These are some of my frequently used bits of SQL.

Tested: MS SQL Server 2008 R2

List of all empty tables in SQL Server Database

List of all tables with at least 1 row of data in SQL Server Database

Find latest modified stored procedures

Change ‘P’ to ‘V’ if you want to search for views.

Find string in stored procedures

Find all constraints

Find all foreign keys

image

It looks like Pinterest hasn’t provided a convenient way of adding the Pin It bookmarklet to Safari on the iPad. But try the instructions below. Its been tested with iOS 5.

Step 1
Bookmark this page in Safari on the iPad. Give it a useful name like Pin It.

Step 2
Copy the javascript below:

Step 3
Go back and replace the bookmarklet address with the javascript above.

Step 4
Pin away!

Follow me on Pinterest.

Tweet me if the Pin It bookmarklet no longer works.

I had previously written about how to batch resize images and rename on Ubuntu, but on Mac OS X, there is an even quicker way to resize images with a command line utility called sips.

Open up a Terminal. Go the directory where your images or photos are located. Lets say you want to max width of 640 pixels. This is all you do:

Easy peasy.

(image source)

To fix this, copy app/code/core/Mage/Sales/Model/Order.php to app/code/local/Mage/Sales/Model/Order.php (because you never, ever, want to be editing Magento core files). Open up the local Order.php, on line 1218-ish, you will find:

Change it to:

For possible reasons on why this is happening in the first place, see the Magento boards.

So this all worked in Chrome and Firefox, but not Internet Explorer.

Shocking.

The Contact Form 7 blog has instructions on how to redirect users to a different page after a successful submission. Under Additional Settings, simply do this:

The on_sent_ok is a Javascript hook. Inside of scripts.js in the plugin, it eventually makes this call:

So “location=’http://www.fubar.com/thanks’;” gets evaluated by Javascript and the page redirects. Great.

On the destination page, we were checking the referrer to verify they were coming from the form, here is an example of how you could do it:

Now, your PHP should be cleaner, more error checking, check for XSS, don’t hard-code anything, etc, etc.

The problem was that the referrer would always be null when the visitor was using Internet Explorer. Referrer isn’t required to be set by the browser. Browsers won’t set it if you started out on a HTTPS site but click on a non-secure link.

And IE won’t set it on redirection, but it will set it if you click on a link. So if a fake a link click, IE will set the referrer.

Lets create a Javascript function to fake a link click. This code is stolen from Stack Overflow:

Ok. Remember, the Contact Form 7 redirection is a Javascript hook. So now we change the on_sent_ok to call the goTo function instead:

Bam. Done.

This is pretty much self-explanatory, but I’ll go through it anyway. document.observe(“dom:loaded”) is the jQuery equivalent of $(document).ready. readAttribute is like jQuery.attr(), include is like a Javascript IndexOf.

Thats pretty much it.

Code snippel from fooFrame.html:

The background image is bazImage.png, a transparent PNG. This worked fine in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, but all the transparent pixels turned up as white in IE. My first thought was we needed to apply a PNG fix.

But that didn’t help.

Not so surprisingly, Internet Explorer handles transparency differently than other browsers. Elements have an allowTransparency attribute that defaults to false, so embedded iFrames won’t be transparent. Simply set it to true.

One final step, set ‘background-color: transparent;’ in the body element.

I don’t know how many folks actually use auto RSS browser discovery, so I wanted to get rid of the RSS links that Headway makes automatically and replace it with a general RSS page that can be reached when the user clicks on the RSS icon.

So, lets see how Headway Themes adds feeds to the HTML. Towards the bottom of wp-content/themes/headway-version/library/core/head.php, you have Headway code being added to the standard WordPress header hook:

Slightly higher up in head.php, the headway_head_extras function is defined and set as a hook itself:

Its important to notice that this bit of code has the feed and pingback URL. We do want to keep the pingback URL, so we’ll need to handle that.

To stop headway_head_extras from being called in general by the WordPress header, I did the following:

Yes, I really should come up with a better function name than my_headway_head_extras, but thats not the point.

I first define my own function that includes the pingback URL. Then I stop the headway_head_extras function from being called by the WordPress header. And finally, I add my pingback function to the WordPress header instead.

I stuck the above code in wp-content/themes/headway-version/custom/custom_functions.php. The main RSS feed and comment RSS feeds disappeared as expected. But there was no change to the Stream site. I decided to put the code in wp-content/themes/headway-version/custom/sites/subsiteidentifier/custom_functions.php and it worked.

This may not be Headway Themes way of doing this, and might not be maintainable through upgrades, so try at your own risk. But I would imagine the custom_functions.php should be copied over as the theme gets upgraded, so it shouldn’t be an issue.

Having successfully moved the CMS Made Simple files and database over, and editing the configuration file to use the right path and DB credentials, I went to the homepage. I was unceremoniously presented with:

string(103) “Smarty error: [in template:20 line 3]: [plugin] unknown tag – ‘title’ (core.load_plugins.php, line 124)” string(106) “Smarty error: [in template:20 line 4]: [plugin] unknown tag – ‘metadata’ (core.load_plugins.php, line 124)” string(108) “Smarty error: [in template:20 line 5]: [plugin] unknown tag – ‘stylesheet’ (core.load_plugins.php, line 124)” string(110) “Smarty error: [in template:20 line 6]: [plugin] unknown tag – ‘cms_selflink’ (core.load_plugins.php, line 124)” string(106) “Smarty error: [in template:20 line 43]: [plugin] unknown tag – ‘content’ (core.load_plugins.php, line 124)”

Nice.

Having never worked with a CMS Made Simple site before, this was really not helpful. My first assumption was that it was a caching issue. But I didn’t have the admin login information, so I couldn’t go into the backend and delete the cache. I would have to delete the cache manually.

When uploading the site, I noticed that there was a tmp directory. I imagined thats where the cache files would be located. Turns out I was right.

Deleting the contents of the tmp/cache and tmp/templates_c got rid of the nasty error and you can see the contents of those directories being refreshed once you hit the site.

The export of the original tables from MySQL were pretty standard: drop the table if it exists, recreate it, lock it, populate it, unlock it:

At the new webhost, in phpmyadmin, when importing the SQL, I kept getting the following error:

How can I not have the permission to lock tables? So I wanted to figure out if this lock really was the problem. Opening up the original SQL dump in Notepad++, I wanted to find the LOCK TABLES lines and remove them, and the corresponding UNLOCK TABLES. Now, there are way too many tables, so removing the LOCK TABLES by hand is a serious PITA.

Good thing Notepad++ supports regular expression in search. Use this to find all the LOCK TABLES:

and replace with nothing. You can find UNLOCK TABLES; directly and remove them.

Turns out after doing that, the SQL imported just fine. So that meant the stupid webhost didn’t allow LOCK TABLES access for the user. Why would you not let users lock their own tables? Plain retarded. There was nothing really wrong with the SQL, just a retarded host.

Thankfully the client got wise and moved to a better host where we had no such problems.

After upgrading and trying to debug code, I kept running into the following error on every page load:

It was true that the favicon.ico was missing, but we didn’t want to make a temporary one. We just needed requests for dot files to the root directory to be ignored.

Most Global.asax have route definitions like this:

There are really two problems here. First, the controller looks for something to handle favicon.ico. More than likely, you don’t have a function to deal with favicon.ico (why should you). Second, the HttpException should be caught and dealt with. Either log it or provide a more helpful message. Otherwise you’ll see ‘HttpException was unhandled by user code’ errors.

To fix the controller, try this:

new { controller = @”[^\.]*” } means ignore anything that matches that regex.

While walking through an ASP.net MVC3 app, I noticed that Ajax calls resulted in nothing happening. Debugging in Visual Studio, I noticed a SerializationException at the following code:

The JSON response from the Ajax was supposed to be read here, but it was failing. It was a runtime exception, “SerializationException was unhandled by user code.” Turns out InputStream wasn’t being read from the beginning of the stream, so the JSON couldn’t be deserialized properly.

Resetting the position in the current stream to the beginning should make it readable again:

The WIndows 7 install went fine, The Visual Studio install went fine. The SQL Server Express install went fine. Thought I was in heaven.

Yeah, right.

So I fire up SQL Server Management Studio and this is what I see:

Makes sense, I hit the Connect button. After about 5 seconds, I see get an error:

A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: Named Pipes Provider, error: 40 – Could not open a connection to SQL Server) (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 2)

For help, click: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink?ProdName=Microsoft+SQL+Server&EvtSrc=MSSQLServer&EvtID=2&LinkId=20476

Of course the information is correct, I’m on my local box, how can you not connect to it? Bah.

Turns out, I got the server name wrong. It should be either <MACHINENAME>\SQLEXPRESS or .\SQLEXPRESS.

Then it all works like magic.

On the Mac,

worked perfectly fine.

To get the application ready, we decided to try it out on a test environment running Ubuntu 9.10 (don’t ask why its running Ubuntu 9.10).

Oddly, currency showed up like 123.45, without the dollar sign.

We thought maybe the ‘en_US’ locale wasn’t installed on the machine. To check, we did:

Oops, in Ubuntu, its ‘en_US.utf8′. Doing a

now allows money_format to work properly.

Talking about my day, and trips to Ikea, Yeah! Burger, and Yoforia.

Um, excuse the crappy camera work and me not knowing the date.

Posted on Vimeo and YouTube.

Testing it out myself, thats clearly not how it works.

Digging around in the code, in the Mage_Poll_Block_ActivePoll constructor

So, to figure out which polls to display, Magento figures out which polls the user voted in already, and ignores them. If there is only one poll, and the user voted, they won’t see any polls.

There are a couple of options here. Either set $votedIds to an empty array or comment out most of getVotedPollsIds. getVotedPollsIds doesn’t seem to be used anywhere else, so I decided to comment it out by first copying app/code/core/Mage/Poll/Model/Poll.php to app/code/local/Mage/Poll/Model/Poll.php, and making sure getVotedPollsIds returns an empty array.

See more of my Magento posts.

Then I try to load the homepage, and I get a blank screen. Eh, ok. Time to display errors by commenting the following line in index.php.

Lets see what the logs say:

Well, what exactly is the code throwing this error? In Abstract.php:

How can Varien_Db_Select::TYPE_CONDITION not exist? I looked at my Varien/DB/Select.php and there was no TYPE_CONDITION. Then I looked at Varien_Db_Select in the Magento docs, and it was there. Weird.

Then I looked back at the terminal which was doing Subversion update, and noticed that there was an error. Apparently my Internet connection had died and the update didn’t complete. Ugh.

After restarting the Subversion update, I look at Varien_Db_Select:

There it is.

Moral of the story. Make sure your updates actually complete before making such an assumption.

Wanting to learn more about node.js, I grabbed the latest stable branch of the source code and tried to install it on my Ubuntu 10.04 dev box. Simply doing a ./configure returned the following:

Oh oops, no compiler has been installed. There are a couple different ways to proceed: (1) either install only the packages needed, or (2) wuss out and install build-essentials which will load all the necessary packages and some extra ones for general development. I prefer to wuss out, so I do:

After all that installs, I try ./configure again, only to get:

Bah, the SSL packages haven’t been installed yet. Do a:

And then you can do a ‘make; sudo make install; make test’ to get it all running.

Quick little background. Even though I’ve got a Macbook, if I have to look at code, I’m usually on a desktop thats running Ubuntu 10.04. We host client sites on servers running Ubuntu 10.04, so its best to write code in that environment. So today, after finishing up code for a Magento site, I needed to upload a set of fabric swatches that would be used with configurable products. The client provided images for the fabric swatches, but they were all different sizes. All I needed was a 60x60px selection of each image and the filenames to be something descriptive with the image size.

Of course, this can be done pretty easily in Photoshop. I’m sure there is some plugin for it, but you can record an action, and run it against a batch of files. The problem was that I didn’t want to hop on my Macbook just to crop and rename files.

Since I was on an Ubuntu machine, my first gut reaction was to fire up Gimp and see if I could do it. Turns out there is a plugin called David’s Batch Processor that pretty much does that. Ubuntu has the plugin in the repository, just search for ‘gimp-plugin-registry’ in Synaptic. Gimp also supports scripting, but the scripting language is Scheme-like, and I didn’t want to recall knowledge from freshman year in college to do this.

Then I remembered ImageMagick. While ImageMagick has a GUI for image manipulation, its got a powerful CLI that lets you do pretty much anything you want to do. So no need to open up a big honkin’ application just to do some basic cropping and renaming.

So save the following code in the directory of the files you want cropped and renamed and run it:

Most of this should be pretty self-explanatory. Up top we define what sizes we want the images to be cropped to and from where in the image we want to crop. Then we grab a list of all the files we want to crop, and grab the filename before the extension (to be used for saving the new files). The convert command is what actually does the cropping and saving the files with the new names, in this case, something like oldgold_60x60.jpg.

The script is most definitely not robust, but hopefully it will be a good starting off point for some.

The problem code was

Doesn’t look problematic…unless you are running PHP 5.3. In PHP 5.3, namespace is a reserved keyword. Oops.

Renaming NAMESPACE to anything will work in this instance:

Tada!

See more of my Magento posts.

When leaving Shanghai, we hopped on the maglev train to go to Pudong Airport. It took around 8 minutes to go 18 miles. Not too shabby.

You get to see the different bits and pieces of China as you ride the maglev train:

Grabbing some dinner with Josh Chase at a snazzy Taco Bell, talking about dieting and how hot dogs are made.

At Flip Burger with @joshcaza, @nicdev, @JohnAgan, and @dannyoutlaw, some car flashiness, and Old Navy.

Old cupcakes, Chloe the cat with plastic bags and in the shower.

Music: Test Drive by Zapac

The New Yorker Deli, Firesheep, the bathrooms at The Varsity.

Music: Test Drive by Zapac

So I kinda missed the first few days of the #vlomo10 meme, but I guess its never too late to get started.

If you are interested, check out my other videos.

Wanting to investigate how a popular extension implemented certain functionality, I decided to install the extension on a new Magento dev environment:

Immediately thought I had broken PHP or PEAR in my environment. Then at the root Magento directory, I tried:

and got this error:

I nearly panicked at this point. I started checking file permissions, checking versions…yeah, general panic.

Of course, if you aren’t completely dim-witted like me and actually read the message, you’d see the problem:

Ohhh. Magento is configured to only accept stable extensions, and Foo_Bar is designated alpha.

Obviously, a quick fix. In the admin backend, go to System -> Magento Connect -> Magento Connect Manager -> Settings and change Preferred State to Alpha or whatever your extension is:

See more of my Magento posts.

Having set up the stream blog, I tried uploading pictures for a post about The Original Pancake House. Uploading didn’t give me any errors, but all the thumbnails and images were showing the broken image placeholder.

Here is what happened with my setup: after setting up multisite by following the instructions at the Codex, I tried installing W3 Total Cache. W3 Total Cache required changes to the .htaccess. But W3 Total Cache really wasn’t working on the underpowered Rackspace instance I was testing (completely my fault).

So I decided to go back to the original .htaccess:

Oops. The multisite references are gone! Look what the Codex states, the .htaccess should be:

After making the changes, the thumbnails under Media might still be broken. Edit an image and hit save. The thumbnails should be recreated.

Setting up the base install is not always easy. What happens if there are updates to the platform? How do deal with development environments versus production environments (think domains, logging, etc). How do you migrate data?

While all good questions, all those issues can be scripted out and handled. There will be tricky edge cases and lots of if-then or case/switch statements, but all doable.

To jump into solving whatever business problem you are working on, you usually need to have some sample data to tinker with. Take Magento for instance. Say you want to change what the product pages display. Gotta have some products in the database or you have to create new ones every time you start working with a new client.

Magento has sample data that can be loaded, but its not obvious how it should be loaded. The sample data needs to be loaded before going through the Magento installation wizard.

So the first step is to download the Magento code. Unzip/untar it in /var/www or wherever the web server can access it. Then create a database.

If you have already gone through the Magento installation process, you need to get rid of all the existing data: drop all the tables in your database and delete app/etc/local.xml (this is where the database access information is stored).

Now lets grab the sample data. Its available on the same page where you download Magento itself: http://www.magentocommerce.com/download. Scroll down a bit and download to your local machine.

Untar/unzip the file. You should see a directory and a file:

The contents of the media directory should be copied into media directory of your Magento install, so afterwards your Magento media directory should contain a catalog directory.

Next, the sample data needs to be inserted into the database. If phpMyAdmin is installed, do an import into the database with the downloaded SQL file.

Now go through the Magento installation wizard and you should have products show up on the frontend of the site when you are done.

Problems?

• Sample data images not showing up on frontpage – This is a permissions issue. If you downloaded the sample data media and moved it to the Magento directory, make sure the media and its sub-directories are owned by the same user who owns the Magento directory. Also make sure to turn off caching and deleting all caches while testing the fix.
• Admin user can’t login into backend – See my post Magento: Can’t Login after Installation Fix.

See more of my Magento posts.

This only applies to doing development on a local machine, not production sites. Base URLs on production sites should be set properly, so none of this will apply. But you are testing functionality or running a local Magento install, read on.

Today I was setting up a base Magento install with sample data and ran into a problem that happens quite a bit when setting Magento on a local server or development sandbox.

Basically, you start by downloading the code or doing a subversion check out to /var/www/ or /home/username/foo. You’ve got virtual hosting set up with AllowOverride ALL, so the .htaccess in the Magento directory will be honored.You go through the Magento installation wizard, everything goes peachy, you go to the admin backend, type in your admin username and password, and hit “Login”.

Instead of successfully logging in, you are presented with the login screen again. But there are no errors. Nothing that says invalid username or password. But you get a URL that looks like you have been authenticated:

WTF?!?

If you are like me, you are probably expecting to run Magento at something like http://localhost/magento. The problem is when Magento goes to create the session for localhost (or 127.0.0.1), it barfs since localhost isn’t a real domain.

There are a bunch of possible solutions. The ugly ones involve modifying core Magento code. For example, one common solution is to remove or comment out out lines where the cookies are being created, like lines 76-101 in app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Session/Abstract/Varien.php:

The problem with this is its maintenance hell. When upgrading Magento, I don’t want to have to remember to make sure this bit of code doesn’t get wiped out locally when merging. Or that I don’t check this code into a git or subversion repository that will be used to pull code down to production servers.

A better solution? While not exactly elegant, it will cause less pain in the future: add another domain to /etc/hosts for 127.0.0.1. Do something like this:

Then go to http://my.sandbox/index.php/admin and watch it all work like magic.

See more of my Magento posts.

It makes sense to change them.

Looking at the Drupal API and code where ‘view’ was defined, it said:

Fair enough, so changing it to ‘My Profile’ in foobar_menu_alter was trivial:

Similarly, I assumed that changing ‘edit’ to ‘Change Profile’ would be like swapping out the view for the edit in the code:

Apparently not. Digging through the source so far, you find that ‘Edit’ label is defined by:

Oopsies, its %user_category, not %user.

That ends up working just fine.

Of course we needed to login, make updates, upgrade the platform and do all that fun stuff.

Our main issue was that we couldn’t log in the administrator back-end. Looking at the database, we could see what the username was, but the password was MD5 hashed for security reasons.

There was no link on the site to login (since the site basically had one user). And the administrator login at /administrator has no reset password option.

There are a couple ways of getting around this.

First, you could create your password, MD5 hash it, and directly update the password field in the jos_users table in the database. Doable but icky.

But the second option is better: directly call up the login by going to http://www.yoursite.com/index.php?option=com_login&Itemid=1.

Tada.

After having loaded a couple files on the iPad, I sat down and watched them. Then I tried to delete them.

Umm.

Previously, I had used CineXPlayer to play content. In the app, you could right-swipe, and you’d get the option to delete the file.

VLC doesn’t have that capability. Yet.

Instead, you have to delete files the way many other File Sharing deal with it, manually deleting it through iTunes. Below are the instructions from the Apple Knowledgebase:

1. Attach iPad to your computer.
2. Select your iPad in the Devices section of iTunes.
3. Scroll down to the File Sharing section under the Apps tab.
4. Select VLC.
5. Select the file from the Documents list and click the Delete button.
6. When prompted to confirm your request, click the Delete button again. The file will be deleted from the app on iPad immediately.

For the Web Dev Fools podcast, I was taking behind the scene pictures of the intros that were recorded. I ended up with about 20 that I wanted to look at on my MacBook.

There are 4 options of transferring photos from the iPhone to a computer: text message them to an email address, import using iPhoto, email them using the iPhone Mail app, or sync with iTunes. I don’t have a text message plan, so I didn’t want to pay to text myself the pictures. You can’t select multiple pictures to email yourself through the iPhone Mail application. I don’t use iPhoto regularly, so thats a no go. And I don’t sync with iTunes, and I didn’t want to start now.

iTunes not being able to do it natively is irritating. It lets you grab music and movies off the iPhone directly, but not photos. The only option with iTunes is to sync:

But, Mac OS X does come with the perfect tool to get photos off the iPhone. Its called Image Capture. Simply plug in your iPhone to your Mac, and start Image Capture.

You will see your iPhone on the left panel, select it and you will see all the photos on the iPhone. You can select individual photos or import all of them. And it gives you the option of selecting a folder where the photos will be placed.

Perfect.

The critical part of what I wanted to set up was Xdebug. There are quite a few web designers/developers out there, who simply write code, save, refresh their PHP in the browser, and do a quick visual check. That might work for pretty simple stuff, but it can be hard to find tricky bugs when the web app achieves some level of sophistication. So Xdebug (or any other debugging tools like Zend) is a must for me.

First, you have to set up Eclipse to handle PHP. There are quite a few options here. You can download the many different IDEs based on Eclipse, download Eclipse with PDT, or install PDT as a plugin to an existing Eclipse installation. Since I already Eclipse installed, I decided to install it as a plugin.

In Eclipse, go to Help -> Install New Software.

Select the drop down menu for Work with:

Select Helios – http://download.eclipse.org/releases/helios.

Find the Programming Languages option, expand it, scroll down and select PHP Development Tools (PDT) SDK Feature.

Hit next, agree with the license, etc, etc.

Next, time to set up Xdebug in php.ini. If you installed MAMP in /Applications in Mac OS X, and assuming you want to use PHP 5.3, the php.ini is in /Applications/MAMP/conf/php5.3.

Find the [xdebug] section towards the end of the file, and update it to:

Unfortunately, the Xdebug that comes with MAMP didn’t work for me, so I needed to get a more recent version. There are Windows binaries on xdebug.org, but no Mac OS X ones. Turns out Komodo, another IDE, has already compiled binaries of the new versions of Xdebug. Download the Xdebug binaries from Komodo and update the zend_extension path above or replace the xdebug.so.

We need to let Eclipse know it should be using MAMP PHP. Go into Preferences -> PHP -> PHP Executables. Edit the default. Change the executable path to the MAMP PHP, something similar to /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5.3/bin/php. Make sure PHP debugger is Xdebug.

Below PHP Executables is PHP Servers. Lets update this to work with MAMP. MAMP’s default Apache port number is 8888, we’ll set the URL to http://localhost:8888.

Let’s make sure that Xdebug is working with MAMP. Create a test PHP file to spit out phpinfo, which lists configuration settings:

Go to Run -> Run As -> PHP Web Page. Scroll down a bit in the browser and you should see a reference to Xdebug:

The Xdebug version that comes with MAMP is 2.0.x.

Thats it.

It can be a pain to remove MySQL if you are running Mac OS X Snow Leopard on a machine. A while ago, I had downloaded the for MySQL DMG from mysql.org, mounted it, installed the database server, installed the startup item, and installed the panel for System Preferences.

We have been installing Ubuntu 10.04 server edition for our client dedicated servers and VPSs since it came out. Ubuntu 10.04 Server is going to be supported with minor bug fixes and security updates for 5 years, so its a great platform for building web applications. So I wanted to update the MySQL version running on my development machine closer to the MySQL running on Ubuntu 10.04.

Then I was reminded of a nasty problem that is all too common unfortunately. A lot of open source tools that have installers for Mac OS X, don’t having corresponding uninstallers. I can understand why open source developers aren’t keen on spending time to do so. Most of them are using a Linux distribution to write code, and they already have package managers (either YUM for Red Hat/Fedora or APT for Debian/Ubuntu). If you use a package manager to install an application, it can be used to uninstall easily as well.

It takes a few steps to remove MySQL off Snow Leopord. If any of this breaks your system, don’t blame me, the following process on my machine.

First, use mysqldump to backup all the databases you want to keep.

Second, stop the database. There are a couple ways of doing this. If you installed the MySQL preferences panel, you can go in there and shutdown the server. Otherwise, “sudo mysqladmin shutdown”.

Next, lets remove the MySQL binary and configuration files:

If you installed the service to startup MySQL automatically at boot and the System Preferences panel, lets remove them:

OS X keeps track of installed applications by tracking “receipts”. There are several places we need to delete references to MySQL. First:

Next, we are going to  look for receipts in a different location. Open up /Library/Receipts/InstallHistory.plist, find the entry for MySQL, delete the entry.

One more location: look in /private/var/db/receipts/ and search for mysql in the directory. There should be 2 files, delete them.

You are done.

Trying to set up an Umbraco installation, using a Windows Server 2008 + SQL Server Express AMI on Amazon EC2, I kept getting Error number 18456 when trying to log in as ‘sa’ with the SQL Server Management Studio. This is the log of the error:

The stacktrace wasn’t helpful, since it basically showed exceptions being thrown when trying to login.

What made it bizarre was that I could look at the database if I logged into SQL Server Management Studio using Windows Authentication.

These are all the things I checked:

• Server Manager -> Configuration -> Services -> SQL Server, SQL Server Browser, started
• SQL Server Management Studio -> Security Login -> sa -> Properties -> Status -> Login, enabled
• SQL Server Management Studio -> Security Login -> sa -> Properties -> General -> enter a new password
• SQL Server Configuration Manager -> SQL Server Network Configuration -> Protocols for SQLEXXPRESS -> TCPIP, enabled
• Windows Firewall -> Inbound Rules -> SQL Server Inbound, enabled

At this point, it might be obvious you what I did wrong: SQL Server Database Engine is set to Windows Authentication mode when it should be set to SQL Server and Windows Authentication mode. To fix this:

• SQL Server Management Studio -> Properties -> Security -> select SQL Server and Windows Authentication mode
• Restart database server

Then you can login as ‘sa’. Wohoo!

Update: Video changed.

I ran into an interesting Mac OS X Perl issue the other day. Since @runlevelmedia hosts websites for clients, its a good idea to have a backup strategy. Hoping and prayer is not really strategy.

We have been working on updating our backup plan to make it more efficient. Basically, the script could be run from different machines, so we have multiple copies as a starting point.

Testing out the script on my Macbook threw me for a surprise. Apparently, I mostly use the basic Perl modules pre-installed with Mac OS X and I’d never run across any issues.

(Yes, my Macbook name is jeebus). Quick Googling found people complaining about the Perl version installed by Mac OS X. The problem is that its not the best idea to yank out the pre-installed version because a lot of apps and systems related processes expects it all work in a certain way. One example I saw was how iTunes used a string comparison behavior that got changed in the more recent versions of Perl. So lots of folks end up installing a bunch of different versions of Perl, which is beyond confusing and unmanageable.

Turns the following command makes it pretty easy to install specific CPAN modules:

Another option is to kick off a CPAN shell and install that way:

That’s it!

Frankly, if you are ever in Central Florida, and need a break from screaming kids or just a couple hours of down time, visit the Harry P. Leu Gardens. Its in downtown Orlando, away from all the tourist traps. Its quiet and serene.

Sit in the Butterfly Garden and watch them dancing away. Check out all the beautiful roses and camellias.

Well, you know what that leads to, right?

Video podcasting of course!

This is basically @nicdev, @dmustafic, @joshcaza, and me (@iamtherealnick) babbling about web development related topics for an hour:

Enjoy and remember to visit webdevfools.com for the latest episodes.

While I’ll embed the videos here now and then, they will all get posted at nickandjosh.com.

Shiva:

Flow 2:

Bokeh:

cosmosition:

Endeavour Lifts Off by NASA:

Lets backtrack a bit here. Towards the beginning of the year, I set my New Years resolutions, just like everyone else. One of my resolutions was to try to help out in the community. I wanted to join an organization that was interested in giving a helping hand. So I decided to look into the big 3 organizations everyone has heard of: Lions Club, Kiwanis, and Rotary Club. I had done Key Club in high school, and wanted something different, so Kiwanis was out (nothing wrong with Kiwanis of course, but I wanted to put myself more out there).

So I googled ‘Atlanta Lions Club’ and up came the Atlanta Lions Club. Well, that was easy.

I emailed Scott Rogers, the club president, and he invited me to their next meeting. A few days later, I walked into one of the rooms at the Capital City Club and met lots of awesome folks. Scott and I talked a few days later, trying to figure out how I wanted to be involved.

Vision is a huge focus for Lions Clubs (no pun intended). This goes back to Hellen Keller challenging Lions Clubs to be “knights of the blind in the crusade against darkness.” This is a topic I can empathize with. Since I wear contacts most of the time, not many folks see me with my honkin’ thick glasses at night or on the weekends. Without contacts or glasses, I can’t tell how many fingers you are holding up if they were a foot from my face.

My biggest fear is not being able to see.

So I want to get involved in anything sight-related. One awesome cause is the Georgia Lions Lighthouse Foundation. The Lighthouse provides eye exams and glasses to folks who can’t afford them. You can donate old glasses (usable or broken) to the Lighthouse.

One of the biggest fundraising events for the Lighthouse is the Night of Spectacles. While the event has a silent auction for raising money, the fun part is a design competition of making dresses that incorporate donated broken glasses. This year, the Night of Spectacles is being held April 22nd, at the Mason Murer Gallery.

The Lighthouse is raising money to open a new 4,450 square feet facility in Decatur. With so many people needing their services, this will allow more people to volunteer, and most importantly, more people to be helped.

And oh yeah, overhead at the Lighthouse is 6%, meaning for every dollar you donate, 94 cents goes directly to their programs!

I’m hoping to help out at the screenings that the Lighthouse holds all over the state.

Members of the Atlanta Lions Club get together once a month and volunteer at The Pantry.  The Pantry provides food to anyone in need. It isn’t limited to homeless individuals. Imagine anyone who has lost their job and can’t make ends meet. The wife and I trekked down there earlier this month to help out. Unfortunately, it was closed because of the insane snowstorm that hit the southeast. But we plan on making it out there once a month to help out.

The Atlanta Lions Club will also be helping out at the American Diabetes Association EXPO/Atlanta on March 27th with free screenings.

Either way, I’m happy to be part of such a great organization. I’m happy that I’ll have the chance to help.

I’m proud to be a Lion.

]]> http://nali.org/atlanta-lions-club-member/feed/ 0 http://nali.org/pics-from-garyvee-book-signing-in-atlanta-w-runlevelmedia-joshcaza/ http://nali.org/pics-from-garyvee-book-signing-in-atlanta-w-runlevelmedia-joshcaza/#comments Sat, 06 Feb 2010 05:29:40 +0000 nick http://iamtherealnick.wordpress.com/2010/02/06/pics-from-garyvee-book-signing-in-atlanta-w-runlevelmedia-joshcaza/ Josh Chase and I headed to Cost Plus World Market for Gary Vaynerchuk’s book signing of Crush It!, to represent Run Level Media. Had a great time!

But Internet Guru always seemed arrogant. I've worked in Internet startups, I've worked on huge web platforms, but calling myself Internet Guru just seemed pretentious. Tessa Horehled's blog post How To Identify A New Media Douchebag just made it worse, because she was right. I definitely don't know it all, and Guru made it seem like I did.

So I talked to the wife about this. To paraphrase her response "Ummm, you are a geek. Call yourself an Internet Geek."

Now I don't feel like a prick when handing out my shiny new business cards.

While we have done plenty of video podcasts before, this is going to be an experiment from the ground up. The whole site will be perpetually under construction as we try out new tools and new ways of doing media distribution. Live streaming and BackNoise will be integrated so we can connect directly to viewers.

It will all be fun!

Leave us some feedback on what you think.

Awesome badges. Whoever designed them did a great job.

Chris Brogan has a post about doing things for free and how you should charge for certain services.

Offering free services can definitely be tricky. Honestly, the only time you should do it is if it isn’t going to offer you headaches. Its ok that Twitter is free, each new user doesn’t require any additional work for Twitter (ok, a million additional users might cause the fail whale, but thats a different problem).

Providing free services when it requires time and labor, especially for a one person shop or a small business, can be an exercise in futility. If you are giving free classes to a whole bunch of people, great. One person vs 10 people in a class situation probably doesn’t matter.

From my own experience, when you offer something from free, clients the world. If you are doing pro bono work for a client, it is critical to clearly define what services you will be providing for free. At least if you don’t want your hair going white! Treat the client just like a paying client. If you have a development or process cycle, do it with the free clients as well.

Don’t sell yourself short.

Enjoy.

Television networks have depended on Nielsen ratings for a long time. Nielsen breaks down how many people are watching what show and demographics of the viewers. Nielsen has been collecting data since 1950. Similarly, radio stations, newspapers, and other print media can provide detailed breakdowns of listeners and readership. Advertisers can get similar data from popular websites who are looking to sell space on their sites.

The old model is about broadcasting to hopefully the right people and getting them interested in products. That doesn’t work with social media. Its all about relationships. Building relationship, cultivating relationships, interacting with clients, potential clients.

The onus falls on the marketer to start creating organic growth.

So how?

Sean Carton, over at Clickz, has a great article called A Social Media Strategy Checklist. Its a great starting point for everyone, especially for folks wondering what the right questions are. To kick off any social media strategy, these questions need to be answered:

1. What are we trying to accomplish?
2. Why social media?
3. What kind of social media will help us best achieve our goals?
4. Are we prepared to let go of control of our brand, at least a little?
5. What will we do to encourage participation?
6. Who will maintain our social media presence?
7. Do we have the resources to keep this up, or will this be a short campaign?
8. How does engaging use rs via social media integrate into our overall marketing/communications strategy?
9. How do we measure success? What constitutes failure?
10. What will we do less of if we’re spending resources on social media?

The question of what resources to dedicate to social media (#7 above) is interesting. Attending New Media Atlanta conference recently, Newell-Rubbermaid was involved in a panel discussion. An audience member asked what kind of resources Rubbermaid puts towards social media. The response: 50% of one full-time employee and 2 interns. Rubbermaid has a market cap of $4.2B. Its hard to believe such a well known brand, whose bottom-line is tied to consumer confidence in its brand, would not provide more resources to its public face. Still, Rubbermaid clearly understands the value of their online presence and social media and has plans for expansion.

The panel also discussed ROI (part of #9 above). The usual metrics of measuring views, followers, comments, or subscribers don’t apply well if the product is purchased from retailers. Rubbermaid said the only form of marketing they could successfully measure was of the in-store variety. Chris Brogan, who was the keynote for the New Media Atlanta conference, said the only ROI that mattered was specific dollar amounts. Show spending X amounts of dollars on social media will lead to Y dollars in savings.

It is important to remember that having concrete answers for all the above questions may not be possible. Knowing why and how are basic questions and can’t be pushed to the back burner. Without answers to them, no viable strategy can be created. The ROI question is tricky and there is no consensus, but Brogan’s assertion that providing a dollar value can be a good starting point. 

First Name	Last Name	Site/Blog
Selah	Abrams	http://www.turnerstudios.com
Nick	Ali	http://www.nali.org
Jeb	Barger	http://www.jebba.net
Sanjay	Bhatia	http://www.izenda.com
Jake	Bohall	http://tastevine.com
Randall	Bollig
Tiffany	Brown	http://www.tiffanybbrown.com
Russ	Caldwell
Nate	Clark	http://nateclark.com
David	Cohen	http://davidscohen.wordpress.com
Greg	Corrin
Dave	Coustan	http://blog.extraface.com
Brian	Culler	http://www.brianculler.com
Brad	Dillon	http://designersbloc.com
Ptah	Dunbar	http://www.ptahdunbar.net
Andy	Edmonds	http://surfmind.com
Geoff	Edwards	http://www.tightgrid.com
Dennis	Eusebio	http://www.thoughtandtheory.com
Stephen	Fleming	http://academicvc.blogspot.com
Jonathan	Gaffke
Bryan	Gay	http://www.dedicatedhosting.com
Glen	Gordon	http://blogs.msdn.com/glengordon
Logan	Gray	http://www.intensetech.com
Lee	Hadsock	http://www.dedicatedhosting.com
William	Harris	http://williamharris.name
Jeff	Haynie	http://blog.jeffhaynie.us
Toby	Ho	http://futuretoby.dyndns.org/wiki/Toby
Michael	Ivey	http://gweezlebur.com
Bobby	John	http://www.creationstep.com
Mark	Jones	http://www.bravadosoft.com
David	Jones	http://blog.lenderflex.com
Russell	Jurney	http://www.lucision.com
Keoni	Kepner
Rachel	Keslensky	http://lastresot.xepher.net
Alex	Kira	http://alexkira.blogspot.com
Craig	Larson
Chris	Martin	http://cjmart.in
Michael	Mealling	http://masten-space.com
Travis	Metcalf	http://travismetcalf.com
Timothy	Moenk	http://tmoenk.typepad.com
Greg	Mueller	http://www.tastevine.com
Jesse	Newland	http://soylentfoo.jnewland.com
Sanjay	Parekh	http://www.sanjayparekh.com
Tejus	Parikh	http://www.vijedi.net
Alan	Pinstein
Evan	Pitstick
Brian	Pitts	http://www.polibyte.com
William	Powell	http://powellizer.wordpress.com
Rob	Ragan
Amber	Rhea	http://beingamberrhea.com
Steven	Romej	http://www.romej.com
Shauvik	Roy Choudhary	http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~shauvik
Murari	S
Sam	Schenkman-Moore	http://samsm.com
Benjamin	Scherry	http://www.biggestfan.net
Chris	Schoon
Thomas	Shanks
Charles	Shapiro	http://tomshiro.org
Kristyn	Shayon	http://pleaseremainstanding.blogspot.com
Paul	Stamatiou	http://paulstamatiou.com
Josh	Sweeney	http://www.securitydistro.com
Rusty	Tanton	http://www.gapodcastnetwork.com
Victor	Tolbert	http://vticonsulting.com
Aarjav	Trivedi	http://aarjav.org
Doug	Turnure	http://blogs.msdn.com/dougturn
Sandro	Turriate	http://thoughtandtheory.com
Joe	Uhl	http://blog.gtuhl.com
Josh	Watts	http://www.blue-violin.com
Lance	Weatherby	http://blog.weatherby.net
Micah	Wedemeyer	http://blog.aisleten.com
Lisa	Weldon	http://www.clubhouseGAS.com
Jason	White
James	Williams	http://griftdrift.blogspot.com
John	Willis	http://johnmwillis.com
Dan	Winship	http://mysterion.org/~danw/blog/
Dave	Wright	http://www.jungledisk.com
Rusty	Zarse	http://www.vitaminzproductions.com/blog

Check out my pictures in Flickr. There is also a BarCamp Atlanta 2007 group on Flickr here.

Pictures from Saturday at BarCamp Atlanta 2007:</p.

Check out all my BarCamp Atlanta pictures in Flickr. There is also a BarCamp Atlanta 2007 group on Flickr here.

Here are a few pictures from Friday night of BarCamp Atlanta 2007:</p.

All the pictures can be seen here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nali/sets/72157602219546137/