Important: JavaScript does not have block scope.

I’m a little embarrassed to say that I only looked this up for the first time today. Although, I’ve been programming in JavaScript for so long that I must have known this years ago, but “forgotten” as I haven’t done much JavaScript programming in the last few years. Hey, at least I retained that niggling feeling like I had to look that up!

Important: JavaScript does not have block scope.

Basically:

 var x = 1;
 { var x = 2; }
 print( x ); // outputs 2

Failed To Read Auto-Increment Value From Storage Engine – MySQL

Recently after my hosting provider hard-booted one of my machines the MySQL service started to complain “Failed To Read Auto-Increment Value From Storage Engine” when an insert was issued to any table with an auto increment field. I found the solution here, and it basically requires you to reset the auto increment key on the table, like this:

ALTER TABLE `table_name`  AUTO_INCREMENT =1

I had to do that on all of my tables that had auto increment keys to resolve the issue.

phpMyAdmin $cfg[‘Servers’][$i][‘tracking_version_auto_create’]

I found the configuration setting in the documentation that will force phpMyAdmin to automatically track tables during and after creation. It is:

 $cfg['Servers'][$i]['tracking_version_auto_create'] boolean

And the default value is ‘false’. I updated:

 /var/www/www.progclub.org/pcma/config.inc.php

With the line:

  // JE: 2011-09-07: force tracking
  $cfg['Servers'][$i]['tracking_version_auto_create'] = true;

Free software licenses

I was doing some research about free software licenses as a part of developing ProgClub’s terms and conditions, and found this list of free software licenses from the FSF, and the same list of FSF approved software licenses on Wikipedia. I noticed the cool table sorting facility they have on the Wikipedia page, and wonder if that’s built in to MediaWiki..? It would be cool if it only required a class specification to have it work like that.

Python string formatting

I’m working through Zed Shaw’s Learn Python The Hard Way, and I’m up to exercise 5. Doing the extra credit 3 involved searching online for Python format strings, and I found that there is the old way, which is presumably what Shaw wanted me to find, and also the new way in which a new scheme for string formatting is provided.