How To Set Cron to Run Every 5 Minutes

Thanks to this handy document How To Set Cron to Run Every 5 Minutes I now my crontab configured so that my jj5-test repo gets updated every five minutes. It’s the sort of thing I generally do in a post-commit hook, but in this case that won’t work owing to the way the servers are configured (the files are in my account and not owned by the www-data user the commit-hook runs as).

So to configure cron I issued the command:

 $ crontab -e

And then to update my svn working copy:

# m h  dom mon dow   command
*/5 * * * * cd /home/jj5/web/test && svn update > /dev/null

How to open file links in Firefox 1.5 and above

Found some instructions about How to open file links in Firefox 1.5 and above and I’m going to try it out just as soon as I can reset my browser.

Basically you add something like the following to your user.js file which is in C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[Profile]\user.js.

user_pref("capability.policy.policynames", "localfilelinks");
user_pref("capability.policy.localfilelinks.sites", "http://www.example.com");
user_pref("capability.policy.localfilelinks.checkloaduri.enabled", "allAccess");

HTML5 and CSS positioning

I stumbled across a weird bug today that I didn’t know about and wasn’t expecting. I’d done a little bit of a CSS file to go with a little bit of HTML that did some simple positioning of content. Then I validated my document on the W3C Markup Validation Service and it complained about a missing doctype. So I added a doctype for HTML5. After I did that my page looked all screwy, the CSS positioning was applying correctly. Anyway it turned out that the reason the CSS wasn’t applying was because I had property specifications like this:

#content {
  margin: 170 50 50 50;
  padding: 0;
}

Whereas I needed to specify the units, like this:

#content {
  margin: 170px 50px 50px 50px;
  padding: 0px;
}

Internet explorer support for file URIs

The URI file://bender-xp/C$/ works in an anchor tag in IE8 to open the \\bender-xp\C$ file share on my network. In this case bender-xp was the name of my local machine but it works for remote file shares too (I tested it to a Samba share on another box).

Unfortunately my version of Firefox (version 9.0.1) doesn’t support this.

File upload error – unable to create a temporary file in Unknown on line 0

I was working with phpMyAdmin and I got the following error:

 File upload error - unable to create a temporary file in Unknown on line 0

The problem was that the upload_tmp_dir setting in my php.ini file was specified twice. Once up the top of the file where I was editing it, and then later in the file where I didn’t see it. So the setting I wanted wasn’t being applied. If you get this error double check you’ve only got one setting for upload_tmp_dir.