MySQL’s built in FROM_UNIXTIME() function only handles positive numbers however we can still convert negative integers to dates using its handy DATE_ADD() function like so:

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SELECT DATE_ADD(FROM_UNIXTIME(0), INTERVAL -13391999 SECOND)

which gives:

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1969-07-30 10:00:01

Note that this also works with positive numbers, so if your database contains a mixture of both it’s still safe to use.

Credit to user fat_kid for his tutorial here.

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Without any adieu what-so-ever, below is a MySQL implementation of PHP’s ucfirst function which capitalizes the first letter of each word in a string.

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DELIMITER $$
CREATE FUNCTION CAP_FIRST (INPUT VARCHAR(255))
 
RETURNS VARCHAR(255)
 
DETERMINISTIC
 
BEGIN
    DECLARE len INT;
    DECLARE i INT;
 
    SET len   = CHAR_LENGTH(INPUT);
    SET INPUT = LOWER(INPUT);
    SET i = 0;
 
    WHILE (i < len) DO
        IF (MID(INPUT,i,1) = ' ' OR i = 0) THEN
            IF (i < len) THEN
                SET INPUT = CONCAT(
                    LEFT(INPUT,i),
                    UPPER(MID(INPUT,i + 1,1)),
                    RIGHT(INPUT,len - i - 1)
                );
            END IF;
        END IF;
        SET i = i + 1;
    END WHILE;
 
    RETURN INPUT;
END$$
DELIMITER ;

Use it like so:

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SELECT CAP_FIRST('my string of words');

and you should get:

My String Of Words

All credit and many thanks for this function to Joezack.

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JQuery Data Tables is an incredibly handy tool that can make a developers life alot easier – notably by handling search, pagination, filtering and sorting for you. The default functionality is very good, however you’ll often need a bit of customization. This post will detail how to add custom filters and position them to nicely theme with your table. The filters’ state will also be saved so they’ll still be there if you reload the page.

You can see the demo page for this post here. Select a filter and reload the page to see it in action.

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After upgrading to 11.10 recently, I occasionally noticed fuser firing up and using between 70% and astoundingly 9999% CPU. Googling the issue led me to this post with the solution.

As user grazer explains:

We have the same problem. This is the content of /etc/cron.d/php5 on 11.10:

09,39 * * * * root [ -x /usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime ] && [ -d /var/lib/php5 ] && find /var/lib/php5/ -depth -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type f -cmin +$(/usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime) ! -execdir fuser -s {} 2>/dev/null ; -delete

And this is the content on 11.04:

09,39 * * * * root [ -x /usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime ] && [ -d /var/lib/php5 ] && find /var/lib/php5/ -depth -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type f -cmin +$(/usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime) -delete

Spot the difference?

The 11.10 version runs fuser for each PHP session file, thus using all the CPU when there are hundreds of sessions.

After commenting out the 11.10 line and replacing with the 11.04 equivalent, this problem was solved for me aswell. Thanks, grazer!

You can also check out the bug report to keep up to date on this issue. Hopefully a fix will be released quickly.

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I had a bit of an issue with this and the documentation wasn’t of much help so I thought I’d post about the process. I currently have CampaignMonitor and MailChimp modules in the LemonStand marketplace and wanted to allow customers to create subscription forms on their sites that AJAX submit.

Firstly, here is the documentation page on custom events. The docs show that you need two things:

• A subscribeEvents() method in your module’s setup class containing an addEvent() call.
• A method containing the code you want to execute, which will be triggered by your event.

I attempted to do the above with the following backend code:

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<?php
class MyModule_Module extends Core_ModuleBase
{
	public function subscribeEvents()
	{
		Backend::$events->addEvent('MyModule_Module:onSubmit', $this, 'on_submit');
	}
 
	public function onSubmit()
	{
		//...
	}
}

And frontend code:

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<form onsubmit="return $(this).sendRequest('MyModule_Module:onSubmit')" action="/" method="post">
	<input type='submit' name='submit' value='Submit' />
</form>

I submitted the form and was greeted with an error message:

An AJAX error occurred: AJAX handler not found.

After a little digging I came across the function excuted when you perform an AJAX query. Important lines are highlighted:

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public static function execAjaxHandler($name, $controller)
{
	$parts = explode(':', $name);
	if (count($parts) != 2)
		throw new Phpr_ApplicationException("Invalid event handler identifier: $name");
 
	$className = ucfirst($parts[0]).'_Actions';	if (!Phpr::$classLoader->load($className))
		throw new Phpr_ApplicationException("Actions scope class is not found: $className");
 
	$method = $parts[1];
	$isEventHandler = preg_match('/^on_/', $method);	if (!$isEventHandler)
		throw new Phpr_ApplicationException("Specified method is not AJAX event handler: $method");
 
	$obj = new $className();
	if (!method_exists($obj, $method))
		throw new Phpr_ApplicationException("AJAX handler not found: $name");
 
	$obj->copy_context_from($controller);
	try
	{
		$result = $obj->$method();
		$controller->copy_context_from($obj);
		return $result;
	}
	catch (Exception $ex)
	{
		$controller->copy_context_from($obj);
		throw $ex;
	}
}

There’s a couple of things to note here.

• Your second and third arguments in addEvent() are ignored.
• _Actions is concatenated onto the end of your class name
• Your method name must start with on_

With the above in mind, it’s time for some rewriting:

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<?php
 
class MyModule_Module extends Core_ModuleBase
{
	public function subscribeEvents()
	{
		Backend::$events->addEvent('MyModule:on_submit', $this, 'on_submit');
	}
}
 
class MyModule_Actions extends Cms_ActionScope
{
	public function on_submit()
	{
		//...
	}
}

That worked like a charm. Good luck to all the module developers for LS out there – I’ve found LemonStand a number of quirks like this and we’ll just have to tackle them one at a time

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Note: Also see the prequel to this post: Why I Hate Unity

As your typical Ubuntu user, I find Unity infuriating and have devoted countless hours towards bringing back the usability and functionality that came with Gnome 2. I’ve racked up quite a few tweaks so far that have gone a long way towards doing this and figured it was about time to share them. My aim was to make 11.10 look and feel exactly like 10.10. I’ve attached below a screenshot of the final result.

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I was receiving a 500 internal server error on one of my CPanel sites earlier tonight but the apache error logs in CPanel admin for that user showed nothing. Instead, I had to locate the global apache error logs. This information may help others so I’ve listed some of the most useful CPanel/WHM log file locations below:

Apache Logs

General Error and Auditing Logs:
Location : /usr/local/apache/logs/error_log
Description : All exceptions caught by httpd along with standard error output from CGI applications are logged here..
The first place you should look when httpd crashes or you incur errors when accessing website.

Domain Access Logs:
Location : /usr/local/apache/domlogs/domain.com
Description : General access log file for each domain configured with cPanel.

Apache Access Logs:
Location : /usr/local/apache/logs/access_log
Description : Complete web server access log records all requests processed by the server.

MySQL Logs

MySQL General Information and Errors:
Location : /var/lib/mysql/$(hostname).err
Description : This path could vary, but is generally located in /var/lib/mysql. Could also be located at /var/log/mysqld.log

For more log file locations, there are some great forum posts here and here.

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I’ve was playing with EasyApache in a WHM install recently and after the upgrade I came across a strange error:

SoftException in Application.cpp:357: UID of script "/home/mysite/public_html/index.php" is smaller than min_uid
Premature end of script headers: index.php

Turns out this error is caused by apache being unable to read files added by root to a users public_html folder. A simple fix for this problem is to

chown -R mysite:mysite /home/mysite/public_html

Thanks to user ronniev of eukhost forums for his solution here.

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One of my favourite plugins for GEdit2 was tabswitch. It made GEdit more consistant with browsers by allowing it to switch tabs with CTRL+Tab instead of CTRL+PgUp/Down. Ubuntu 11.10 comes with Gedit 3 and the plugin no longer worked – so I rewrote it!

This plugin will let you use CTRL+Tab to switch between tabs in GEdit 3. You can download a working implementation here.

Install it by copying the files into ~/.local/share/gedit/plugins directory (which doesn’t exist by default) or /usr/lib/gedit/plugins if you want it to work for all users. Remember to enable the plugin in Edit – Preferences – Plugins for it to work!

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I’ve been using my Cloud Database Backup script for a few months now for weekly scheduled backups of my MySQL databases to Google Docs. Everything has been going smoothly, however I’m starting to run low on quota. For this reason I decided to look into splitting the SQL dumps into chunks small enough to be convertible and doing an upload-convert rather than a zip upload which will result in literally unlimited, quote free database backups as frequently as I like! The focus of this post though is the actual splitting script which splits a given MySQL dump into chunks of x characters.

As always, download it here.

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