would not accept the replicated query.
After a bit of scrummaging around, and changing field values/character sets, I discovered that in the string was “x80″ which is a padding character as set out in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8859-1 and shouldn’t be used in a string. I’m not really sure how it got there, or why, but I basically changed the “applied_by” field to be a BLOB – which is generically a VARCHAR with no character set and there fore ignores this.
Help in using Ubuntu Terminal Console
Posted on | March 18, 2010 | No Comments
Help in using Ubuntu Terminal Console
Remote connection
To ssh to another Lunix terminal, use this command:
ssh username@host -p port
The default SSH port is 21, but you could change it to anything, i.e. 9100
Remote teminal will prompt for your password, and job done.
File/Folder functions
cp – Copy file
cp /usr/bin/file /tmp/location
mkdir – Create directory/folder
mkdir /home/chris/newfolder
rm – Delete files in folder
rm -rf /home/chris/foldertoremove
The -rf tells Linux to remove files in the folder. This will remove all files and sub folders though, so be careful. There is no undelete.
mv – Rename a file, or move a file
mv /home/chris/index.htm /home/chris/home.htm
mv /home/chris/index.htm /home/chris/site/index.htm
The first command will rename a file, and the second will move it (effectively renaming it into another directory)
pwd – see what folder you are in
pwd
/home/chris/Desktop
Ubuntu Console commands for SVN
Posted on | March 18, 2010 | No Comments
Console commands in Ubuntu for use with subversion
Checkout a branch:
svn checkout url@revision path
To update your local source:
svn up
And to commit a single file:
svn ci -m "message for commit" <files>
Multiple committing is just without the <files>.
To download a revision
svn co -r 1671<remotefolder> <localfolder>
http://www.mydomain.com/svn/project/trunk/folder
Getting a list of revisions for a page (if you’re trying to find when you changed a page)
svn log -g <files>
Merging a branch into another
svn merge http://svn.branch.url localfolder .
That will merge the specified url into the localfolder. Ensure that your local changes in your working copy have been committed before you do this.
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