Ramesh Thiruchelvam's Blog

Configuring phpMyAdmin

Ramesh Thiruchelvam — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 03:03:22 +0000

Installing phpMyAdmin is simple as extracting to the www folder, but I install it in a different way, I extract phpMyAdmin in Program Files folder, and configure Apache to map /myadmin to the extracted folder, and make that only accessible by the local machine for security purpose.

Alias /myadmin/ "C:/Program Files/phpMyAdmin-2.11.9.2/"
 
<Directory "C:/Program Files/phpMyAdmin-3.0.0">
    Options Indexes MultiViews
    AllowOverride None
    Order deny,allow
    Deny from all
    Allow from 127.0.0.1
Directory>

In the phpMyAdmin copy the config.sample.inc.php to config.inc.php and change the first server configuration to authenticate via configuration file so that I don’t have to enter the user name and password again and again and hide the mysql database as I don’t really need access to that.

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type'] = 'config';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['host'] = 'localhost';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['connect_type'] = 'tcp';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['compress'] = false;
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['user'] = "root";
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['password'] = "xxxxxx";
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['hide_db']  = "mysql";
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['extension'] = 'mysql';

Change the Server Collation of SQL Server 2005

Ramesh Thiruchelvam — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 15:31:01 +0000

I installed my SQL Server 2005 wit the default options and found out that my db collation and the server collation were different that caused my application to throw a collation mismatch exception when comparing.

I tried my options, but couldn’t get it working with out changing the server collation to be the same as the database collection option. I still believe that there should be a way to do it with out doing so, but I don’t have much time to put in to find out how.

Changing the Server Collation is bit tricky, basically we will have to reinstall the SQL server instance, with the new Server Collation, you can do it with the setup.exe in the “C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Setup Bootstrap” folder.

start /wait setup.exe /qb 
	INSTANCENAME=MSSQLSERVER 
	REINSTALL=SQL_Engine 
	REBUILDDATABASE=1 
	SAPWD=test 
	SQLCOLLATION=Finnish_Swedish_CS_AS

Warning: When you reinstall the SQL Engine, you will loose all your user databases so please take a back up of all your user databases before you do this.

Enabling mod_rewrite in Apache 2

Ramesh Thiruchelvam — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 05:40:21 +0000

Enable the mod_rewrite module by uncommenting it from the httpd.conf file.

1	LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

Enable .htaccess configurations by setting AllowOverride to All for the DocumentRoot directory.

<Directory "C:/www">
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
 
    # AllowOverride controls what directives may be placed 
    # in .htaccess files. It can be "All", "None", or any 
    # combination of the keywords: 
    # Options FileInfo AuthConfig Limit
    AllowOverride All
 
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
Directory>

Using mod_rewrite with PHP

Ramesh Thiruchelvam — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 17:50:46 +0000

I used apache mod_rewrite to create user friendly and search engine optimized urls for sri-lankan.net. Here is how I did it.

Using the following .htaccess configuration, I redirected all the requests to index.php.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
IfModule>

And decide what to show the user by checking $_SERVER[’REQUEST_URI’]…


$url = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
$parts = explode('/', $url);
?>

Mum and me…

Ramesh Thiruchelvam — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 15:20:38 +0000

A kindergarten picture of mine, which I found wile scanning my old albums.

Merging Subversion Repositories

Ramesh Thiruchelvam — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 13:36:22 +0000

I had two different projects in separate subversion repositories and I wanted to merge them together. I found a simple tick like this.

$ svnadmin dump srilankan > sri.dump
$ svnadmin dump ebizlanka > ebiz.dump
$ svnadmin create projects
$ svn mkdir file:///home/ramesh/svn/projects/srilankan
$ svnadmin load projects --parent-dir srilankan < sri.dump
$ svn mkdir file:///home/ramesh/svn/projects/ebizlanka
$ svnadmin load projects --parent-dir ebizlanka < ebiz.dump

Show working directory in bash prompt

Ramesh Thiruchelvam — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 02:59:39 +0000

I always get confused with which directory I’m working under. The solution I found is to display the working directory in the bash prompt. This is the single line that does the magic in the ~/.bashrc

1	PS1=[\\w]\\$

Change timezone of PHP

Ramesh Thiruchelvam — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 23:24:43 +0000

If you wanna change the timezone of a PHP script, set the timezone environmental variable in your PHP code as simple as shown bellow.

1
2
3


putenv("TZ=Asia/Colombo");
?>

U.S. Robotics Wireless USB Adapter in Ubuntu 7.10

Ramesh Thiruchelvam — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 18:42:44 +0000

I had a hard time configuring my U.S. Robotics Wireless USB Adapter in Ubuntu 7.10, at last found out non of the native drives work for it and installed the windows driver with ndiswrapper and disabled all the native usb drivers by adding them to the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and boom it start working.

blacklist islsm_pci
blacklist islsm
blacklist islsm_usb
blacklist prism2_usb
blacklist rtl8187
blacklist r8187b
blacklist r8187
blacklist prism54usb
blacklist prism54pci
blacklist p54usb
blacklist p54pci

Note:If you don’t disable the these modules by adding them to the the blacklist the ndiswrapper wouldn’t work properly.

Hacking W800i…

Ramesh Thiruchelvam — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 15:10:59 +0000

I decided to play around with my W800i and hack it’s features as I want. I used the Far Manager with SEFP (Sony Ericsson Flash Plugin) to access the phone configuration. Here are the stuff I did with my phone. (Use at your own risk)

Remove Camera Sound
I wasn’t able to find the configuration file for the camera sound; so I simply deleted the audio files that’s used by the camera and got it done.

/FS/tpa/preset/system/sound/cameraburst.3gp
/FS/tpa/preset/system/sound/cameraburst.mid
/FS/tpa/preset/system/sound/camerafocus.3gp
/FS/tpa/preset/system/sound/camerashutter.3gp
/FS/tpa/preset/system/sound/cameratimer.mid

Remove SMS Limit
Edit the SMS storage configuration file “/ifs/settings/messaging/pref_store.txt” and change “/smsdata” to “/tpa”.

Removing Operator Name
Ooops I didn’t like the big Dilog GSM hiding part of my Wallpaper, I got rid of it by editing the /FS/tpa/system/layout/layout.xml file.

 name="StatusIndication">
>
 name="RowHeight" value="0"/>
 name="TopOffset" value="0"/>
 name="TitleHeight" value="0"/>
 name="TitleTopOffset" value="0"/>
 name="TitleMode" value="4"/> 
 name="OverlayStyle" value="2"/> 
 name="YPos" value="18"/>
 name="Height" value="176"/>
>
>