Michael's Tech Blog

Recently I moved from Fedora 13 to Ubuntu 10.04 on my work laptop. So, I faced again with problem to setup Oracle PHP interface. Oracle provides RPMs only and not DEBs. So, to install the client RPMs should be converted to the DEBs. It can be done easily using utility alien:

They can be installed then with sudo dpkg -i.
Don’t forget to install PHP interface to Oracle:

That’s it. I spent no more 15 minutes to setup PHP Oracle interface under Ubuntu. Thanks to that post!

There are two ways (at least) to rebuild Ubuntu package from the source.
Using Ubuntu diff file and dpkg-buildpackage

• Download source from Ubuntu repository.
• Download Ubuntu diff file and apply it:
  patch -p1 < ubuntu.diff
• Build package:
  dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot

Using .dsc file and debuild

• Download .dsc file
• Run following command:
  dpkg-source -x file.dsc

  Note, sometimes the archive with sources should be presented in the same directory!

• Go to source directory and start building:
  debuild

In both cases the development packages should be installed first:

I have two versions of LinuxMCE on my HTPC – stable 0710 and developer 0810. The 0810 was installed after 0710. So, the GRUB bootloader was placed on 0810 partition. A few days ago I decided re-install 0810 from the scratch and I deleted its partition including GRUB booloader. As result I couldn’t boot 0710 anymore. Thanks to GRUB power and flexibility I was able to fix that problem and watch Champions League The solution is simple and clear: boot from any LiveCD, drop terminal and type following command there:

That’s it. After booting from HDD the GRUB menu was found again.

To log Mysql console session use option –tee (two dashes!) with full path to the log file:

As result the file /tmp/mysql_console.log will contains all commands and queries with result of their executions. That might be helpful to keep your queries for using next time or for troubleshooting.

The author of the post, where I found that useful info, said that each time the Mysql session is started with logging the log file will be replaced. In my case it isn’t. As I expected the new messages just are appended to the log file.

I use VIM with additional configuration instead of IDE. That configuration includes code explorer using ctag, syntax checking for PHP and Perl and run Perl scripts (syntax highlighting is not a subject of discussion ). Also I should run Mysql queries often. So, I decided to add integration with Mysql to VIM. I managed to do that thanks to that simple solution. Just add this code to your .vimrc:
to select database:

to run query:

So, when you press Ctrl-d the VIM gives you a prompt to type database name, Ctrl-m will run query. Sure you can use the your preferable combinations of keys. Also you may extend the login functionality by adding prompt for database host and user or hardcoded that information in the SwitchDB() function.

Using VIM to construct queries in the Mysql shell even much easier. Just specify VIM as default editor:

After that type \e in the Mysql shell. It’ll bring you VIM window where you’ll able to type your query. To finish with editing just type ZZ as usual. To run built query type ; and press Enter.

As result we’ll have possibility to run Mysql queries directly from VIM and using VIM to create queries in the Mysql shell.

I spent a few day with patching LinuxMCE database connection to pass UTF8 option to the server. But without luck. However I found a way to configure mysql server to skip client’s request about charset and send all data in the defined one. To do that just add following lines in the my.cnf file under mysqld section:

The option init_connect replaces setting ‘SET NAMES utf8′ from the client and skip-character-set-client-handshake tells to server to ignore charset sent by client and use it default one instead.

I tested this approach with LinuxMCE and it works. The Russian text is displayed on the Orbiter correctly. I tested it with Perl as well and found that Perl script still should set option mysql_enable_utf8 to true.

[via Saiweb]

I was very surprised how pure the Oracle’s command line utility SQL*Plus. Comparing with mysql it lack history, completion and doesn’t allow even edit query. To fix that the utility rlwrap can be used. I installed it via yum under Fedora 11 and run like that:

To have auto-complete feature you should find file SQL.dict somewhere (drop the comment, please, if you know the place). It contains SQL keywords, functions and commands. The command to run SQL*Plus will be following in that case:

To make our life easier we can create an alias in the .bash_profile or .profile:

There is an another interesting improvement for Linux users – using VIM as default editor of SQL*Plus. I didn’t try it practically yet.

[via Oracle Online]

I did it a few times but always made a search and dug WordPress code. So, just generate a new password:

and update specified user in the table wp_users: