Computers

Fun with Unicode

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edocinU a ot ni 1611 retcarahc edocinU eht epyt ouy fI????????
gnihtyreve tnirp lliw ti ,resworb a ekil ge , margorp erawa
????????! teaN .esrever ni

Note : can't show you the real Unicode char, cause either Drupal or MySQL is transforming it into '???????'. Follow the link !

The developer cheat sheet compilation

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If you're used to vim for your daily editing tasks, but you're on a server hosting only vi, then you might miss vims extra features like visual blocks, window splitting and folding. Here's where the vi cheat sheet comes to rescue. Fuzzyfuture.com has a list of several of these cheat sheets ranging from C++ to Oracle syntax references. Stick those on your cubicle walls and look like an expert !

Happiness is a warm login prompt

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After a MySQL crash (or PHP upgrade) at my hosting provider, my site started to misbehave. Badly. Drupal refused any login attempt, which is, as you can imagine, quite impractical. For days, I searched the Drupal forums, tried every hint of every problem which looked somehow like mine, but without any luck. I got my site back in hand after :

* backup database and website pages
* drop the database, remove all Drupal webpages, and reinstall.
* create a new admin user
* log out
* drop the entire database again, but keep the users table.
* Restore the database except for the users table
* Restore old Drupal pages

There might be some things which can look weird, but I hope to correct those in the next couple of days...

Drupal 5.0 migration

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Most of the modules that I used in Drupal 4.6 have been upgraded at this moment. For the taxonomy_image module, I have to modify the Garland stylesheet yet. Has anyone done this already ? A patch would be nice.

However, the spam module doesn't seem 5.0 ready yet, which is quite annoying, as Drupal is quite easily spammable. As I don't feel like cleaning up the comment section every day, I have switched to captcha's. The captcha module offers a choice between text images and arithmetic questions which is kinda cool. There's seems to be some problems with text images, so I have to burden your arithmetic capabilities somehow ;)

Drupal 5.0

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Drupal 5.0 has been released this week, so this was the ideal opportunity to upgrade from my old (and now officially unsupported) 4.6 version to 5.0. The upgrade went pretty smooth, though I took my precautions and performed the upgrade first on a local copy. Fine stuff is the Garland theme, which colors can be changed on-the-fly.
Next thing to do is to upgrade some old modules, like the taxonomy_image module.