Saturday 31 May 2014

Drupal moving database from one server to another

So I wanted to get a site I've been making 'live' which meant transferring from the test server to the real one. How to do this? I remember in Joomla it was as easy as pie, not so with Drupal, although not too tough.

Basically:

  1. move all files
  2. move all tables from database
So, in myPHPadmin you can export, but I was coming up with an error:

Error

SQL query:
--
-- Database: `sitename_pw`
--
CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS `sitename_pw` DEFAULT CHARACTER SET latin1 COLLATE latin1_swedish_ci;

 
MySQL said: dot.gif
#1044 - Access denied for user 'my_user_name'@'localhost' to database 'sitename_pw'

So I found this website which explained that you have to export the tables within a database, rather then a whole database. To do this you have to be looking at the database tables, then press the export button to export just the tables.

Then when you import them, you have to be actually in the new database and press the import button

Thursday 29 May 2014

Alcatel onetouch t'pop and android

Well, I wanted a phone for my girlfriend, she was not really that bothered. I thought "you can't go wrong with this, only £20!". How wrong I was.

What you won't find in reviews for this is that there is only 100mb internal storage. This of course isn't too bad, is it. Surely you just put a 32gb memory card in and it's just as good as an iPhone 3GS! Nope!  Well, here's my rant:

one thing no-one really says is that Android has to use the internal storage to store some information about each app, and most of the time it's xxMB's big. Yes, it does store extra data for the app (pictures, music) on the sDcard but you'll soon fill up the 100mb internal storage with the information it does NEED to store internally. i managed to install 4 apps before it started complaining. I think it's pretty poor design which limits you to this internal memory. Surely android can fix it so you use your sd card! There are ways to do it, but it'll take you a few hours, and it's pretty technical. 

But the worst bit wasn't actually the lack of apps, it's what happens when it runs out of internal storage space. On an iPhone it simply won't let you update apps and take more pictures. Thats about it though. Surely android would be the same?

Nope, it turns out Android doesn't care how much storage you have left. What happened was that she couldn't actually answer the phone when it rang!!!!! Very poor design in an operating system.

What should happen is it should include answering the phone as a priority app and reserve a little more space for this as well. The trouble is that if it did do this, Alcatel couldn't really sell this phone. Poor from both points of view.


Sunday 25 May 2014

One pc two logins and screens

So I don't want to get another computer, and at any one time only one person will be playing intensive games, so why not use one PCM as two. Here's some software which does it

Wednesday 21 May 2014

Blender render farm for OS X in background

Hi, I want to set up a render farm at our College to run on any machine in the background with minimal installation and setup.

It looks like the built in render farm to blender is only acceptable on smaller scales where all machines are logged in, and have blender open and running. This isn't the right solution for me.

A while back I set up a render farm for Maya using OS X Qmaster. This runs in the background without anyone logged in, receives jobs and executes command line arguments. A network share is mounted on all machines running it. Looks like Qmaster isn't set up correctly on Mavericks, also might be some compatibility issues for it too. Looks like you can set up with command line:

sudo SystemStarter start Qmaster
qmasterprefs -list
Current settings:
 -sharingType servicesAndQuickCluster
 -launchContentAgent off
Bus error: 10
qmasterprefs -cluster on servername "test1"
Bus error: 10

I'm getting "Bus Error: 10" every time I run any commands

I also setup Blender to render over Xgrid, but Apple has pulled this out of the new servers so I'll give this a miss for now.

Farmerjoe render farm, looks alright. Need to install Perl I think.

DrQueue looks interesting, but you do need to compile it first.

Backburner is more promising, as we can also use it for Maya and any autodesk app. Found an article here which almost proves it. So here's my attempt a few years ago to get it working. I tried once more but couldn't get the web monitor working, might be because I've got the server app installed? Or it's mavericks? I shall continue with this.

Saturday 3 May 2014

Creating a Back Button in Joomla

So, I wanted to create a back button, as one of my articles did not provide an adequate link to the previous item. I found this article which describes a simple a tag which calls javascript. Heres the example:

Go back

for none javascript browsers he proposes this:

Go back

I then created a module called "Back Button" with this link, and made it appear only on the pages I wanted. It nearly worked but unfortunately I couldn't get the WYSYWIG editor to let me put the javascript entry in, it always wiped it out!!

Ended up going into the database and pasting it in myself! If someone could please let me know for next time how I get TINYMCE to let me put this code in to a customHTML module in Joomla!!

after comingback to this some time later, i accidentally saved it and it deleted the code! But now, if I want code I install flexi custom code, which lets you add javascript, php etc. to modules!