Category Archives: Programming

Material related to computer programming.

Omitting date completed from MySQL dump file

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By default when you run a dump with ‘mysqldump’ the date of the dump is appended to the file, e.g.:

jj5@love:~/desktop/experiment$ udiff *
--- dbt__jj_dev_1__svn_jdrepo.1.sql     2019-06-11 18:11:13.267758230 +1000
+++ dbt__jj_dev_1__svn_jdrepo.2.sql     2019-06-11 18:12:03.856075974 +1000
@@ -32,4 +32,4 @@
 /*!40101 SET COLLATION_CONNECTION=@OLD_COLLATION_CONNECTION */;
 /*!40111 SET SQL_NOTES=@OLD_SQL_NOTES */;

--- Dump completed on 2019-06-10 21:59:44
+-- Dump completed on 2019-06-10 12:06:49

This causes dumps for a single database that has not changed to have two dumps which differ. It’s better to have dumps from the same unchanged database to be the same. To facilitate that add the –skip-dump-date option when running ‘mysqldump’.

See here for the back-story.

Fixing character encoding issue in ViewVC

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So I was having an issue with ViewVC wherein UTF-8 content (a copyright symbol) was being garbled in the web browser.

I chased a number of red herrings (Content-Type headers, http-equiv, XHTML vs HTML5) but eventually found the culprit in the viewvc.conf settings.

I needed to change the ‘detect_encoding’ setting from ‘1’ to ‘0’. Once that was done my content was presented correctly:

## detect_encoding: Should we attempt to detect versioned file
## character encodings?  [Requires 'chardet' module, and is currently
## used only by the syntax coloration logic -- if enabled -- for the
## 'markup' and 'annotate' views; see 'enable_syntax_coloration'.]
##
# 2019-06-02 jj5 - OLD: this was bollocksing things up...
#detect_encoding = 1
# 2019-06-02 jj5 - NEW: so I changed it...
detect_encoding = 0
# 2019-06-02 jj5 - END

Salt file.recurse source file not found (file encoding issue)

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So I was running this:

/var/www/jj-web-1-www.jj5.net-sixsigma:
  file.recurse:
    - clean: True
    - user: root
    - group: root
    - dir_mode: 755
    - file_mode: 644
    - source: salt://inst/mediawiki-1.29
    - require:
      - pkg: apache2

And getting an error like this:

----------
          ID: /var/www/jj-web-1-www.jj5.net-sixsigma
    Function: file.recurse
      Result: False
     Comment: #### /var/www/jj-web-1-www.jj5.net-sixsigma/vendor/james-heinrich/getid3/getid3/module.audio.ac3.php ####
              Source file 'salt://inst/mediawiki-1.29/vendor/james-heinrich/getid3/getid3/module.audio.ac3.php?saltenv=base' not found

              #### /var/www/jj-web-1-www.jj5.net-sixsigma/vendor/james-heinrich/getid3/getid3/module.audio-video.mpeg.php ####
              Source file 'salt://inst/mediawiki-1.29/vendor/james-heinrich/getid3/getid3/module.audio-video.mpeg.php?saltenv=base' not found
     Started: 14:27:18.352264
    Duration: 134735.945 ms
     Changes:
----------

The issue was that the source files mentioned weren’t in UTF-8 format. To convert the files I ran, e.g.:

$ iconv -f WINDOWS-1252 -t UTF-8//TRANSLIT < module.audio-video.mpeg.php.bak > module.audio-video.mpeg.php

(Actually I couldn’t get the ‘iconv’ command to work so I edited manually in Vim)

Installing .NET on Debian 9

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After installing Visual Studio Code I followed the instructions from .NET Tutorial – Hello World in 10 minutes, basically:

wget -qO- https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc | gpg --dearmor > microsoft.asc.gpg
sudo mv microsoft.asc.gpg /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/
wget -q https://packages.microsoft.com/config/debian/9/prod.list
sudo mv prod.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/microsoft-prod.list
sudo chown root:root /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/microsoft.asc.gpg
sudo chown root:root /etc/apt/sources.list.d/microsoft-prod.list

Then:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install dotnet-sdk-2.1

Then for example to create a new console project:

dotnet new console -o myApp
cd myApp

I ended up reading MICROSOFT SOFTWARE LICENSE TERMS for the MICROSOFT .NET LIBRARY which included this doozy:

The software may collect information about you and your use of the software, and send that to Microsoft.

Ah, Microsoft. You haven’t changed.

I found some notes about how to disable telemetry:

Telemetry
———
The .NET Core tools collect usage data in order to help us improve your experience. The data is anonymous and doesn’t include command-line arguments. The data is collected by Microsoft and shared with the community. You can opt-out of telemetry by setting the DOTNET_CLI_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT environment variable to ‘1’ or ‘true’ using your favorite shell.

Read more about .NET Core CLI Tools telemetry: https://aka.ms/dotnet-cli-telemetry

I have added the opt-out environment variable via jj5-bin.

Debugging JINJA in Salt Stack

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So I was trying to figure out how to report the template source file within the template itself and I found myself wanting to know what was available in the JINJA globals for a Salt Stack JINJA template.

Turns out you use the show_full_context() function, like this:

Context is: {{ show_full_context() }}

You can parse the output to see what top-level items are available. In my case I found the ‘source’ setting for the JINJA template in use.

Hot tip: if you’re using Vim to inspect the show_full_context() output, try using ‘%’ or ‘]}’ to move between matching braces.

Bonus: while I was learning about reporting the JINJA context I discovered that you can call Salt functions from JINJA templates, like this:

# The following two function calls are equivalent.
{{ salt['cmd.run']('whoami') }}
{{ salt.cmd.run('whoami') }}

pwned

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I wrote the below BASH function today. It’s good because it performs super well compared to the alternative commands (which are commented out below above the new commands):

own() {

  echo "Taking ownership..."
  #chown -R jj5:jj5 .
  find . \! -user jj5 -or \! -group jj5 -execdir chown jj5:jj5  "{}" \;
  [ "$?" = 0 ] || { echo "Could not take ownership in '$PWD'."; exit 1; }

  echo "Fixing directory permissions..."
  #find . -type d -execdir chmod u+rwx "{}" \;
  find . -type d -and \( \! -perm /u=r -or \! -perm /u=w -or \! -perm /u=x \) -execdir chmod u+rwx "{}" \;
  [ "$?" = 0 ] || { echo "Could not fix directory permissions in '$PWD'."; exit 1; }

  echo "Fixing file permissions..."
  #find . -type f -execdir chmod u+rw "{}" \;
  find . -type f -and \( \! -perm /u=r -or \! -perm /u=w \) -execdir chmod u+rw "{}" \;
  [ "$?" = 0 ] || { echo "Could not fix file permissions in '$PWD'."; exit 1; }

}

The basic premise is don’t do work which doesn’t need to be done!

NetBeans PHP “Invalid include path”

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So I migrated my projects from a Debian 8 (Jessie) system to a Debian 9 (Stretch) system. The default NetBeans installed by apt-get install netbeans on Strech was 8.1, and it didn’t include PHP support, so I manually installed NetBeans 8.2.

When I opened my old projects I got an error about an invalid global PHP include path.

So initially I edited ~/.netbeans/8.2/build.properties to change the php.global.include.path settings (to remove /usr/share/php5, because in Stretch I’m running PHP 7.0). But that didn’t work. Each time I ran NetBeans the build.properties file was overwritten with the old php5 directory.

So then I found ~/.netbeans/8.2/config/Preferences/org/netbeans/modules/php/project/general.properties. In there I edited the phpGlobalIncludPath and removed the /usr/share/php5 directory.

Then when I reopened NetBeans all of my projects opened properly without an error! Everything is easy when you know how!