Windows Live mesh rant

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Ok, sorry for the rant, but I’ve had a couple of shots and now feeling a tad tipsy! There is a really annoying bug in Windows Live mesh that causes the first letter of the sync folder to be dropped (e.g. select d:/my folder and it tries to sync as d:/y folder). This only effect those of us that have changed their my documents folder to a drive (I think) but has now been a bug/issue for over 6 months! How can it take over 6 months to create a simple patch for this issue! The affect it has on my work flow is huge, as I used to be able to sync no problems with Xp and the old Windows Mesh. Come on MS I do like your products but get your thumb out your arse on this one!!!

WordPress admin / wp-admin 404 – AAARRRGGG

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Man oh man, this install of WordPress has been running fine for the last year, till last week! I recompiled Apache on the server to include PDO support in PHP. Didn’t think anything of it till I went to respond to a comment, BANG! No admin… POO POO… recompiled Apache again removing PDO, still didn’t work (After trying 4 other installs of WordPress on this server which all failed). Did the usual searches on the net and found LOADS of solutions, but none of them worked til…

http://www.webmasterfamily.com/f12/wordpress-solution-500-internal-server-error-8.html

admin section was accessible anymore, Problem: PHP is running out of memory.
Solution:
Create a text file and name it “php.ini”  and with a single line of code in it:
memory=20MB
This file has to be placed into the directory /wp-admin/ within your WordPress installation.

So my hearty thanks go out to Vita who posted that!

VitaVta

MySql table names, case sensitive

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I’ve been building a script to compare mysql databases so I can better see what tables need updating/adding. All was going well till I started copying data and structures form my local pc (running under WAMP) to my UNIX server. I was using PhpMyAdmin to get a dump of the table, then adding to the main server, however I was then getting table not found! After much frustration I have found out that my local copy had been turning all the table names to lowercase, so when I recreated them on the server the table names where not consistent. The fix? Add lower_case_table_names=0 to the my.ini (access on WAMP menu) in the [wampmysqld] section, table name are now kept the same as the backup file or entered value. Personally I tend to only use lower case for table names, but this website has a lot of legacy data which has mixed case table names! Hope it helps!

Codeigniter 2.0.2

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Just in case you don’t visit the CI site (Would be surprised!) there has been a new release to Code and Reactor which includes a security fix which patches a small vulnerability in the cross site scripting filter. Not a big one but worth updating!

Ever been in a position where your dev site DB tables have changed, and you *cough* forgot to write down what changes would be required on your live site?! Well it has for me, and consequently I’ve been trying to find a tool/script to show me the database changes, but with no luck. So after a bit of experimentation I’ve written a small script that does this! Click here for details

Codeigniter 2.0.1

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Nice to see CI having more regular updates via Reactor 🙂 As you can tell I don’t write many blog entries on here, mostly because I blog directly from my phone to my personal blog. Image_moo has been serving me well, however I have had to make a couple of minor modifications for the update of the Printfetti.co.uk website, so I’ll be posting a new version soon.

Recently I’ve been doing a lot of work in ExpressionEngine and while there are a couple of things I don’t like, on the whole it’s a nice bit of web software (webware?). Because EE uses CI as a base it’s quite easy to work with, using active records etc. It’s just a shame that the documentation is not up to the same quality as CI and you need a high post count before you can even contribute.

On a personal level I’ve been contracting at http://www.purple-agency.com/ for the last few months, working in a team of 4, Matt.B, Matt.T, Paul.C and myself, so 3 Matts!

I’ve recently been playing with the FTP module of CI and have found it a bit weird in the way it works, so will be posting in the reactor forums. So I’ve ripped it and made ftp_moo which I might publish as well.

Image_moo update

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Recently I had a comment about the quality of watermarks via the image_moo library. Now I’ve been aware that there was some limitation, but it lead me to experiment a bit more. The issue is that imagecopymerge does not support alpha channel correctly, so I’ve had to add some additional checking to check this, and process watermarks as needed. For watermarks using alpha (e.g. PNG32) the results are far better than before, but still it iwll do JPG/GIF etc. watermarks as well.