She might have been sleepy before but now she is OUT.

I uploaded this through

I uploaded this through

An article on Tom’s Hardware that I helped with was posted yesterday. It’s about Wi-Fi, it’s problems, why your Wi-Fi sucks and what can be done about it. If you’re interested go ahead and read it. Please suffer through the format as it’s actually a pretty good read, but if you glaze over tech stuff just go look at the images I did for the article. I’m quite pleased with a couple of them. There’s 27 pages in the article, each with a picture (see why I said to suffer through the format?). Specifically, I did the images for pages 1, 21, and 23-26. tip: most have a “zoom” option if you hover over the image

Page 1 and 26 I think are my favorites. Page 1 (shown above) because of how it turned out and page 26 is an homage to XKCD. Page 21 has been dubbed the FrankenAP. I’m not thrilled with page 25 (the two iPads in different orientations) but there were time constraints and limitations in the room setup, and that was even the second time I shot that particular concept. Funny behind-the-scenes note about page 25. I was using a mini-bagel between the stand and the iPad to keep the iPad from leaning back and catching a glare from the overhead fluorescent lights.

I uploaded this through

Turns out it was because in my original install of the prefpane I had used the “ports” version of a required ruby file, per instructions, since I was using the MacPort version of Apache. The easy fix is to just reinstall the prefpane. All of my sites now show up in the site listing and I can add the new site I’m currently developing.

This was puzzling, and despite everything I tried I couldn’t get that same content to display correctly on my iMac. However, this was a localized problem on my iMac because my MacBook displayed everything correctly. I tried but I couldn’t figure out where the discrepancy was between the two machines so I decided to move on and fix it at the source.

There are tens of thousands of posts on the Internet explaining how to convert to UTF8 but nothing seemed to work until I discovered this post on the WordPress Codex. That post was the first one I could find that specifically addressed unicode content stored in latin1 columns and how to properly convert it.

To put it simply, you need to convert your text columns to their binary field type counterpart and then convert back to the text type but specifying the utf8 charset. Once I did this, the page displayed correctly on my iMac. Here’s what I did.

• Backed up my database. While this wasn’t really needed since it’s just my local develoment machine, it’s still a good practice.
• Opened up my terminal and ran mysql with the -s –skip-column-names flags that make it easier to copy and paste the output.
• Ran the following script. NOTE: when doing this yourself, remember to replace “db_name” with the name of your own database.

USE information_schema;
SELECT CONCAT('ALTER TABLE `', table_name, '` MODIFY `', column_name, '` ', REPLACE(column_type, 'char', 'binary'), ';') FROM columns WHERE table_schema = 'db_name' and data_type = 'char';
SELECT CONCAT('ALTER TABLE `', table_name, '` MODIFY `', column_name, '` ', REPLACE(column_type, 'varchar', 'varbinary'), ';') FROM columns WHERE table_schema = 'db_name' and data_type = 'varchar';
SELECT CONCAT('ALTER TABLE `', table_name, '` MODIFY `', column_name, '` ', REPLACE(column_type, 'tinytext', 'tinybinary'), ';') FROM columns WHERE table_schema = 'db_name' and data_type = 'tinytext';
SELECT CONCAT('ALTER TABLE `', table_name, '` MODIFY `', column_name, '` ', REPLACE(column_type, 'text', 'blob'), ';') FROM columns WHERE table_schema = 'db_name' and data_type = 'text';
SELECT CONCAT('ALTER TABLE `', table_name, '` MODIFY `', column_name, '` ', REPLACE(column_type, 'mediumtext', 'mediumbinary'), ';') FROM columns WHERE table_schema = 'db_name' and data_type = 'mediumtext';
SELECT CONCAT('ALTER TABLE `', table_name, '` MODIFY `', column_name, '` ', REPLACE(column_type, 'longtext', 'longbinary'), ';') FROM columns WHERE table_schema = 'db_name' and data_type = 'longtext';  

SELECT CONCAT('ALTER TABLE `', table_name, '` MODIFY `', column_name, '` ', column_type, ' CHARACTER SET utf8;') FROM columns WHERE table_schema = 'db_name' and data_type = 'char';
SELECT CONCAT('ALTER TABLE `', table_name, '` MODIFY `', column_name, '` ', column_type, ' CHARACTER SET utf8;') FROM columns WHERE table_schema = 'db_name' and data_type = 'varchar';
SELECT CONCAT('ALTER TABLE `', table_name, '` MODIFY `', column_name, '` ', column_type, ' CHARACTER SET utf8;') FROM columns WHERE table_schema = 'db_name' and data_type = 'tinytext';
SELECT CONCAT('ALTER TABLE `', table_name, '` MODIFY `', column_name, '` ', column_type, ' CHARACTER SET utf8;') FROM columns WHERE table_schema = 'db_name' and data_type = 'text';
SELECT CONCAT('ALTER TABLE `', table_name, '` MODIFY `', column_name, '` ', column_type, ' CHARACTER SET utf8;') FROM columns WHERE table_schema = 'db_name' and data_type = 'mediumtext';
SELECT CONCAT('ALTER TABLE `', table_name, '` MODIFY `', column_name, '` ', column_type, ' CHARACTER SET utf8;') FROM columns WHERE table_schema = 'db_name' and data_type = 'longtext';

SELECT DISTINCT CONCAT('ALTER TABLE `', table_name, '` CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8;') FROM columns WHERE table_schema = 'db_name';

The output, in my case, was like this…

ALTER TABLE `registrations` MODIFY `name` varbinary(50);
ALTER TABLE `registrations` MODIFY `name` varchar(50) CHARACTER SET utf8;
ALTER TABLE `registrations` CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8;
ALTER DATABASE `db_name` CHARACTER SET utf8;

This is just a snippet of my code but you can see exactly what’s going on. First, the registrations.name column is being converted to varbinary(50). Binary columns don’t care about character sets. Then it’s being converted back to it’s original varchar(50) column but specifying “CHARACTER SET utf8”. Finally, we convert the table and database to utf8.

Now go forth and spread the P.O.E. … Purity Of Encodings.

I uploaded this through

I uploaded this through

Team-building outing for the Ruckus marketing team. My first step toward my skydive! Woot!

I uploaded this through