01Jun

Upgrading to Fedora 13

After having a spin of Fedora’s latest in a Virtualbox virtual machine on my main home PC, I decided to upgrade my Fedora box. First, I needed to battle imperfect Internet speeds to get an ISO image that I could burn to a DVD. Once that was in place, I rebooted the Fedora machine using [...]

29Apr

Basic string searching in MySQL table columns

Last weekend, I ended up doing a spot of file structure reorganisation on the web server for www.johnhennessy.co.uk and needed to correct some file pointers in entries on my outdoors blog. Rather than grabbing a plugin from somewhere, I decided to edit the posts table directly. First, I needed to select the affected observations and this is [...]

19Apr

Removing a column from a MySQL data table

My trying out WordPress 3.0 in advance of its final release has brought me errors on the links management page. After a spot of poking around the TRAC, I found that the bug already has been reported and that the cause is an extraneous column in the *_links table called link_category. The change in taxonomy [...]

04Dec

Securing MySQL in Fedora

Ubuntu users must be spoilt because any MySQL installation asks you for a root password, a very good thing in my opinion. With Fedora, it just pops the thing on there with you needing to set up a service and setting the root password yourself; if I remember correctly, I think that openSUSE does the same [...]

24Apr

Self-hosted web analytics tracking

It amazes me now to think how little tracking I used to do on my various web “experiments” only a few short years ago. However, there was a time when a mere web counter, perhaps displayed on web pages themselves, was enough to yield some level of satisfaction, or dissatisfaction in many a case. Things [...]

09Apr

Ubuntu upgrades: do a clean installation or use Update Manager?

Part of some recent “fooling” brought on by the investigation of what turned out to be a duff DVD writer was a fresh installation of Ubuntu 8.10 on my main home PC. It might have brought on a certain amount of upheaval but it was nowhere near as severe as that following the same sort [...]