Bugzilla: Upgrading MySQL Database from Latin1 to UTF8

IM­POR­TANT Up­date 2009-07-09: This in­for­ma­tion is al­ready sev­eral years old! You should not use this in­for­ma­tion for mod­ern ver­sions of Bugzilla (3.2 and above), which will allow you to con­vert to UTF-8 using check­setup.pl.

In the pre­sent case, we have a Bugzilla data­base cre­ated with a charset of lat­in1. Un­for­tu­nately, now after up­dat­ing MySQL to 4.1, error oc­cured when try­ing to as­sign a new de­vel­oper to a bug, in­di­cat­ing mis­match of col­la­tions (UTF-8 vs. Lat­in1). This is caused by the fact that there is now lat­in1-data stored in an UTF-8 table.

The fol­low­ing pro­ce­dure can be used to up­grade the data­base to UTF-8, elim­i­nat­ing the prob­lem:

  1. mysqldump -p --default_character-set=latin1 --skip-set-charset bugs > dump.sql
  2. mysql -p --execute="DROP DATABASE bugs; CREATE DATABASE bugs CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;"
  3. mysql -p --default-character-set=utf8 bugs < dump.sql
  4. perl -pe 's/latin1_bin/utf8_general_ci/g; s/latin1/utf8/g' dump.sql > dump-utf8.sql
  5. mysql -p --default-character-set=utf8 bugs < dump-utf8.sql

You should of course al­ways check if the Pearl-RegEx only re­placed charset de­c­la­ra­tions and not some matches within the data.

Thanks to TextSnip­pets for the script.

DWR – Easy AJAX for Java

DWR is a re­ally fan­tas­tic li­brary for Java: it al­lows to write JavaScript ap­pli­ca­tions in web browsers that will di­rectly and al­most trans­par­ently call Java-meth­ods of ob­jects that live in the Java-Servlet-Con­tainer (e.g. Tom­cat) as part of the web-ap­pli­ca­tion.

Con­tinue read­ing “DWR – Easy AJAX for Java”

KDE-Style Window-Movement on Windows

One of the minor fea­tures I ad­mire most in the com­mon X11-Win­dow-Man­ager im­ple­men­ta­tions on Linux is the fact that you can move and re­size Win­dows eas­ily with­out first mov­ing the mouse to a spe­cial lo­ca­tion of the par­tic­u­lar win­dow: Drag­ging your mouse while hold­ing Alt+(Left-Mouse-But­ton) will move the win­dow, hold­ing Alt+(Right-Mouse-But­ton) will re­size the win­dow on its near­est edge.

I al­ways missed this lit­tle fea­ture when work­ing on Win­dows. Today I found a script for Au­to­Hotkey, which is a free (GPL) script­ing en­vi­ron­ment for hotkeys. After in­stalling Au­to­Hotkey, sim­ply down­load and launch the script by dou­ble-click­ing it and now you’ll have the same be­hav­iour for win­dow move­ment and re­siz­ing as under KDE. Re­ally cool!

Au­to­Hotkey can do a lot more, un­for­tu­nately I have not yet had time to try out more.

Scuttle: Your Own Server-Side Bookmarks the del.icio.us’ Way

I have been using del.​icio.​us since I first heard about it (by read­ing an an­nounce­ment of its ac­quire­ment by Yahoo!) and I have to con­fess I was taken by the ap­proach. The only thing I didn’t like was the fact that I didn’t have my book­marks and the ser­vice under con­trol.

Thanks to a note by Erik I found out about Scut­tle, an open source clone of del.​icio.​us which every­one can host on his/her own server. (Please note: scut­tle.org only of­fers their pub­lic book­mark­ing ser­vice, the soft­ware can only be lo­cated at their Source­Forge page.) Scut­tle is writ­ten in PHP and re­quires MySQL as data­base back­end.

Scut­tle of­fers most of the fea­tures of del.​icio.​us and can even im­port your book­marks from there. Some minor us­abil­ity-is­sues still arise, but I can live with them. Their API is com­pat­i­ble to del.​icio.​us so most ex­ter­nal del.​icio.​us ap­pli­ca­tions will work with Scut­tle, as long as the tools allow you to spec­ify the URL of the ser­vice. Ad­di­tion­ally, Scut­tle pro­vides three lev­els of vis­i­bil­ity for your book­marks: pub­lic book­marks, shared with your watch­list (= your friends/col­leagues), and pri­vate book­marks.

I in­stalled Scut­tle at my com­pany and every­one is busy using it and is happy to now hav­ing a cen­tral place to store their book­marks. Del.​icio.​us was no op­tion for us be­cause all book­marks are pub­lic there.

I can strongly rec­om­mend using this soft­ware to every­one who wants to have a cen­tral­ized way for stor­ing their book­marks with­out giv­ing away all con­trols over their book­marks.

News­Forge has pub­lished a nice re­view of the soft­ware.

OpenVPN and Tap-Win32-Adapter Problem

Open­VPN on Mi­crosoft Win­dows has a prob­lem with the TAP-Win32-Adapter dri­ver used for the tun­nel. The de­vice needs to be de­ac­ti­vated/re­ac­ti­vated after a Win­dows restart be­fore any con­nec­tion can be es­tab­lished. In this ar­ti­cle I pre­sent a very sim­ple script and so­lu­tion for au­tomat­ing this process.

Con­tinue read­ing “Open­VPN and Tap-Win32-Adapter Prob­lem”

Gentoo: MySQL and PHP Charset Problems

At the mo­ment, Gen­too is ex­pe­ri­enc­ing sev­eral in­con­sis­tency and prob­lems with char­ac­ter sets be­tween MySQL and PHP. This is pri­marely based on MySQL-4.1 now up­dat­ing from 4.0 with­out warn­ing and user in­ter­ac­tion which most of the times breaks ex­ist­ing ex­tended char­ac­ters as MySQL now stores every dump from for­mer data­bases as UTF-8, which is still badly sup­ported by PHP.

For many PHP web ap­pli­ca­tions which ex­pe­ri­ence prob­lems with ex­tended char­ac­ters (like um­lauts, ac­cents, …), the fol­low­ing hack might help.

  1. Lo­cate the file where the mysql data­base con­nec­tion is opened.
  2. Add the fol­low­ing com­mands after open­ing the data­base con­nec­tion:
    mysql_query('SET character_set_client=latin1');
    mysql_query('SET character_set_results=latin1');
    mysql_query('SET character_set_connection=latin1');

This will re­sume using lat­in1 in­stead of UTF-8 for the con­nec­tion and the re­sult set. For per­for­mance rea­sons, the data in the data­base should then be stored as lat­in1 as well.

Ac­cord­ing to mes­sages in the Gen­too Forum, the de­vel­op­ers have now re­leased an ebuild for PHP (both 5.x and 4.4.2) that will re­gard char­ac­ter-set set­tings in my.​cnf in a sec­tion es­pe­cially for php (still in un­sta­ble). You should use the sec­tion [php-cli], [php-cgi] and/or [php-apache2han­dler]. Un­for­tu­nately I have not yet had time to test this out.

Increasing Performance of VMWare Virtual Machines on External Devices

By de­fault, VMware Work­sta­tion 5.x use a mem­ory mapped file for back­ing the RAM of the sim­u­lated ma­chines. This eases the pres­sure on the sys­tem’s page file. If you host the vir­tual ma­chine on an ex­ter­nal drive, how­ever, this can be­come a bot­tle neck, es­pe­cially if the ex­ter­nal de­vice is slow (e.g. USB 1.1, flash, etc.).

As de­scribed in this VMware Knowl­edge Base Ar­ti­cle, you can turn of VMWare’s be­hav­iour to use a mem­ory mapped file and force it to use the sys­tem’s pag­ing mech­a­nism in­stead. To do so, you just have to add

mainMem.useNamedFile=FALSE

to your vir­tual ma­chine’s con­fig­u­ra­tion file (.vmx).

VisualStudio.NET: Text-Editor Guide at 80

Guiding lines in VS.NET 2005It is still con­sid­ered good style to keep code-lines within a cer­tain bound (e.g. 80 char­ac­ters). IDEs like Eclipse offer to dis­play a red guid­ing line at the cho­sen off­set to help de­vel­op­ers keep within this bound.

By mod­i­fy­ing the reg­istry a sim­i­lar guide can be en­abled for Vi­sual Stu­dio 2003 / 2005. Add a string value Guides to the key (VS.​NET 2005, VS 2003 has ver­sion 7.1)

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Text Editor.

Set the value to

RGB(128,0,0) 80

To have mul­ti­ple guides (like in the screen­shot), add the ad­di­tional columns space de­lim­ited, e.g.

RGB(128,0,0) 80 100

Ackn.: This in­for­ma­tion has been pro­vided by Hannes Pavelka in Mi­crosoft’s news­group mi­crosoft.​public.​dotnet.​languages.​csharp, Mes­sage-ID: <e1­jag7$qk7$02$1@​news.​t-​online.​com> (Ar­ti­cle in Google Groups):

Microsoft: Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure 2.0 Release

Just came ac­cross this: seems like Mi­crosoft has re­leased some parts of the CLI under one of their “free” li­censes.

Down­load de­tails: Shared Source Com­mon Lan­guage In­fra­struc­ture 2.0 Re­lease

Up­date 2006/03/26: As I just no­ticed at Mono’s “Con­tribut­ing” page, they won’t ac­cept any con­tri­bu­tions from peo­ple who had a look at the down­load.