Archive for January, 2010

Major upgrades and changes

Sunday, January 31st, 2010

During the past couple of weeks I’ve been doing some changes with my server; this might have been noticed from outside too.
Getting down to business, it’s like this:
– I dropped my second ISP so basically my main server remained without a backup internet connection. It’s too expensive to keep a backup during these times 🙂
– I upgraded my server from my old desktop dell pc PIII with 256 mb RAM to a newer server dell pc dual proc PIII@866Mhz with 512 MB RAM and 2 19GB SCSI HDD in software raid (0 for swap and 1 for rest). Sometime in the near future I plan a memory upgrade, not sure yet how much since the MB has only 4 memory slots and all 4 of them are filled. Obsiously I moved the 80GB hdd from the old pc to the new server 😀
– I installed centos 5 latest CLI only and switched from “source-based” to “rpm-based” using yum (you might not know but everything on my old server was source based. needless to say that upgrading was a real pain specifically when I had to upgrade commonly used stuff such as libs or compilers or even interpreters)
– I downgraded mysql from 5.1.x to 5.0.y (it’s basically what centos came with)
– upgraded xmail from 1.23 to 1.26
– upgraded apache as well from 2.0 to 2.2 (centos came with)
– downgraded php from 5.2.x to 5.1.6 (it wasn’t properly supported by most of my sites anyway)
– upgraded gallery2 plugins to latest (not gallery 2 it self yet)
– upgraded smf from 0.9 to 1.1
– upgrade wordpress from 2.8.6 to 2.9.1 (did you know that the migration tool DOES NOT work? I just found out myself)
– upgraded php link directory from 2.1.1 to 2.2.0
– partially upgraded joomla and components to 1.5 latest
– dropped bugzilla and a bunch of other stuff

and now, I’m watching the logs to see what else is not behaving properly and fix it.

I had so many things I wanted to write about while I was doing upgrades but I forgot most of them. I’ll try to summarize how it all went.
– I wanted to start out clean and fresh so after installing and upgrading all the needed software, I started installing the first sites. And I started with wordpress.
My first idea was to create a reverse proxy with apache but I just couldn’t get that working with wordpress.
So I then decided to actually move the old things to the new hdd and export then import the DB data. However, I did the stupid thing of changing all tables to use myisam engine so now I had to install all the software from scratch so that the db structure is recreated as needed and then semi-automatically add the data. Now that was painful.
I have to mention that I had a lot of trouble moving the data around too, as I needed a jumper for the storage hdd (the 80 gb one) to make it primary and I also needed a longer ide cable so I could fit both the hdd and the cd-rom in the casing. I took the jumper out of the cd-rom since I couldn’t find an ide cable so right now I’m running with no cd-rom. I shouldn’t need that anyway, unless the system goes down since I do everything from remote.
There is still the problem of accommodating the new server space-wise since the old one was a desktop, “flat”, and this one is tower.
I also had to change the fans since they were pretty loud.

Well, that’s about all I remember now. But since I was struggling with this for over a week, you can imagine how much trouble I was in. Anyway, let’s hope for the best and that now I can resume my site-migration from html+ssi+cgi to joomla.

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False/True is not a valid integer value for field blabla

Sunday, January 10th, 2010

Ok, so you designed a small mysql table with a boolean field which got translated to tinyint(1). You then wrote your query in delphi and populated your querys fields and the field got mapped to a TSmallIntField.
And then, on top of everything, you placed a db-aware checkbox on the form to set that field and now you are getting the error
“False/True is not a valid integer value for field blabla”.

What to do? Well, since delphi won’t map your field to a TBooleanField as it should (since the field is actually an integer), you must do it yourself. So, close the project, open your favorite text editor and modify the dfm and pas files so that those fields are now of type TBooleanField.

Then, right before the form declaration add the following:

TBooleanField=class(DB.TBooleanField)
public
constructor Create(AOwner: TComponent); override;
end;

and in the implementation section

{ TBooleanField }

constructor TBooleanField.Create(AOwner: TComponent);
begin
inherited;
SetDataType(ftSmallint);
end;

If you need this in more then one form, then create a unit, like MySqlBooleanField.pas and then add it to the uses clause AFTER the DB unit.

That’s it, you’re all set.

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New contact page

Monday, January 4th, 2010

A couple of days ago I created a new contact page based on joomlas contact page layout. Default. And then today I got a spam message. I researched a bit on how to add captcha to it and tried 3products: securityimages, Alikon secure form, and anotehr one I don’t remember.
Finally I gave up and installed chrono forms which indeed is a cool thing.
Unfortunatelly it has troubles with joomla’s internal SEF.
Well, that’s not a big deal for me right now since the old /contact.html page is redirecting to the new url anyway but I will probably try and figure something out whenever I’ll remember about this and will have time for it.

Until then, the new contact page is much better than the old one 😀

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Killed web project your-quotes

Saturday, January 2nd, 2010

I just killed the web project your-quote (was at .info then moved at .ciuly.com where now only an information page about it’s “death” appears).

Forgot to mention that I dropped the entire DB schema with all users and associated information. that info is still present in the backups but as always, privacy is respected.

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testing “new” wp to twitter plugin

Saturday, January 2nd, 2010

with my “new” url shortener: the old alus.ws which moved to s.ciuly.com

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“Compacting” web sites

Saturday, January 2nd, 2010

Having a lot of domains that bring in no cache is too expensive, especially now with this world-crisis, so I decided to drop the domains that don’t pay for themselves.
Thus alus.ws, the url shortener service has moved to s.ciuly.com (s from short).
ciuly.info moved to info.ciuly.com
empty-directory.info remains as it is at least until march when the domain expires. I have set up dedicated adsense channels to see the exact revenue the site is bringing. Based on that I will decide if to keep it or not.
ciqcs.com moves to ciqcs.ciuly.com

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