LornaJane

I am an increasingly avid flickr user and have a growing collection of photos on my flickr account. It seems daft to upload photos twice all the time so I tried the flickr plugin for serendipity (my bloggling platform) but I couldn't get my account to connect correctly. In the box labelled "flickr username" I added my flickr username, "lornajane", which appears in my photos URL. However the plugin seemed to think my photos should then be at a URL:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/64718621@N00/

which they obviously weren't. I played around with this for a while, also trying my yahoo user id and getting nowhere.

Eventually I tried another flickr plugin on another site and got identical behaviour - at which point I logged a support ticket with Flickr to ask what I was doing wrong. It turns out that "username" in this case means this label here:



Never noticed that before, and its certainly not how I refer to myself, so I'm a bit confused - but hey my plugin is working! I hope this helps someone (probably me, next time I try to plug flickr in to something else) confused by flickr seeming to think you have the wrong username!

Once upon a time there was a girl geek called Sarah Blow, and she wanted to hang out with her girl friends and geek out at the same time (and who wouldn't?). So she founded the phenomenon of the Girl Geek Dinner in London. Well this great idea has spread and spread around the world and eventually to the North of England - first to Manchester (next event, this Friday 25th July!) and eventually to Leeds.

So I'm pleased to announce that, on Wednesday 13th August there will be the first Leeds Girl Geek Dinner!! Tickets are £10 and if you needed any further encouragement, I'm one of the speakers for the evening. If you're going, or have any questions, leave a comment below - and I'll see you there!

Yesterday I had an outing to the LUGRadio Live event in Wolverhampton. To be honest this isn't my usual kind of crowd but it was local, the talks looked interesting and so off I went.

Well it was a very interesting day - the highlight was of course meeting Emma from emmajane.net - I enjoyed her talk and also her company for both lunch and dinner. Predictably there was an excellent crowd and I had a wonderful time - a few people were there from WYLUG and I had a really good chat with Robert Collins from Canonical, nominally about bzr but in reality we also put the world to rights which was illuminating and good fun. Here's me and Emma having dinner:



I met a few IRC friends too, some I knew before, some I was hoping to run into and one who stopped me (in my phpwomen shirt) and went "oh, you're the UK girl from phpwomen .... lornajane!!" which was very cool :) I was also impressed by the "low tech wiki" and "low tech open streetmap" ... large pieces of paper and pens.



I also met Dave and Kat from Pale Purple and had a good long chat with them so all in all it was well worth the trip (there are a few more photos in the flickr set if you're interested). Well done to the organisers for a great event!!

I'm attending LUGRadio Live UK this weekend, in sunny Wolverhampton! I'm slightly concerned that this might be too geeky for me and I might be scared but there are people I'd like to meet, the talks look interesting, and I can imagine it will be a pretty good crowd. If you are there, please come and say hi to me - I'm very easy to spot because I am tall and female with curly hair, usually a rare combination at any technical gathering :)

I was running an import script today taken from a mysqldump from another user, when I saw an error that looked like this:

ERROR 1005 (HY000) at line 123: Cant create table  (errno: 150)

This is caused by a mysqldump or export process exporting tables in alphabetical order and not in the order in which they rely on one another. My tables had foreign keys which fail on import if the other table doesn't exist when you create the table with the key. In this case I was only importing six or eight tables so I simply opened the script in a text editor and re-ordered the import blocks. On a bigger scale a more technical solution might be required!

When development teams have people working on a variety of platforms, its pretty common to end up with wrong line endings. In vim these will look like ^M at the end of each line. To get rid of these line endings you can use the following command (in command mode)

:% s/^M$//

To type the correct ^M character, you'll need to press Ctrl + V followed by Ctrl + M (the first combination means "take the next combination literally).

To turn this into a macro you should do the following. In command mode, pressq, followed by any letter. This will be the shortcut to access the macro. Then type the command as above. Finally, press q again to stop recording and its done. You can use your macro by pressing @ and then the letter you chose.