We had really good reasons to think that the cause of this pain was a virus. I tried to scan the computer with Windows Live One Care and, sadly, I had no time to complete the scan before another crash. I tried to reboot in safe mode with no luck.

That was the moment I suspected a hardware defectuosity. So I used tools from Dell to check the laptop hardware and it reported a hard drive error. Many files weren’t backed up and my boss really wanted them back to finish some important stuff. The best way I found to recover all files, even ones that was corrupted, was to make an image of the partition with dd and then mount the image.

# dd if=/dev/sdb3 of=/home/user/crashed-partition.img conv=noerror iflag=nonblock
# mkdir /media/crashed-part
# mount /home/user/crashed-partition.img /media/crashed-part
# ls /media/crashed-part

I could just mount the partition directly but copying files from the bad hard drive skips files affected by bad sectors. These files could be used even if they are damaged so there is no reason to skip them.

That wasn’t the first time I did that. In 2004, I had a similar problem with an Outlook PST file damaged in the middle. A 1GB file with plenty of emails that I didn’t want to lose. I did the same procedure and repaired the file with a Microsoft tool… TADAM!

That’s the best way I found to do that… I’m sure there is better way so feel free to comment other options.

The task of customization of your shop is not a small one but you can find a lot of documentation about this on Google and Magento official website provide a nice introduction tutorial to help you with the task.

But there is one thing I lost many hours on to debug : the image uploader. Here was my problem… when I uploaded my pictures for a product, everything was fine… my files was on the right folder and the administration panel showed me the pictures. But when I browsed to the product page, the only picture I could see was the default placeholder image of Magento.

After many hours browsing Google and finding no solution, I started to debug directly the source code. I found that the function “imagecreatefromjpeg” doesn’t exist. A quick check on php.net showed me that it was a GD function. GD wasn’t loaded properly but I thougt I had it ! I did a quick check :

$ php -i | grep gd
Configure Command =>  ‘./configure’  ‘–with-apxs2=/usr/bin/apxs2′ ‘–with-gd’ ‘–with-mcrypt’ ‘–with-curl’ ‘–with-zlib’ ‘–with-mysql’ ‘–with-mysqli’ ‘–with-pdo-mysql’ ‘–enable-sockets’ ‘–enable-soap’ ‘–with-pdflib’ ‘–with-xmlrpc’ ‘–disable-cgi’ ‘–with-xsl’ ‘–enable-exif’ ‘–with-config-file-path=/etc’ ‘–without-pdo-sqlite’ ‘–enable-bcmath’

No sign of the module loaded, only the “–with-gd” switch. A search on Google showed me that I should add the switch :

–with-jpeg-dir –with-png-dir

After recompiling PHP, I could see the product images on my Magento installation, HOURA!

Even if it was all my fault if the images wouldn’t load, is it normal that Magento gived me no advices to solve my problem ?

Here is an example of my problem. I want to translate the phrase « Delete the {obj} » where {obj} can be anyone of these words : project, component, activity, task. All these words are in a table and can change in time and I want to use them in other context. In english, that’s fairly simple, you just have to replace {obj} with the word you want to use in your page.

But in french you can’t do just that, you have to deal with the gender of words. For example, the same phrase in french looks like « Supprimer {pronoun} {obj} » where {pronoun} is « le » for the word « project », « la » for « composante » and « tâche », finally « l’ » for the word « activité ».

And this is just one example! What should I do when I add some plural form in the mix ? And what happen with other languages like portuguese and spanish? The worst thing about that is that I can’t find anyting about that in Google…

I have some solution in mind but I want to know how other people are doing it before doing my own implementation. When I have something, I will post my solution here.

The thing that motivated me to start over is that I wanted to write it in english. It’s been a long time that I wanted to write in the Shakespeare language but feared that my level was too low. Since a few years, I traveled in countries where I must speak in english (Bermuda, USA, Mexico), I spoke with english speaking people, try to watch a lot of english movies and tv shows (these aren’t just a lost of time finally!) and read a lot in english. So now I’m a lot more confident that I can do it. I hope these changes will attract more reader for who likes technology and photography like me.

If you are searching for my old blog, you can reach it at the old address : http://www.cidsphere.com/blog.