Today I was diagnosing some HTTP/HTTPS issues, and firefox was being a bitch by not showing me whether I was on a HTTPS or HTTP connection in the address bar. Turns out that in order to show the URL scheme you can change the setting in about:config. You need to change browser.urlbar.trimURLs to false, and then you’re back in business.
I had a problem with MediaWiki math sections not always displaying as a PNG. For simple expressions HTML was used instead. This lead to a very non-uniform look and feel where some images had a green background and large fonts (for PNG expressions) compared to a black background and different fonts (for HTML expressions). I wanted a uniform look and feel so I went looking for a configuration setting.
I haven’t been able to figure out how to force mediawiki to always display a PNG as a global setting, but in your user settings on the math preferences section you can change from the default “HTML if very simple or else PNG” to “Always render PNG” which fixes the problem on a per user basis, which is good enough for me.
I was reading my default .bashrc file, and found the following:
# Alias definitions.
# You may want to put all your additions into a separate file like
# ~/.bash_aliases, instead of adding them here directly.
# See /usr/share/doc/bash-doc/examples in the bash-doc package.
if [ -f ~/.bash_aliases ]; then
. ~/.bash_aliases
fi
This suggested that I wanted a .bash_aliases file for my aliases, so I set one up:
jj5@sixsigma:~$ cat .bash_aliases alias home='cd ~' alias jj5='cd /var/www/www.jj5.net/' alias profile='cd /var/www/www.jj5.net/profile/' alias chomsky='vim /var/www/www.jj5.net/profile/chomsky/index.html' alias henney='vim /var/www/www.jj5.net/profile/henney/index.html' alias lakoff='vim /var/www/www.jj5.net/profile/lakoff/index.html' alias norvig='vim /var/www/www.jj5.net/profile/norvig/index.html'
This is my basic “CMS” system for http://www.jj5.net/profile/.
I seemed to be having a bit of an issue with my nvidia video card driving the Ubuntu Unity desktop on my new Ubuntu 11.04 desktop installation. I found how to disable unity on ubuntu and am now running the Ubuntu Classic desktop which so far has been stable.
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.
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;
Due to my blatant SEO hacking ProgClub has finally made it to page 3 of search results for programmers’ club. Go team! :)
ProgClub aspires to be *the* Programmers’ Club. So first we get page 3, then we get page 1, then we get first result. Sound like a good plan?
You can help by blogging about ProgClub or linking to our Programmers’ Club page from your blog or your web-site. The text of your link should be “Programmers’ Club”, and you should link to the http://www.progclub.org/wiki/Programmers’_Club page.
p.s. We’re on page 2 for good programmers’ club and we’re on page 2 for the programmers’ club (page 1 in Australia: the programmers’ club).
p.p.s. I posted some more information on how I went about the SEO process.
p.p.p.s. I followed up with some more commentary about the best way to link to ProgClub.
Found this article today: 10 AJAX-based & PHP WebMail Clients For a Great User Experience. Installed Roundcube at ProgClub, might install SquirrelMail later too.
Was helping Teejay with his Cock n Bull web-site the other night, and we needed to setup a ‘page’ link in the top main navigation as a ‘link’ to the blog feed. Anyway, we found a WordPress plugin that does that: Page Links To. Pretty handy!
After spending the afternoon investigating MediaWiki templates, I’ve decided that for the most part they are more trouble than they’re worth for any of my applications. I tried to create a ‘done’ template, that took username, user initials, date and ‘done note’ parameters, but really the code to call the template was just as long as not using the template, and the template broke when the ‘done note’ included a link that included an equals sign, which is just too shoddy. I’m giving up on templates until I find I actually have a use for them where the technology solves a problem that I actually have. At the moment that’s nothing.