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Thingy Ma Jig - the blog of Nicholas Thompson. A place where I keep my thoughts and experiences.
How to setup reminders on OS X
I just wanted to quickly setup a reminder on my mac (in this case that Star Trek was on in ten minutes - I know, I'm a geek!). It dawned on me that I didn't know a way to do this off the top of my head.
After a little Googling and trial and error, I found that the awesome Quicksilver could execute timed events!
It's a little convoluted, however here is the process...
Drush Cron & XCache can cause var_size errors
I use a cron script on this server which fires up Drush to run Cron (rather than the standard wget method). There is nothing wrong with using wget, however it does tie up an apache or lighttpd process while cron is running. It also means it's harder to control process priority. Drush, on the other hand, runs in CLI mode, so controlling process priority is easier (using nice). But then I started seeing odd errors…
Bash script to find most common 404
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).
MySQL: Count occurrences of string
Today I needed to quickly find out a list of node's which did not contain a certain token (one we use on PPOnline to insert adverts into articles). There were meant to be 2 of these tokens per article but we had noticed some only had one. Some didn't have any at all!
Now, this might already exist as a neat function somewhere, but I couldn't find it. So I wrote this little query to find the number of occurrences of a substring in a larger block of text.
I did look into using the SUBSTRING() and SUBSTRING_INDEX() commands, however I couldn't see a way of efficiently using them to find any number of occurrences. So I settled on the following…
Generate Entropy for GnuPG
Has anyone every tried to generate a GPG (or GnuPG) key? I have… and I received this error…
Not enough random bytes available. Please do some other work to give the OS a chance to collect more entropy! (Need 284 more bytes)
Drupal, ImageCache & Performance
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.
Drupal Autocomplete in Vim
I recently stumbled across a handy tutorial on configuring a Drupal dictionary in Vim for autocomplete. I also remembered helping a friend out with a similar problem, Drupal syntax highlighting for Nano. I then combined the two and have a simple to follow tutorial for generating your own drupal 6 dictionary for vim autocomplete!
Patching can cause permission denied errors
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…
Vim Tips: Replace 0px with 0
I like little wins. I was just looking through the CSS file for this site and noticed that - for some reason - I'd used 0px instead of a LOT of times. Most values need numbers (10em, 10px, 10% and 10pt are all very difference sizes) however 0 is one of the few valeus which is the same in all cases (0px, 0pt, 0% and 0 are all zero!). This adds up to wasted data and bandwidth; admitedly not a lot, but still Every Little Helps!
So I fired up Vim. Initially, I just did:
Indenting in Vim
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?
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