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!
Need to know how to do something? Take a look through this list - covers topics such as converting video, compiling software in linux and tips for firefox.
The Date Picker widget, when using webforms, defaultly appears in American form (Month, Day, Year). For UK sites this isn't often desirable. Doing a quick google and I stumbled upon James Davidson's blog post on how to re-theme the element from earlier this year. I thought it was certainly one approach, but felt there must have been a neater alternative. So here is my approach:
15 October 2012
git
How to
tips
I recently needed to be able to run a regular git task on a folder and I didn't want to have to CD into that folder first. Annoyingly, there didn't seem to be an optional "path" parameter to git remote update, until I looked at the help file for Git.
This handy script will allow you to get the current Load Average (loadavg) for a remote server over SSH. It will stream the result set back to you, which you can then pipe into a file if you need to.
This would be handy for monitoring the load of a server while stress testing, for example.
I've had several people ask me recently how I managed to get the nice date effect on my blog headers. It's quite simple really. All you need is:
16 January 2011
Drupal
How to
code
tips
So, Drupal 7 is out. Have you heard? It was a bit of a quiet launch really. ;-)
When it came to upgrading by blog, I decided (eventually) that I needed to do a cleanup as the Database had been upgraded from 4.7, to 5 and then to 6 - with many modules added and removed in between. New year, new drupal, new blog (kinda)!
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.
30 September 2010
tips
programming
mysql
How to
code
15 September 2010
websites
SEO
How to
Drupal
How do you find "all" the Drupal sites that Google knows about?
A post on drupal.org suggests Add New Comment, but that wont be entirely accurate. So far I have come up with a search that lists all sites with a User Account page on user/login:
intitle:"User account" inurl:"user/login"
04 March 2010
programming
linux
How to
geek
Drupal
apache
Following Kevin Hankens post on why you shouldn't ignore Drupal 404 errors, I decided to go through yesterdays error_log on our live apache server (the one which hosts www.pponline.co.uk, www.sportbusiness.com and www.mychild.co.uk alongside around 40 other dupral sites).
24 February 2010
tips
programming
performance
How to
Drupal
I run XCache on the server that powers this site. XCache is cool. Out of the box, it allows caching of PHP compile code in memory, after all once a file is compile you shouldn't keep needing to compile it on every page load, should you?
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.
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…
Ever had that situation where you've enabled :set paste and pasted in hundred of lines of code into vim only to see it all fully left aligned? I just did… And bugger going over each line and manually indenting it! Want know how to indent a visual block of text?
26 May 2009
tip
linux
How to
bash
After Worldpay recently changed to use the RBS system, I was tasked with finding every instance of select.worldpay.com/wcc/purchase in our forms and replacing it with select.wp3.rbsworldpay.com/wcc/purchase. There appeared to be thousands of files and I wasn't going to do it manually…
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.
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? ;-)
15 January 2009
tip
programming
How to
Drupal
The first test is a valid email address test. The second test is if an account exists for that email address. The third is if the username, generated by the “user” part of the email address, exists. If there are any issues, the “error” is logged into and array and printed at the end.
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
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…
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?
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!
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…
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!
03 September 2008
linux
How to
geek
I am currently in the process of migrating several dozen sites between two servers. I tried using scp command to copy the sites over however scp is a very slow command when transferring many small files.
I did a little research on how to use tar over an ssh connection and realised that you could specify the stdout on tar.
10 July 2008
security
programming
mysql
How to
geek
Have you ever wanted to generate a random string in MySQL, say for assigning a random password to a list of users? Well here is a useful tip!
07 July 2008
technology
software
mac
How to
geek
I recently setup my PC in the living room with my TV so I could play games and watch streamed video from the net (eg, BBC's iPlayer). Unfortunately this always meant having a keyboard and mouse attached.
Then came along Synergy.
21 April 2008
linux
lighttpd
How to
geek
Drupal
bash
Following my previous post about configuring Lighttpd on this VPS Webserver to replace Apache I bring you a guide to configuring AWStats under Lighttpd. This process is differs to Apache as control of directories and aliasing is handled differently. There can also be complications if you have previously enabled the Drupal LUA Magnet script on your site for clean URL handling!
22 March 2008
programming
How to
Drupal
peashoter has raised a good point in an issue report for GlobalRedirect. What happens to a URL which has a fragment in it - such as:
http://www.example.com/node/100#comments
I have done a google and cant find any answer to this. It appears that the fragment is not passed to PHP. This makes it a LOT harder to fix!
08 November 2007
programming
linux
How to
geek
cool
Following on from my previous post about how to check how many apache processes are running - I recently wanted to find out exactly how much memory my applications where using… So I did a little research and found a few new and useful commands!
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!
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.
08 May 2007
websites
security
programming
linux
How to
Drupal
I've recently been receiving some spam from some Russian IP's. As each spam attempt was from a different IP, blocking individual ones was a little futile and time consuming. I did a quick Google and ended up at Deekayen's website as it seems he has had similar issues. His solution was an Apache level "Deny"… My solution uses iptables.
19 February 2007
software
mobile phone
K800i
How to
geek
Drupal
cool
This morning I decided to watch the Lullabot Drupal 4.7.x to 5.x Conversion Tutorial. Thing is - my work PC doesn't have sound plus it's not ideal to watch a video and work on the same screen - not enough screen real estate.
02 February 2007
review
linux
How to
Firstly - YAFC? "What on earth is YAFC?" I hear you say. YAFC is a command line FTP tool which, unfortunately, only comes in source code which means you need to know how to compile it. Fortunately, compiling it is easy - it required very few dependencies and most of those I could install using yum on my linux box (Redhat Fedora).
02 January 2007
programming
mysql
How to
Drupal
cool
Faced with a tedious task of ordering a set of rows using a weight column? Don't want to type the numbers out? Would rather find a difficult but more interesting method? I have the answer for you!
16 November 2006
How to
firefox
Drupal
cool
Rob Douglass has dugg a fantastic article he found on Josh Koenig's blog. It has taught me something new and usefull, which I ALWAYS appreciate. You can have arguments/wildcards in bookmarks…
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.