List of things I’ve done after installing OSX Lion

1. Disabling natural scrolling and customizing other gestures
2. Disabling “All my files” and reorganizing icons in sidebar of Finder
3. Activating FileVault (and after rebooting, I noticed that all my windows were reopen at the same place !)

I have undertaken the task of converting the CVS repository to GIT to be able to publish the work on Github. In the past, I’ve seen a lot of example that converted SVN repository to GIT but never CVS. I did a little search and found the tool git-cvsimport that is included in the git-cvs package in Ubuntu 10.04. I installed it and imported my repository :

$ sudo apt-get install git-cvs
$ mkdir soundbawx
$ cd soundbawx
$ git cvsimport -v -d /path/to/my/CVSROOT/ SoundBawx

You should provide the path to your CVSROOT as a parameter of the -d switch and then the name of your module to import.

To see if my history was correctly imported, I checked the log of the repository and I could see that every revision I’ve done was there. The only problems was that I used my nickname at that time as the author of the commits and every messages was encoded in ISO-8859-1. To correct the identity of my commits and convert the encoding from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8, I did a little script that filters every commits of my history :

#!/bin/sh

git filter-branch -f --msg-filter '
while read LINE do
 	echo $LINE | iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t utf-8
done '
--commit-filter '
if [ "$GIT_COMMITTER_NAME" = "cid" ];
then
	GIT_COMMITTER_NAME="Sylvain Filteau";
	GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="Sylvain Filteau";
	GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL="cidsphere@gmail.com";
	GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="cidsphere@gmail.com";
	git commit-tree "$@";
else
	git commit-tree "$@";
fi' HEAD

Then I made it executable and ran it :

$ chmod +x update-history
$ ./update-history

The only thing that lasted to do was to rename my .cvsignore to .gitignore :

$ git mv .cvsignore .gitignore

Looks like an easy task, but at first, not everything was straightforward to do. I had things to figure out, mainly with the correction of identity and character encoding. But I’m pleased to share with you the steps to do your final conversion !

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.