Touch of Technology

rsync: failed to set times on “xx”: Operation not permitted (1)

andrew — Fri, 18 May 2012 17:36:00 +0000

I use Rsync alot to make sure directories are all in sync with each other. It’s a great tool for development and distributing files over multiple machines with one command. Because it finds the differences, you don’t have to worry about whether you get the most recent version of a file copied to every machine you want it on. A single command can run an Rsync command to transfer to all the machines from a single source directory. Recently however, one of my machines was getting the two errors below.

rsync: failed to set times on “xxFileNamexx”: Operation not permitted (1)

rsync error: some files/attrs were not transferred (see previous errors) (code 23) at main.c(1060) [sender=3.0.7]

I tried all sorts of permission combinations – 777 which you would think would make everything open to copy actually locked down the files even more giving a different permission error. The simple fix to both these errors is to make sure the owner of the files on both sides is the same. It simply goes off the name of the owner, which is odd to me because you’re not always guaranteed to have the same accounts on multiple machines, but I guess the makers of Rsync couldn’t anticipate everything.

List of DBAs in Pennsylvania, search for doing business as names

andrew — Tue, 15 May 2012 20:40:12 +0000

If you’re looking to start a business you may not always want your corporation, or official business name on your promotions, invoices, or website. Sometimes you might want a DBA (doing business as) name. A DBA is a name that can be unrelated to your actual business name. For instance if you’re a plumber and your business name is “Joe’s Plumbing”, you might want the name “Magic Sinks” as your name in advertising. If you register “Magic Sinks” as a DBA, then people can write out checks to that name and you’ll be able to cash them without issue.

When looking for a DBA, remember that you have to register a distinguishable name, meaning it can’t be too much like an already registered name. Adding “a”, “an”, or “the” in front of a name does not make it distinguishable, so save yourself some time and headache and do some research before you try to register a name like that. If you’re filing in Pennsylvania, the state has a nice website that will do a search for you based on keywords. It’s very up to date of new filings, so you should get the name you want. State pf PA DBA Lookup

“The program can’t start because php5ts.dll is missing from your computer” Error

andrew — Wed, 02 May 2012 17:13:23 +0000

I was trying to execute a PHP file via the command line on a windows machine and got the following error “the program can’t start because php5ts.dll is missing from your computer” Now executing PHP via the command line in Windows is different enough from Linux, I didn’t know what it needed. In Linux I would have install php-cli which should have come with all the dependancies. In Windows however, I fixed the issue by simply copying the php5ts.dll into the PHP folder. Now where did I get the php5ts.dll file? http://windows.php.net/download/ I downloaded the latest Thread Safe package, unzipped it and the php5ts.dll was present. This fixed the issue when executing the PHP file from the command line.

Removing extra spaces from within quotes of a string in PHP

andrew — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 20:31:08 +0000

Every once in a while, you may be building strings that include quoted material. The issue is that if you’re doing it programmatically, you may be doing something that quotes different parts of the string. The issue is, that if the field you’re pulling from doesn’t exist, you may leave yourself with extra spaces in your strings. See the example below.

Table: A
Columns: color,number,price,shape
Row1: red,4,3.25,square
Row2: blue,,3.99,round
Row3: ,50,,
Row4: ,,50,

Now if you combined these rows with quotes around everything, and hyphens as delimiters, you’d wind up with the following 3 strings. Note that the delimiter is arbitrary, you can use a replace with any character.
“red-4-3.25-square”
“blue–3.99-round”
“-50–”
“–50-”

Notice that if you trimmed row 3 and row 4, you’d wind up with the same string, but if you left the delimiters in there untouched, you’d have unique strings. For this example we want to talk about the case where you want to combine them both. So how do you get them all out of there?

The first step is to use a simple replace to replace any spot where the delimiters fall next to each other. This will take cause of row 2 where the missing data was in the middle.

$string = str_replace(“–”, “-”, $string);

The simple replace doesn’t help with the edges that are next to the quotes though. You want the quotes next to the first word, not the first delimiter. Therefore, I created the following script to remove the quotes. If you have issues with it, please let me know and I’ll see about improving it to take care of your case. You could modify this to take a dynamic delimiter, or even a dynamic quoting character.

function cleanInsideQuotes($str, $forward=true)
{
if(!$forward){$str = strrev($str);} // reverse it so the same logic can be applied to the end of quotes.

$open = false;
$justOpen = false;
$tempLen = strlen($str);
$newString = “”;

for($x=0;$x<$tempLen;$x++)
{
$tempChar = $str{$x};

if($tempChar=='"')
{
if($open)
{
$open = false;
}
else
{
$open = true;
$justOpen = true;
}
$newString .= $tempChar;
}
elseif($tempChar==" ")
{
if(!$justOpen)
{
$newString .= $tempChar;
}
}
else
{
$justOpen = false;
$newString .= $tempChar;
}
}

$str = $newString;

if($forward) // process it in reverse to catch the spaces before the ending quote.
{
$str = cleanInsideQuotes($str,false);
}
else
{
$str = strrev($str);
}
return $str;
}

What makes a good blog post?

andrew — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 04:39:00 +0000

I have just finished writing a five-part series of articles about what makes a good blog article for our sister site, A Touch of Technology. My goal with this series is to get you the reader involved and expand this list to be even more inclusive. It would be great to make this series into an invaluable resource for blog writers of all levels. I would greatly appreciate any and all of your feedback.

I’m only focusing on single blog entries, not what make a good blog. There are some overlaps between the two, but one of the key concepts of creating a good blog, is having good articles that readers want to read. I have broken down the aspects of a good blog article into 5 sections.

There are more possible sections, but I cover a great deal in the sections I have included. Please share your thoughts and ideas in the comment sections. I can add more sections if good points are raised, or expand the current sections.

ERROR: `phpize’ failed and make: *** [oauth.lo] Error 1

andrew — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 15:23:46 +0000

I recently tried to install oauth on Ubuntu and got two errors during the process. Unlike what is said, it was not the simple install from pecl.

sudo pecl install oauth

This should work, but it threw my first error

ERROR: `phpize’ failed

More searching revealed that the phpize script is found in the php5-dev package, and those who had the error installed that to make it work.

sudo apt-get install php5-dev

It got farther this time, but still had issues. I got the next error when running the pecl oauth install again.

make: *** [oauth.lo] Error 1

More research found that another dependency was missing. To install that

sudo apt-get install libpcre3-dev

After both of the packages were installed oauth downloaded and installed without issue.

srst failed errno 16

andrew — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 16:14:07 +0000

I booted up an Ubuntu machine and got this “srst failed errno 16″ error today. There was no raided harddrive, so I thought I was doomed. The machine was very quiet, checkdisk never finished, and I was starting to worry I’d never get my data back.

It did allow me to go into recovery mode when booting Ubuntu, so I knew my data was at least obtainable. I still couldn’t boot normally though, so something had to be done. Fortunately, I opened up the case, and unplugged the two CD drives, and switched the power and SATA cables into the harddrive. When I rebooted, things went fine!

Is Your Website Mobile Ready?

andrew — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 19:12:15 +0000

Cell phone usage is huge in today’s world. Whether it’s actual mobile usage while on a train or on the road, or it’s just someone sitting on their couch, the use of cell phones to access the internet is increasingly becoming popular. Personally I hate using my cell phone for browsing, but that could be because the sites I’m trying to access aren’t mobile friendly yet. I get frustrated with the speed, which crawls along at 3-G rates, and the cumbersome way your have to navigate. Put your own website to the test if you feel mobile users are an important target audience for you. Did you get frustrated with your own site? If so, your site is not mobile ready.

Here’s a quick summary of the full article (Click the title to read):

Is Your Website Mobile Ready?

Cell phone usage is on the rise and a mobile friendly site is essential.
Mobile users are looking for their information as fast as possible.
The digital real estate for a mobile user is drastically smaller than a normal browser.
Mobile users don’t have a mouse, so don’t use hovers for effect or navigation.
Thumbs are not precision instruments!
Optimize your load times for mobile users.
Take action and make it easier on your mobile users by updating your design.

A Touch of Technology is the sister site to Touch of Technology. The article summarized above is written for that site. Touch of Technology is a key part of business and service offerings and the staff work closely with each other to provide an even better level of service for our customers.

How to filter a list in Excel to provide a list of unique values

andrew — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 22:04:32 +0000

Often you’ll have a big list that you want to filter duplicates out of. It could be because you’re copying content from a number of sources that may overlap, or you’re just rattling off a list of something as fast as you can and don’t want to go back to see if what you’re thinking of is already in the list. Either way, you’ll want a unique list of all the values. This is simple in Excel, and the tutorial below is for Microsoft Excel 2010. The steps are similar for other versions.

How to remove duplicates from a list in Excel

Start with a list of data.

Highlight the set of data you want to filter, then open the ribbon and click on the Data tab. There is a large filter button, but we want to click on the advanced button next to it.

The dialog box below comes up. Change the first radio to Copy to another location. Make sure the List range does not include your headers, then click in the Copy to: field. You can either type the top cell of where you want your new list to appear, or just click on the cell while you’re in the field. Check off the Unique records only checkbox and click OK.

The resulting data set will show as you expected it to.

Counting the occurrences of your unique list

As an additional step, you may want to know how many times each unique item showed up in the list. This would be useful if you’re getting a raw list of data and trying to show patterns or create a graph. Simply add another column and use the formula shown below. Place the formula in the first cell of your new column, next to the first unique value. Use the range of your full set where the formula references A1:A100, and use your unique column cell as the $B2 reference. Drag the formula down to match your list of unique values, and the result will be the count you’re looking for.

=COUNTIF(A1:A100,$B2)

Hot to set an element’s CSS style using Javascript

andrew — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 15:18:00 +0000

CSS is a great way to reduce the amount of markup that needs to be on a page. It also standardizes how your pages look and feel and should make it easier and quicker to add new content. But what happens if you have Javascript logic on your page and based off some user action, you want to change the appearance of an object? With Javascript, you can reference the object, then set the style equal to your desired new value. You can even change the object’s class and in most browsers, it will re-render the object with the styling of the new class. This is great if you want to change a lot of the element’s styles all at once. The process is shown below.

var Object = document.getElementById(“someElementOnPageID”);
Object.style.StyleName = ‘Style Value’;

Of course if you’re using this method in production, be sure to check the object to make sure it exists, as it will break Javascript if you try to set the style of null.

The Style Value can be the same thing you could put in an inline style or in a CSS style declaration in an external file. There are no restrictions that I’m aware of in this department. Now for most styles that are one word, the “StyleName” in the code shown above is just going to be the style, but for styles such as padding-right, the hyphen will break Javascript.

CSS Styles with Hyphens

The table below is a reference in alphabetical order of the different styles that have hyphens, and their corresponding Javascript reference when setting the style.

CSS Property	JavaScript Reference
background-attachment	backgroundAttachment
background-color	backgroundColor
background-image	backgroundImage
background-position	backgroundPosition
background-repeat	backgroundRepeat
border-bottom	borderBottom
border-bottom-color	borderBottomColor
border-bottom-style	borderBottomStyle
border-bottom-width	borderBottomWidth
border-color	borderColor
border-left	borderLeft
border-left-color	borderLeftColor
border-left-style	borderLeftStyle
border-left-width	borderLeftWidth
border-right	borderRight
border-right-color	borderRightColor
border-right-style	borderRightStyle
border-right-width	borderRightWidth
border-style	borderStyle
border-top	borderTop
border-top-color	borderTopColor
border-top-style	borderTopStyle
border-top-width	borderTopWidth
border-width	borderWidth
font-family	fontFamily
font-size	fontSize
font-variant	fontVariant
font-weight	fontWeight
letter-spacing	letterSpacing
line-height	lineHeight
list-style	listStyle
list-style-image	listStyleImage
list-style-position	listStylePosition
list-style-type	listStyleType
margin-bottom	marginBottom
margin-left	marginLeft
margin-right	marginRight
margin-top	marginTop
padding-bottom	paddingBottom
padding-left	paddingLeft
padding-right	paddingRight
padding-top	paddingTop
page-break-after	pageBreakAfter
page-break-before	pageBreakBefore
float	styleFloat
text-align	textAlign
text-decoration	textDecoration
text-decoration: blink	textDecorationBlink
text-decoration: line-through	textDecorationLineThrough
text-decoration: none	textDecorationNone
text-decoration: overline	textDecorationOverline
text-decoration: underline	textDecorationUnderline
text-indent	textIndent
text-transform	textTransform
vertical-align	verticalAlign
z-index	zIndex