Tip

A note to myself on how to force-sync my really outdated master branch with an active branch. This is taken from this excellent post:

git checkout -b tmp origin/upstream
git merge -s ours downstream
git checkout downstream
git merge tmp
git branch -D tmp

If you've been working with Linux terminals for a while, you've invariably found that viewing a binary file tends to output a lot of hieroglyphic nonsense (when all you want to do is check its header) and for some petty collateral damage, rapes your screen by changing your command prompt and window title to more of the same gibberish. While a lot of people (*raises hand*) simply accept such rowdy behaviour as one of the vagaries of life and simple open a new terminal window or similar, this - as I found out a few minutes ago - can be fixed.

On an Ubuntu box, I tried using the locate command to find information about a package and ran into the following error:

mlocate: can not stat () `/var/lib/mlocate/mlocate.db': No such file or directory

The locate program (should) routinely builds a database of files on the box and searches it when we call it. As the error message states, this database appears to be missing thereby leading to the error. Fixing it is as simple as calling:
updatedb

which should build the database.

Hope this helps!

If you find that you Drupal installation is WSOD-dead with the following error message:
Error: Class 'SelectQueryExtender' not found in includes/pager.inc

then this means that you've messed up the Drupal (7, at the time of writing) registry somehow. You might have done this during an import/export operation where you forgot to export the registry and registry_file tables, or as I did, you have foolishly just emptied them to clear up issues with a missing class file that Drupal fastidiously continues to track.

Today, I made quite an impression on my furniture thanks to incessant contact between it and my illustrious head. This, as usual, was due to my looking for a clean regex to solve my issue while working with text files in Vim. My task was, I initially believed, quite simple: delete all the lines that are sandwiched between two types/patterns of lines. In this case, the top slice of the sandwich consisted of a line which was entirely a number and the bottom slice was a line entirely populated with underscores.

I'm using Eclipse (Indigo) and eGit, its Git plugin. Earlier today, when I merged the contents of one branch with my master, I ran into a bunch of conflicts. While I suspect that I should have used the "Team > Merge Tool" to resolve them, as they were rudimentary in nature, I just sorted them out manually. However, eGit did not notice that the conflicts (and their in-file markers) were gone and retained the conflicted icon for each of the affected files.

One of my laptops which is running on Kubuntu Lucid decided to stop connecting to my network today. I found that the KDE network-manager applet (or is it a plasmoid? :S) had decided to disable itself. Clicking it stated so with no option to re-enable it (nice UI, boys). Getting to the commandline and starting the network-manager service did not help. I also found that accessing the System settings networking configuration gave me corrupt XML file errors.

If you find that the really handy Excel spreadsheet import feature for MySQL is missing in PHPMyAdmin, it's because it has been removed. According to the PHPMyAdmin changelog:
3.4.5.0 (2011-09-14)
- [core] Remove library PHPExcel, due to license issues
- [export] Remove native Excel export modules (xls and xlsx formats)
- [import] Remove native Excel import modules (xls and xlsx formats)

If you're importing Open Office / Libre Office Calc files or Excel spreadsheets into MySQL using PHPMyAdmin, you might have run into the occasional case where the process hangs with either a partially imported set or no records at all. After some messing around, I have found that this usually happens when there's a problem with the input data. In my case, this usually stemmed from duplicate primary keys or similar issues. Unique keys were detected fine.

In other words, PEBKAC.

If you have ever pasted data into Calc in Open Office, you'll notice that any hyperlinks in the input data will be retained as hyperlinks rather than reduced to plain text. While this might be beneficial behaviour to some, it wasn't for me this afternoon. After a little digging around, I found that an easy way of removing the hyperlinks is by highlighting all the affected cells, right-clicking and choosing the Default Formatting option.

The associated CTRL+M shortcut (as seen in the Format menu) did not work for me.