Spent a couple of hours today upgrading from MySQL 5.0 to MySQL 5.1

It went ok.

While trying to find some quick and easy ways to import data into Zen Cart I’ve ended up looking into phpMyAdmin.

Also MySQL 5.1 seems to support CSV as a storage engine. See this post: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/csv-storage-engine.html

All good stuff – I’m probably going to need to refer back to that sometime hence the post – time to sleep now.

Very useful list of query criteria expressions for retrieving records by date:

e.g. last week, last month, last 28 days

It was supplied by a company who are no longer in business so I was pretty much on my own.

After attaching a monitor and keyboard and watching it boot I discovered it was booting OpenBSD 3.8

I didn’t know the root password and this appliance had lost all tcp/ip connectivity. So I googled and found http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/reset-forgotten-openbsd-root-password.html

This post worked like a charm for me and I had reset the root password within a few minutes.

No time to find out why this appliance cannot communicate over tcp/ip currently.

My laptop’s RAID0 array failed the other day resulting in a new hdd installation and a complete re-install of the operating system.

I had backups of my work, my personal files etc however I had to go through the hassle of re-installing all my applications.

As a side note – what a poor config choice RAID0 turned out to be. Unfortunately this was the way the laptop arrived from the factory. In my opinion it doubles the chances of a catastrophic disk failure as either disk going down will render the raid drive unusable. I chose to configure RAID1 when I rebuilt.

It’s always best to have a recent backup to restore from, but when you need to install all your applications again it helps to have a check list as there is just so many to remember.

So in no particular order here are most of them:

• Notepad++
• mIRC
• Adobe Reader / Shockwave / Flash
• Canon Digital Photo Software
• SQL Server 2008 Express Edition
• Visual Studio Express Edition
• SyncToy 2.1
• Windows Live Messenger
• AVG Antivirus / Microsoft Security Essentials
• Google Chrome
• Mozilla Firefox
• Mozilla Thunderbird
• 7Zip
• Gimp
• Blender
• VLC
• nMap – needs WinPcap
• Wireshark
• Microsoft Network Monitor
• Microsoft WinDbg
• Dia
• Inkscape
• FreeMind
• VNC Server / Viewer
• Nokia Software
• Java
• Google Earth
• SysInternals Suite
• Python
• Azureus / Vuze
• Daemon Tools Lite
• FileZilla
• ImgBurn
• Audacity
• Amaya
• Visual Studio 2008 Shell
• SQL Server 2008 Express Edition
• Windows Powershell 2.0
• CDex (ripper)
• PuTTY
• UltraVNC
• ImageMagick
• Skype
• DiscJuggler (demo)

It’s available here: http://phplayersmenu.sourceforge.net/

I’ve just been getting this well known php script to work under Windows with PHP running under IIS.

After following the docs and making sure I set $myDirPath = ‘D:\\Websites\\sitename.co.uk\\phplayersmenu-3.2.0\\’;
$myWwwPath = ‘/phplayersmenu-3.2.0/’;

I was nearly there except I was getting a template error.

After a little searching I found the solution in \lib\layersmenu.inc.php

There is some code in there that sets various default paths and it needed changing to take account of the windows notation for the physical file paths.

/*
 $this->dirroot = ‘./’;
 $this->libjsdir = ‘./libjs/’;
 $this->imgdir = ‘./menuimages/’;
 $this->imgwww = ‘menuimages/’;
 $this->icondir = ‘./menuicons/’;
 $this->iconwww = ‘menuicons/’;
 $this->tpldir = ‘./templates/’;
*/

/* BECAME THIS */

$winroot = ‘D:\\Websites\\manick.co.uk\\phplayersmenu-3.2.0\\’;
$winWwwPath = ‘/phplayersmenu-3.2.0/’;
 $this->dirroot = $winroot;
 $this->libjsdir = $winroot.’libjs\\’;
 $this->imgdir = $winroot.’menuimages\\’;
 $this->imgwww = $winWwwPath.’menuimages/’;
 $this->icondir = $winroot.’menuicons\\’;
 $this->iconwww = $winWwwPath.’menuicons/’;
 $this->tpldir = $winroot.’templates\\’;

After that I was good to go and the menu system now works in any folder on the webserver not just the folder I installed the script.