LornaJane

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.

This site uses a blogging platform called serendipity which is a nice little tool and I've been mostly happy since moving across from textpattern (I did write about the experience). Recently however, a few things have been going wrong with the feeds.

I edited an old post, because the image links were broken (I did have a nightmare migrating because I was so inconsistent about the format of the image tags in textpattern, completely my own fault). I was very careful not to update the published date of the article, however the edited article appeared in the feed, which wasn't what I had in mind! It turned out that this is by design. On line 262 of includes/functions_entries.inc.php (I have serendipity 1.1.3), I found this:

I've commented out this line, which was in an if($modified_since) clause. Hopefully this will stop updated entries from appearing in the feed - I have a few other old ones to fix images in so we'll soon see.

At around the same time, Ivo mentioned that he was seeing the order of posts change in his reader (google reader) when people commented on my posts. I suspect that this is part of the same issue and I'm optimistic of it also being fixed by this change. However when I was looking into the problem I noticed that the URL he was using to access my feed, http://www.lornajane.net/index.rss2, actually returned RSS 0.91. Not ideal! The problem is the rewrite rule in serendipity's .htaccess file, which looks like this:

When you request index.rss2 it should rewrite to rss.php?file=$1&ext=$2 but the "rss" matches first so the user gets redirected to index.rss instead. As a nasty hack to get around this I removed the rss from the above example and gave it a line of its own:


Requests to index.rss2 are now correctly rewritten as rss.php?file=index&ext=rss2 and will get RSS 2.0 format in the response. I have just noticed however that this is the most requested page on the site so I really hope I didn't break anything!

I've had this error more than once. On a debian virtual machine, with Zend Core installed, and when mysql doesn't restart when the machine reboots. It looks something like this:

This is for two reasons. First: you need to be up one level of directory to be able to run these commands. Some errors will tell you that but this one doesn't. Secondly, you need to use the mysqld_safe command.

This works for me - I have no idea if it is the prescribed method but background the process above and you're good to go.

So, at the Dutch PHP Conference, they were making a video and they interviewed me. The video is at http://www.bachelor-ict.nl/dpc and it is also featured in this article on DevZone which is exciting! The video is mostly about the PHPWomen organisation, rather than my talk but it does have some footage of me speaking and of the conference itself.