Sam Wilson's Journal

Yet another new release of WebDB.

[Keywords: WebDB] [No comments] [Permanent link]

When backing up Thunderbird, the only files I worry about are the actual mbox files that store the ‘Local Folders’ (archived) email, and the *.mab addresbook files. Everything else is operational cruft. This might seem a bit extreme—after all, why not backup the account configurations and user preferences etc.—but I jump from machine to machine [...]

[Keywords: backups, data, email, mail, mbox, scripts, Subversion, Thunderbird] [No comments] [Permanent link]

I’m now a member of: :-)

[Keywords: Linux, Perth Linux Users Group, PLUG] [No comments] [Permanent link]

The news feed from the City of Fremantle is currently invalid. :-( They just need to fix the date formats, really.

[Keywords: City of Fremantle, feeds, Fremantle, Freo, news, Planet Freo] [No comments] [Permanent link]

Last year I wrote a little script for producing GraphViz graphs, and LaTeX books, from werelate.org family history data. I’ve been tweaking it a bit now and then, and using it for my mum’s genealogical research. It works, but the more I want to do with it the more I think it needs a good [...]

[Keywords: extensions, genealogy, MediaWiki, Printable WeRelate, trees, WeRelate] [No comments] [Permanent link]

I like simple things like GluePHP.

[Keywords: GluePHP, PHP, routing, URLs] [No comments] [Permanent link]

I often have cause to query a database table and join it with a subtable of related data (i.e. a table with which this one has a one-to-many relationship), and to retrieve only the highest (or lowest) of related records (based on some sortable field; often a date). Usually in MySQL, and often to be [...]

[Keywords: databases, maximums, MySQL, SQL] [No comments] [Permanent link]

I have now had this problem about every year for the last three or four years, and every time have completely forgotten how I resolved it the previous time. It’s especially annoying, because usually involves searching for such common terms as index.php, apache, directory, etc. which result in almost entirely useless information. So, here, for [...]

[Keywords: Apache, index.php, MultiViews, PHP, servers, web] [3 comments] [Permanent link]

I use USB hard drives for backing up one of my machines, swapping them regularly but leaving everything else up to the backup script that runs daily. This means that I want to mount them at the same place every time, regardless of which drive I plug in or what device it is registered as. [...]

[Keywords: backups, FAT, filesystems, Linux, mtools, system administration, Ubuntu] [No comments] [Permanent link]

A little tool for printing schedules for tape (or other backup media) rotations: static.samwilson.id.au/2012/backup-cal

[Keywords: backups, calendars, rotation, scheduling] [No comments] [Permanent link]

I hate it when my bug turns out to be somebody else’s! Hours gone! Still, it’s a relief… :-)

[Keywords: bugs, debugging, files, Kohana, MIME types, PHP] [No comments] [Permanent link]

A couple of directories in Windows couldn’t be deleted by Windows Explorer, because they had unprintable characters (I’m assuming) in their names. D:\tmp>dir Volume in drive D is Data Volume Serial Number is 8C47-34BD   Directory of D:\tmp   28/09/2012 11:34 AM <DIR> . 28/09/2012 11:34 AM <DIR> .. 26/10/2010 01:51 PM <DIR> 954321. 0 [...]

[Keywords: cmd, deleting, DOS, filenames, files, renaming, Windows] [2 comments] [Permanent link]

Windows batch files are hideous things, if one is used to *nix shell scripting. Everything feels wrong! Of course, that’s mostly just because they have a different syntax… but sometimes it’s because they are wrong. Date formatting, for instance. There’s an environment variable, %DATE%, that holds the current date, but it’s formatted to the current [...]

[Keywords: batch files, cmd, date formatting, dates, DOS, Java, variables, Windows] [One comment] [Permanent link]

Yesterday I added a little fix to WebDB for a bug that prevented filtering on column names that occur in both the table being filtered and any of the tables referred to by foreign keys. This most often applied to id columns. [Update:] And today I’ve (hopefully) fixed the problem with foreign-key fields in edit [...]

[Keywords: bugs, databases, foreign keys, PHP, sorting, WebDB] [No comments] [Permanent link]

Manton Reececited wrote some sensible words about the permanence of material on the Internet, and Dave Winercited followed suit shortly after (and then againcited). It’s an important topic. We need places — secure, digital, permanent places — to store things. It’s not a particularly difficult problem, at least to attempt to solve. (Of course, we [...]

[Keywords: archiving, Dave Winer, Manton Reece, open standards, permanence, storage] [No comments] [Permanent link]

The combination of wget and the Export Cookies add-on for Firefox is useful for creating offline, complete, static archives of websites that are only accessible with a password: First log in to the site and export cookies.txt, Then run wget \ –recursive \ –no-clobber \ –page-requisites \ –html-extension \ –convert-links \ –restrict-file-names=windows \ –domains example.com [...]

[Keywords: archiving, cookies, Firefox, passwords, static web pages, websites, wget] [No comments] [Permanent link]

I signed up for an rsync.net account a bit over a month ago. They’re a reasonably-priced off-site filesystem provider, seemingly run by people who care about security and doing things normally. By ‘normally’, I mean rsync for starters (oddly enough, given their name) but also the whole gammut of *nix-y ways of doing things; one [...]

[Keywords: backups, cloud storage, Linux, offsite, rsync.net, Subversion, svn] [No comments] [Permanent link]

This post has moved to: http://wiki.samwilson.id.au/git

[Keywords: code, development, git, Github, Programming, version control] [No comments] [Permanent link]

I first used a Mac in about 1993 — a Quadra I think it might’ve been, or a Performa. I’d come from DOS and Amiga and didn’t really know anything about anything — I didn’t even know there was anything to be known. I remember hearing someone talking about Windows, and assuming they just meant [...]

[Keywords: activism, Apple, Douglas Adams, fandom, free as in speech, freedom, gratis, laptops, Lenovo, libre, Linux, Mac OS, Open Source, Programming, Ubuntu, X220] [No comments] [Permanent link]

A new cafe, on the way home from a ride this morning: the Mocca Lounge, it seems to be called. I guess they mean brown and not quite one thing nor another, but at least relaxing. It’s a reasonable place to sit for a while and read a book. It’s an inside cafe with no [...]

[Keywords: cycling, digitisation, files, filesystems, Mocca Lounge, nomenclature, organisation] [No comments] [Permanent link]

There seems to be quite a few posts out there about how to replace Subversion externals definitions with local directories, but not so much for going the other way. I’m not sure why; it seems to me more likely that one would start off with some small module as part of a bigger repository, and [...]

[Keywords: code, externals, Project Management, revision control, Subversion] [2 comments] [Permanent link]

I am working on a bespoke issue-tracking system at the moment (not for code issue-tracking, in case anyone thinks we’re cloning Redmine; although there certainly are overlaps…) in which each issue has a list of personnel, each of whom have a role on the issue. The task at hand is to prevent people selecting the [...]

[Keywords: forms, HTML, jQuery, Programming, selecting, tabular, validation, websites, Work] [No comments] [Permanent link]

The Internet Society’s Future Internet Scenarios.

[Keywords: future, internet, Internet Society, ISOC, web] [No comments] [Permanent link]

Open Data Kit (ODK) is a free and open-source set of tools which help organizations author, field, and manage mobile data collection solutions. ODK provides an out-of-the-box solution for users to: Build a data collection form or survey; Collect the data on a mobile device and send it to a server; and Aggregate the collected [...]

[Keywords: data collection, Java, ODK, Open Data Kit, OpenRosa] [One comment] [Permanent link]

I want my blog to be the hub of my online life. I’ve come back to using WordPress because I want to be able to show other people how easy it is to avoid the walled-gardens of Facebook, Twitter, et al. So I need to explain what I want my blog to be. A place [...]

[Keywords: Blogging, Facebook, feeds, NaBloPoMo, news, RSS, Twitter, wordpress, Writing, Writing in public view] [No comments] [Permanent link]

My new Ubuntu-flavoured ThinkPad is computing heaven, Cory Doctorow, The Guardian. [Local archive] This article will probably even appeal to Mac fans; certainly reminds me of my idea a few months ago to get one of these machines…

[Keywords: Cory Doctorow, Exploring, laptops, Lenovo, Linux, The Guardian, ThinkPad, Ubuntu] [No comments] [Permanent link]

Given a database table listing events and their date ranges: events { id, start_date, end_date, … }, where either or both of the dates can be null, how is one to find all of the events that fall within (even partially) a given date range? (This is pretty much what Kieran Benton asked on Stack [...]

[Keywords: code snippets, date ranges, Kieran Benton, MySQL, SQL, Stack Overflow, temporal reasoning, Work] [One comment] [Permanent link]

I have been pulling my hair out this morning trying to get the PHP Fileinfo extension working under PHP 5.2.14 on Windows Server 2003 SE. Actually, to be accurate: I’ve been trying to get the PHP Fileinfo extension working; the pulling out of hair is a normal occurrence when doing anything on a Windows server, [...]

[Keywords: Fileinfo, Pecl, PHP, Windows] [8 comments] [Permanent link]

A big audience this evening for Richard Stallman at the Hyatt in Perth: a sharp divide between the suits and the t-shirts. RMS does not seem to quite gel with the ACS! In fact, David Clarke, in introducing him, said that he had no idea that the talk would be of interest to so many [...]

[Keywords: Australian Computer Society, community, David Clarke, Free Culture, Free Software Foundation, freedom, GNU, Richard Stallman, RMS] [One comment] [Permanent link]

In which I try to implement column sorting in WebDB, but end up building a general system for persisting query string variables between HTTP requests. Sort of. In the old, Zend-based, WebDB, column sort order was passed as a $_GET parameter and then stored in per-table variables in $_SESSION. In the index controller, both were [...]

[Keywords: columns, Kohana, redirecting, sessions, sorting, URI, WebDB, Zend] [No comments] [Permanent link]

Thanks to the wonderful people on Stackoverflow, I’m making some progress with figuring out how some geographic information is saved in a DB2 database that I’m working with. it turns out that, rather than using the spatial functionality of DB2 (which would make sense, but considering the source of this database, I wouldn’t ask for [...]

[Keywords: bc_base_convert, GIS, MGA, Morton codes, PHP, UTM, Work, Z-order (curve)] [No comments] [Permanent link]

First feedback about #WebDB: http://forum.kohanaframework.org/discussion/6112. Hurrah for #Kohana!

[Keywords: feedback, forums, Kohana, WebDB] [No comments] [Permanent link]

High on coffee, and I’m setting up a demo site for #WebDB. A good morning.

[Keywords: coffee, WebDB, Work] [No comments] [Permanent link]

For the past month or so I have been working on rebuilding my little database interface — called WebDB — as a Kohana module. It’s now ready for a first alpha release; you can find it at github.com/samwilson/kohana_webdb. I’ll be putting a demo up soon, and hopefully getting a project set up for it at [...]

[Keywords: databases, Kohana, WebDB] [No comments] [Permanent link]

This morning I’m returning to work on some code that I haven’t touched for a few months, and I’ve been rather dreading getting back to it. I’ve forgotten all the details; never knew many of them anyway. I was working with someone else on this, and so have to get my head around their work [...]

[Keywords: documentation, Donald Knuth, javadoc, Literate Programming] [No comments] [Permanent link]

I had hoped to be able to post an announcement today about a new version of the Addressbook plugin, but unfortunately it’s not quite ready.  I’ve done a bit of fiddling (this will only add 0.0.1 to the version after all), and have just a little more to do.  Then I will get on with [...]

[Keywords: Addressbook plugin, coding, God, honesty, Quakerism] [2 comments] [Permanent link]

Right. There we go. What was I saying? Yes, Addressbook Plugin… Desiderata thus far (taken from comments and emails, and in order of proposed implementation): Export CSV; Import CSV; Photo upload (probably over-ride the Gravatar, but show a note that there is a Gravatar?); Custom fields; I’ll also be refactoring most of the code while [...]

[Keywords: Addressbook plugin] [Permanent link]

I’ve just submitted a patch for Squirrelmail’s Variable Sent Folder plugin, fixing that plugin’s lack of respect for the user’s choice of folder-select-box display. It’s been annoying me for a while. Here’s the patched version (0.4sw).

[Keywords: email, plugins, squirrelmail, technology, variable sent folder, webmail] [No comments] [Permanent link]

Oh weary thing! Oh listless drudgery! Oh the stupid work we make for ourselves!! Oh!… Here I sit, on a cool spring morning, with nothing at all to worry about; I am happy. So why-oh-why-oh-why should I sit down to work at some sloppy, good-for-nothing code that purports to “record, display and analyze genealogical data”?! [...]

[Keywords: Drupal, genealogy, technology, Work] [No comments] [Permanent link]

The Unesco Archives Portal is a wonderful directory (among other things) to all sorts of archives and archival-related information, all over the world. I found the ISAD(G) there, and I think it will be of great value in building the structure of [a project I'm working on].

[Keywords: archiving, General International Standard Archival Description, ISAD(G), Unesco] [No comments] [Permanent link]

I got up early this morning to grab the phone line before the others awake – there’s eight here today and I guess someone will come hassling before long. I have returned to using wordpress (the software that I was using last year briefly) for this site, and have updated it to the latest (stable) [...]

[Keywords: Blogging, software, wordpress] [No comments] [Permanent link]