Fatal error: Call to undefined function pcntl_fork() in /path/blah.php on line 5

The fix requires recompiling php with –enable-pcntl Fortunately cpanel offers the Easy Apache script. The bad part is that it doesn’t have an option for pcntl. So you have to specify it as a custom compile time option. Edit (or create – for PHP5) and add /var/cpanel/easy/apache/rawopts/all_php5

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--enable-pcntl

On one line

Then rebuild Easy Apache.

One of the above broken everything (I started seeing _digikam_root_tag) and some of my tags were doubled. So all in all I wanted to delete them all:

• Remove your collection from digikam
• Drop all tables from the digikam database
• Remove all .xmp files. In the folder containing your collection:
  find . -name *.xmp -exec rm {} \;
• Remove all embedded xmp tags (again in the folder containing you collection)
  exiftool -r -P -xmp:TagsList= -xmp:LastKeywordXMP= -xmp:HierarchicalSubject= -xmp:Subject= -iptc:Keywords= *

DON’T FOLLOW THIS BLINDLY

This is just a sketch of the process. If you don’t understand what are you doing don’t do it! I also kept all .original files exiftool generated, just in case I discover something later on.

Well, today instead of working I had the pleasure of fixing the monitor The monitor is an older Asus VW202 SR that my wife uses connected to the laptop. I tried everything else (power cycling, another signal cable, another computer) but it turns out to be really the button. The issue manifested itself by the brightness setting window appearing and going eventually all the way to 100. First I thought that the button was stuck in the frame but it was safely depressed. That means a broken button on the pcb board. I thought it would be pretty easy to solder a new one in place.

But first I had to disassemble it:

1. Search and remove. There are 7 philips screws. 2 under rubber caps, 2 under flat foil, 2 holding the stand and 1 on the middle of the bottom frame. Make notes that the two of the stand are a different size.

One is hidden under the warranty seal.

Don’t loose the rubber caps and place the flat ones with the adhesive side facing up. This way you can reuse them.

There are two openings in the frame at the bottom. Place the monitor facing up and use a plastic tool (or if, like me, you don’t care about marks you can use a flat-head screwdriver) Pull very gently as the frame holds a small pcb board with the buttons and the power led. Disconnect it before lifting the frame.

That is the PCB that needs removing. You need to bend one of the plastic posts holding it in place. Be very careful not to snap it.

Make note of the button causing you troubles. For me it was menu right (toggles brightness when not in menu)

Try not to open the wrong one like I did!The problem was that I didn’t have buttons like this to solder in place. So I tried to see if I can fix it. Ok this is a bit tricky. Use a magnifying glass if you need to. The button has a metal casing held in place by 4 clamps (clasp? – for lack of a better term). I used a snapped syringe needle to gently lift it over the four clamps. Inside you will find a dome shaped metal disk (this is the one closing the circuit) and two plastic parts. Try to lift the casing without moving them and make note (take a picture) of their arrangement. It is important that they face the same way when assembling the button.

Not a good picture but enough detail on the bad button. The problem was caused by 1-2 metal particulates in the button. I cleaned it with a cotton swab. After you put the disc and the two plastic parts in place simply press the casing to snap in place.

Don’t forget to connect the cable back to the PCB.

Do everything you did to get here in reverse to assemble the monitor!

So a little code hacking is in order. Open modules/mod_related_items/helper.php and go to line 94 (right after the Filter by language if) and modify $db->setQuery($query); to read:

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$db->setQuery($query,0,10);

Of course you can change the limit from 10 with whatever you like. Random order is commented out because using ORDER BY RAND has performance issues. If you think you can handle it feel free to uncomment.

This hack also works for Joomla 2.5!

Homework:

• add parameter in the admin interface Feel free to post the solution

WPPREFIX_cbnetpo_ping_optimizer table had over 11Gb. Great, 82 million records for some errors about not being able to ping. Great: no limit on how much you log in the table, no throttling on errors (each error is logged tens of times in the same second) and so on. I could track where this comes from but I simply removed the darn plugin and dropped the table.

Unfortunately trying to run the setup on Slackware gives the errors regarding to

/…/bin/eagle: error while loading shared libraries: libssl.so.1.0.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

libssl.so.1.0.0 and libcrypto.so.1.0.0

I run a multilib setup so that’s not it. It turns that all I had to do was:

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cd /lib
ln -s libssl.so.0.9.8 libssl.so.1.0.0
ln -s libcrypt-2.14.1.so libcrypto.so.1.0.0

in /lib

Hope that helps.

I went to Home->Account settings->Display Language

It was already English US

Well, it won’t be the first webapp displaying a default that was there in the interface but not in the settings database.

So I clicked EDIT switched to English UK, hit save and then back to English US and save again.

It worked. QA was at lunch again for google.

1. using MFE which works from time to time
2. use syncevolution which invariably screws my contacts on the n900 (I guess google’s implementation of syncml or exchange support is dubious at best)

So I devised a third. Since I edit and store all my contacts on the n900 I will export them from time to time (Contacts->Export->All contacts)  and import them manually into gmail. Note that Gmail doesn’t support vCard 3.0; you have to export as 2.1. Unfortunately the n900 will export each contact into a separate file. Since google doesn’t offer bulk import support I thought of concatenating all files into one:

cat *.vcf > all_contacts.vcf

Good idea, but it doesn’t work. In another example of fine programming skills clicking import uploads the file and returns with no contact imported and no error message. Nice one.

It seems some new lines are missing; and so this will work (in the folder with the vcf files)

for i in *.vcf; do cat “$i” >> ../all_contacts.vcf; echo >> ../all_contacts.vcf; done

Import worked now ok!

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mysqlcheck -Aop -h hostname -u user -pPASSWORD

What all those mean:

–all-databases, -A; Check all tables in all databases. This is the same as using the –databases option and naming all the databases on the command line.
–optimize, -o Optimize the tables.
-h host to optimize (you can skip if it’s the localhost)
-u mysql user
-p the password

They are stored as hidden files in a, you guessed, hidden directory. You can’t browse to it but you can type it in RUN or windows explorer location bar:

%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\AutomaticDestinations

You will see there a bunch of files with long weird names. You can either search trough them to find the one you want to delete or simply do like I do: delete them all! Not just from time to time, but add a task in Windows Task Scheduler to remove them on shutdown.