Rick Baker's Personal Website

Haven’t posted much here as of late, been pretty busy.   But this was worth taking a moment or two to post.

This was on the Opie and Anthony show on Sirius. When they brought this guy in off the street they had no idea he could sing. It was just going to be a radio bit promoting their upcoming “homeless shopping spree” During the interview it came up that he has written some songs and could play guitar. So they went and got the man a guitar …

There are times when you want to run a PHP script in the background, something that is triggered by a user, but you don’t want them to have to wait for it to complete.   A couple ways to accomplish this, but I’ll focus on one in particular.  That’s making an asynchronous call using AJAX.

It’s pretty simple actually.  The first thing is in your script that you want to run in the background, you need to make sure it runs long enough to complete, and that also it won’t die when  the connection is aborted.  So, at the top of this PHP script, you’ll want to add these 2 lines:

 ignore_user_abort(1);
 set_time_limit(0);
 

Now for how to actually get that script running in the background.  We’ll be using javascript and taking advantage of the YUI library since it makes it particularly easy.

Basically, what happens is an async call is made to the script, and then the connection is aborted, so the script continues to run and the user can go on doing whatever they want.  The key is you don’t want to abort the connection to fast.  If it’s aborted right after it’s made the script won’t even have time to start.  So, we need to give it a couple seconds before actually aborting.   Here’s the javascript for this:

 <script src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.8.0r4/build/yahoo/yahoo-min.js"></script>
 <script src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.8.0r4/build/event/event-min.js"></script>
 <script src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.8.0r4/build/connection/connection_core-min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var spawnCallback = {
success: function(o) {
},
failure: function(o) {
},
timeout: 2000
};

function spawnProcess() {
YAHOO.util.Connect.asyncRequest('GET','url/to/script.php',spawnCallback);
}
</script>

And that’s about it.  Then you just need to call the spawnProcess() function and it will trigger your designated PHP script which will run in the background until finished.

Over time some of your MySQL tables may end up fragmented.  If you run any type of diagnostic script like mysqltuner, it will even tell you how many of your tables are fragmented.  You can easily fix this by optimizing the fragmented tables.  The problem is, you might not know which tables are fragmented.

Here’s a quick little query you can run that will give you the tables that are fragmented and how badly fragmented they are:

select TABLE_NAME,Data_free
from information_schema.TABLES
where TABLE_SCHEMA NOT IN ('information_schema','mysql')
and Data_free > 0;

Just in case anyone didn’t catch the optimize bit above. Once you’ve found your fragmentend tables, you can fix them with the following query, replacing %TABLENAME% with the actual table name:

optimize table %TABLENAME%

Ever have a several gig MySQL dump and only need to extract a table or two out of it?  Here’s something you can run from the command line that will split all of the tables into individual files.  You’ll need to know if your dump file has the CREATE TABLE format included or is just the data.  If it’s just the data then you can change where it says CREATE TABLE to LOCK TABLES below.

One thing to note.  If awk ends up giving you an error such as “Program Limit Exceeded”, then you can use gawk instead and it should work without issues.

cat dumpfile.sql | awk 'BEGIN {
output = "comments"; } $data ~ /^CREATE TABLE/ {
 close(output);
 output = substr($3,2,length($3)-2); }
{ print $data >> output }'

I work on so many sites, domains, linux boxes, MySQL servers, etc. that I have like a million and one passwords dancing around in my head. Went to add a database to an old devel box that I haven’t used for about 2 years and I couldn’t remember the MySQL root password. So I had to reset it. If anyone finds themselves in this situation, here’s how you do it if you have root access to the server. I’ll use my normal way of stopping/starting the service, you may need to alter this for your server.

/etc/init.d/mysql stop
mysqld --skip-grant-tables &
mysql (to get to MySQL shell)
mysql> update user set password = ('newpasssword') where user='root';
mysql> flush privileges;
mysql> exit;
/etc/init.d/mysql restart

Recently was asked a question on how to delete records from multiple tables with a single MySQL query. I’ll give an example below with one caveat. If your tables are INNODB and you have foreign keys then this query will fail. For INNODB you should just do a single delete and rely on the ON DELETE capabilities to handle any other deletes.

Anyways, so on to the query. Say you have 3 tables (table1, table2, and table3). Each of them have an entry for a variable that we’ll call $id and you want to delete from all 3 tables at once. Here you go:

delete t1, t2, t3
from table1 as t1
left join table2 as t2 on t2.id = t1.id
left join table3 as t3 on t3.id = t1.id
where t1.id = '$id'

Just installed the Wordbook plugin, which in theory is supposed to cross-post my blog posts over to facebook. So, naturally, I must test to see if it works or if it’s another piece of crap Wordpress plugin.

I just had to give some assistance to a friend who needed to do a remote desktop session to a Windows work computer, but had to go through a couple of hops to get to it. I’ll give the setup below.

He has a linux machine at home (HOME), and a linux machine at work (WORK). (WORK) has access to another Linux machine (WORK2) on the network that the Windows machine (WINDOWS) is on, but not to the Windows machine itself.

In the code below you’ll substitute machine names (given above in parenthesis) with the actual IP or hostname of each machine. (Note: this should be all on one line)

ssh -t -L HOME:3389:WORK:3389 user@WORK
ssh -L WORK:3389:WINDOWS:3389 user@WORK2

At that point he just had to remote desktop to HOME and he ended up with a session on WINDOWS.

So, I’ve never been much for flavored cigars, but my local cigar shop suggested something new that they just started carrying, Isla Del Sol. The filler leaves are infused with nuances of Sumatran Mandheling Bean Coffee and it has a wrapper with a sweetened cap. You’ll get flavors of mocha and coffee while enjoying this cigar. Definitely not an everyday cigar for me, but pretty much the only flavored cigar that ever found it’s way as a regular inhabitant of my humidor.

I spend most of my days inside several linux terminals. I do the majority of my development in Vi, read my email in pine, etc. I always hate getting word documents since I’d need to transfer them to my Windows box and view them. Not anymore, antidoc to the rescue.

I know this has been out for awhile, but it’s new to me and really just made my day. This allows me to read the document inside a linux terminal window:

antidoc word.doc | less