jfw.id.au

I’m migrating a database from a postgres 7.4 server to a 8.1 server and hit a small issue with the import of the dumpfile. I’m in the middle of testing the migration at the moment and the complaint coming back from the import was about invalid UTF-8 characters in the input file. A quick google and the first link was to a page on the PostgreSQL site with the following snippet:

Some users are having problems loading UTF-8 data into 8.1.X. This is because previous versions allowed invalid UTF-8 byte sequences to be entered into the database, and this release properly accepts only valid UTF-8 sequences. One way to correct a dumpfile is to run the command iconv -c -f UTF-8 -t UTF-8 -o cleanfile.sql dumpfile.sql. The -c option removes invalid character sequences. A diff of the two files will show the sequences that are invalid. iconv reads the entire input file into memory so it might be necessary to use split to break up the dump into multiple smaller files for processing.

It works :) I had no doubt, but it is good to know that it has solved this problem.

Now my only problem is to work out why there are invalid characters in the database in the first place.  But that can wait for another day.  I’m off to bed!

Taking a quick break from what I was doing I decided to have a look at Reddit to see if there was anything new and interesting to read. Currently occupying the 2nd and 3rd positions on the Reddit front page are two different links to 2 different accounts of the City Manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma and his threats of reporting CentOS to the FBI for hacking.

Link #2 goes to the Register’s story on the whole incident (thats where i got the link to Mr Taylor)
Link #3 goes to the account as posted (including full emails) on the CentOS Site

I won’t go into detail, as there is too much to fully duplicate here. But to sumarise, if with “22 years in computer systems engineering and operation” you can’t comprehend plain language telling you that it is a problem with your webserver and you need to contact the Administrator or that server, then you’ve really got some problems. If instead you retaliate with what amounts to “stop hacking us or I’ll call the FBI” you make yourself look ignorant, incompetant and exceptionally stupid all at the same time.

I had to share as I found it too damn funny reading it.

I get the Australian IT ‘ping’ email and I have to comment on a story in today’s issue. Apparently KinderStart are suing Google for “downgrading its search-result ranking without reason or warning”. Now I’m not very up to date with this whole search engine thing, but I’m pretty confident that you actually have to have content on your site to get ranked.

I mean seriously, correct me if I’m wrong, but having a shitpile of links to other sites that you frame with your own header does not really consititute an information rich site. If anything that looks more like an attempted set of doorway pages to me, and we all know that this is frowned upon. Don’t we?

Obviously the smart people at KinderStart.com don’t understand this. Obviously Google is exacting some form of baseless punishment on the wonderful KinderStart.com site and they should be brought to justice for this heinous crime. The answer is obvious to anyone in the Litigious States of America, sue them!
Just a hint here folks, if you want good search rankings it pays to have good content.

For anyone that is interested, the Australian IT story can be found here.

I’ve been struggling with a compilation error for a few days trying to compile PHP on a new server. The error I had been getting was ” undefined reference to `assertionfailed’” and I had not had much luck tracking down an answer.

Until just now. I found this post on a mailing list that said PHP hasn’t upgraded their module for the 2.2 libcyrus. The message was from back in May 2003, but it was in a thread regarding a similar problem to mine. I figured I’d give it a go as there wasn’t really anything to lose if it didnt work. And just because I was compiling PHP linked to an older version of Cyrus-IMAP didnt mean that I couldn’t use the updated version for the IMAP server.

I downloaded cyrus-imap-2.1.18 and installed it to a different location to where I have my main Cyrus-IMAP install. Then adjusted my PHP configure line to point to that version. Reran configure for php with my options and then compiled it. It all compiled and installed cleanly.

I still find it a little annoying that to compile a PHP release that is only 1 month old with IMAP support I need to revert to a version of Cyrus-IMAP that is over a year old. There have been 9 releases ahead of the one that I needed to use. I mean come on guys, how long is it going to take before PHP is upgraded to a newer version of Cyrus-IMAP??

I’ve started on a web project for a client using VS.Net 2005 and the .Net 2.0 framework.  This is the first project that I am undertaking in this framework and I am catching a few little teething issues as I go.  Some of them are obvious and some not so obvious.

The most un-obvious one that i have come accross so far was related to being able to debug the project.  I am set up working on my laptop which has both VS.Net 2003 and VS.Net 2005 installed.  I’d had the “unable to start debugging on the webserver” errors before in VS.Net 2003 and am fairly comfortable with what has to be done to correct the issue.  When I received that error this evening with VS.Net 2005 I followed the same path to try resolving it.

No good.  Doesn’t work.

After chasing links in circles through the online help I found a link to this knowledge base article that gives instructions on editing the permissions on the metabase.  Thankfully for my particular problem it was easy.  At the top of the article it says:

Note If you are using ASP.Net 2.0 and you have to grant metabase permissions to a Windows user account, run the ASP.NET IIS Registration Tool command with the -ga option instead of using the tool that is shown here.

A quick check in “Local Users  and  Groups” on my laptop showed that the windows user account  that ASP.NET runs under is ASPNET.

I ran

aspnet_regiis -ga ASPNET

and was back in business.  Debugging is now working, pitty that my code is not - but that is another tale altogether.

I’ve recently starting working in VS.NET 2005 for some development that I am doing for a client.  This is the first time that I have undertaken anything using the 2.0 Framework and the updated IDE.  Having done a fair amount of development in VS.NET 2003 I have been using nDoc quite a bit.  I was quite dismayed to learn that nDoc was not compatible with the 2.0 Framework.

A little digging lead me to Jonas Lagerblad’s post about a improvements he has made to a port of nDoc 1.3.1 for .Net 2.0.  I am about to install this as it will give me the docs that I need for now, but I would be more comfortable having a complete version.  As yet I’m not doing anything that is not covered by this version, but that may change soon as I become more comforatble in the 2.0 Framework.

I was googling a little more about this to find feedback from others that have used this version and came across a nice little post on  Fabrice’s weblog. Someone representing themselves as the “main developer of NDoc 1.3 and the titular admin of the project” indicated that a complete rewrite has been undertaken for the 2.0 Framework and that the new version is in alpha testing at the moment.  Hopefully it won’t be too long until the new version is available.