ThingyMaJig

Thingy Ma Jig is the blog of Nicholas Thompson and contains any useful tips, sites and general blog-stuff which are considered interesting or handy!

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geek

I spend most of my life being a geek so I thought I'd share some of the stuff relating to being a geek.

Fixing Dos Line Endings

25 November 2010
tips linux How to geek code Drupal

Sometimes, when you're running coder on a module, you'll get a lot of errors complaining about Windows line endings. This is because you should set your editor to use Unix Line endings to be consistent with all developers. See the Drupal Coding Standards for more details.

Below is a handy bash script which will help you batch convert many files from DOS to Unix line endings.

MySQL: Count occurrences of string

17 February 2010
tip mysql geek Drupal

Today I needed to quickly find out a list of node's which did not contain a certain token (one we use on PPOnline to insert adverts into articles). There were meant to be 2 of these tokens per article but we had noticed some only had one. Some didn't have any at all!

Now, this might already exist as a neat function somewhere, but I couldn't find it. So I wrote this little query to find the number of occurrences of a substring in a larger block of text.

I did look into using the SUBSTRING() and SUBSTRING_INDEX() commands, however I couldn't see a way of efficiently using them to find any number of occurrences. So I settled on the following…

Generate Entropy for GnuPG

22 January 2010
security linux geek

Has anyone every tried to generate a GPG (or GnuPG) key? I have… and I received this error…

Not enough random bytes available.  Please do some other work to give
the OS a chance to collect more entropy! (Need 284 more bytes)

Drupal, ImageCache & Performance

14 November 2009
performance How to geek Drupal

A while ago we started having issues running a website. Bandwidth. Upon investigation, we saw that the majority of bandwidth was being use by image files and of those, lot was from the ImageCache folder. It was also causing a lot of excess server load by consuming Apache processes. Something needed to be done.

Patching can cause permission denied errors

11 August 2009
linux How to geek Drupal

I just updated this server to PHP 5.3. As all my sites are Drupal 6 it seems I have a few issues ahead which mean I need to patch Drupal to stop PHP complaining about deprecated stuff…

So I headed over to the post on drupal.org which is discussing 5.3 compatibility in Drupal 6 (which I personally think SHOULD go in) to grab a patch. I applied the patch with no problems. I refreshed a page and got a white screen so I checked the logs only to see…

PHP's display_error, not always a good thing!

19 May 2009
programming geek Drupal

I just hit an interesting issue while trying to upgrade a Drupal 5.18 site to Drupal 6.12. I went to the update.php page and noticed an error at the top implying the url_aliastable was having issues due to Drupal 6 expecting a language column which wasn't present in Drupal 5. "No problem" I thought, "That'll get fixed during the update!". This was the beginning of a long learning curve through the new Batch API system!

Backing up a Drupal Database: Redux

27 April 2009
tip linux How to geek Drupal code bash

Back in November last year, I wrote a script which handled backing up a drupal database. There were quite a few comments and I've taken some on board and developed the script on a little further to be more "generic".

One of the main complaints/suggestions about my previous snippet was the hard coded nature of it. The follow script offers far more configuration through the command line itself.

I'm a lazy linux piper

11 March 2009
tip svn linux How to geek Drupal

This morning I updated a site to the latest release of Drupal 5.16. Nothing special there at all. I’ve done that many times as has (hopefully) mabye other drupal devs… However, I’m a bit of a newbie when it comes to SVN. Didn’t I mention this drupal site was in an SVN repository? ;-)

Finding the largest files in a folder

06 January 2009
linux How to geek bash

I just needed to find the largest files in a folder (in an attempt to find out why it was so bloody huge!) and have ended up with the following handy combination of commands…

find /path/to/folder -size +1M -print0 | xargs -0 du -h | sort -nr

New Dr who is Matt Smith

03 January 2009
tv geek doctor who announcement

The new Dr Who appears to be Matt Smith!

Whoa! He is so young! Almost depressingly, he is only 11 days younger than ME. Yes… The new Dr Who is younger than me.

I think he could be good. When the replaced Christopher Ecclestone with David Tennant I was a little wary and wondered if he could pull it off - which he obviously did. This guy looks (from the clips) like he should fit the character perfectly!

Lighttpd book

30 December 2008
technology lighttpd geek Drupal

As many readers might know, I use Lighttpd a lot. I really like it for many reasons. Its fast, free, easy to configure, very light-weight (handy if you're running a cheap VPS or a low end server)… This is very apt for me because almost EVERY website I make now is a Drupal site (why would you use anything else?!).

Drupal is, inherently, a rather large web app - mainly because of its ability to do nigh-on anything. This means one needs to be a little careful about what you do with your resources. From my experience, Apache (which is bloody brilliant) can tend to get a little "bloated". I know there are ways of slimming it down and improving it, but I also like playing with new toys too! This is when I moved over to Lighttpd…

OpenSuse 11.0 Issues

12 December 2008
linux How to geek

After about 4 days of using OpenSUSE 11.0, I'm not overly impressed with it in comparison to RedHat Enterprise 3/4/5, CentOS 5, Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8.x (other distro's I've used). OpenSUSE has some annoying habits and default/unusual configurations…

Backing up a Drupal Database

26 November 2008
tip linux How to geek Drupal code bash

I was just dumping a database using mysqldump and I noticed that tables such as cache (and its cousins cache_page, cache_menu, etc), sessions and watchdog can be pretty big and are also not often essential for backing up. I mean, when you restore your web site do you really care about restoring people's logged in sessions from when the backup took place? I can understand maybe keeping watchdog; but then again should you lose your site you would probably lose it several hours after the backup so would miss out on any relevant watchdog notices.

Anywho… I did a mysqdump for a large database for a website I maintain and the dump came out at 400Mb. I then spent a few minutes cobling together a small script which would do a mysqldump but had some pre-programmed Regular Expressions to match specific groups of tables which it would only dump the structure for (ie, no data). After running this script, the SQL dump was only 220Mb. Much better! It also runs considerable quicker too and will cause less table locking.

So - the script?

SVN + NFS = svn nfs cant get exclusive lock

25 November 2008
svn programming linux How to geek

Last night I was trying to configure SVN on a server. The setup was that the SVN Repo was on "srv2" and the frontend and code I wanted to import was on "srv1".

I created an NFS share on srv2 and mounted it on srv1 in /mnt/svnroot. The mount worked perfectly and I could touch and remove files from srv1.

So I tried to create a "sites" folder where I wanted to import a site I wanted to version control. This is where I started to have problems… The sollution was to add "nolock,bg" to the mount options on the client. Read on for more details!

List enabled services in Linux

21 November 2008
linux How to geek

Today I needed to list all of the services which were enabled on boot-up for one of the servers I maintain. Obviously, my first port of call was to use the nifty tool ChkConfig like so…

Upgrading Netgear DG834PN

14 October 2008
How to hardware geek

Something I thought I'd post up quickly which caused me a little trouble just now…

I tried to upgrade my Netgear DG834PN (an ADSL WiFi router, EXCELLENT piece of kit incidentally) from the stock 1.3.30 firmware to the latest (as of writing) 1.3.39. There was no particular reason for the upgrade - I'm just a "bleeding edge" kinda guy!

Vim and Drupal Modules

18 August 2008
vim programming linux geek Drupal

I just finished upgrading a server to Ubuntu 8.04 which came with Vim 7.1 rather than 6.3 on the older server. It seems 7.1 does things slightly differently to 6.3.

In 6.3 I could create ~/.vim/filetype.vim and in there define a line as follows:

au BufRead,BufNewFile *.module,*.install,*.theme setf php

However in 7.1, it looks like a line similar to this has to go into ~/.vimrc instead…

How to batch rename files

19 April 2008
mac linux geek bash

This afternoon I needed to rename a bunch of files from one form to another in a command shell… Well technically I didn't need to do it in a shell - but, as sure as there is a hole in my ass, I wasn't gonna go through renaming them all manually!

They needed to go from, for example, add.png to add_32.png. After a little research into commands like printf, awk, bison and so on - I suddenly realized that 'cut' held the key!

Drupal and SEO: A comparison

04 February 2008
SEO review geek Drupal

I've recently been noticing a trend in how other websites are handling Clean URLs and it isn't good! Most websites don't appear to have the same luxury we have with Drupal (a concrete URL Alias system provided by the Path module). Although the URL Aliases can sometimes be a bit of a burden on larger sites, as the table can easily enter the tens or evey hundreds of thousands of entries, it provides (if used correctly) a very effective 1:1 relationship.

The price of sucess - too many users!

25 October 2007
programming linux geek Drupal cool apache

Recently at work we had been having issues with spiking server load. One of the potential suspects was the Apache configuration as it was allowing 256 MaxClients. Combine that with Drupal eating RAM for breakfast (say a minimum of 12Mb per page) and you have a recipe for disaster - too many visitors cause a RAM shortage, lots of swapping and eventually a server meltdown. After speaking the Rackspace Technical Support Team, one of the guys there (Daniel) wrote a VERY useful script for us to run on the server to monitor Apache usage.

Getting the most out of Fedora Core 4

28 September 2007
websites software linux How to geek Drupal

I recently looked into which versions of software I was running and was a little concerned to see how backward Fedora Core 4 was in some areas. I did a little Googling around and found a website (http://remi.collet.free.fr/) which is predominately written in French (but has a few English translations) which provides a new repository for Fedora Core 4's Yum Installer Package which provides far more recent RPM's for the likes of PHP and MySQL... So I installed it!

Which modules use hook_cron?

14 May 2007
programming linux geek Drupal cool

I recently needed to find out a list of modules which used hook_cron. I have SSH access to my server. Instead of writing a module (or using devel to execute some PHP) which returned the result of module_implements, I turned to grep. Simply cd into your modules folder (can be the Drupal install, but you end up recursing through unlikely folders) and run this:

grep -R "^function.*_cron" *module

How to SCP a path with spaces

14 May 2007
mac linux How to geek

I recently needed to remotely copy over SSH a folder from the remote machine to my local machine. Usually this is not a problem, however the path to this folder had a space in it. The folder itself is rather large and contains files which wouldn't really benefit from compression. It turns out the solution was quite simple.

The Web is Us/ing Us

08 April 2007
websites video geek cool

After looking through the list of mentors for this years Google Summer of Code I noticed that I have been paired up with a fellow Drupal-eer called kkafer for the project we chose to mentor (I'm probably not allowed to publicly say yet, so I wont). Anywho - in a quest to find out a little more about this 'German gentleman' I decided to pop over to his Blog and, while having a little read through, I found that he'd bloged about this YouTube video regarding the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.

NT-Hell

04 September 2006
firefox geek How to

We use NTL at home and recently they have been quite inconsistent when it comes to speed. Fair enough, when they upgraded us for free from 2Mb to 4Mb, I can accept a little slow down while the techies get on and sort the network out - but since friday our internet connection has stopped me from getting to one or two of the sites I works with, including this one! The one I was most concerned about was www.sportbusiness.com which was recently moved onto a new server over the weekend. Just when I needed (not wanted, NEEDED) to get to it - NTL stop me getting there.