So how did I like it? It was really good. You can look it up and read all about it, so I won’t rehash the details of the novel and what it is about. The thing I liked was that it mixed so many different genres. It is a cowboy western with some sorcery/magic mixed in. There is also a “knights of the round table” feel and some modern day sci fi. Throw in some religion (a somewhat blasphemous take on Christianity no less – not my favorite part) and multiple/parallel universe thinking and you have yourself a mixed up jumble of interesting reading (or listening in my case).

Wait a minute, you say! You can still use keyboard shortcuts. That’s true. Now to perform the same task in Outlook I can simply type ALT-F, I, T, Y. That just rolls off the tongue (or fingers), doesn’t it? Maybe in the next version I’ll be able to type “P-L-E-A-S-E E-M-P-T-Y M-Y R-E-C-Y-C-L-E B-I-N, Y-E-S I A-M S-U-R-E, T-H-A-N-K Y-O-U”.

Well, this has been a first for me. I was recently hacked on this very blog; or at least it was brought to my attention recently. I suppose it could have taken place a while ago. My hosting provider started sending me notices that my webspace account was generating large amounts of spam mail while I was away on vacation. So naturally by the time I got back home, they had shut down all of my websites. Of course, that was a good thing because they actually researched and found the offending scripts inside a WordPress theme that I had installed. Thus the reason that my blog is somewhat out of sorts now.

So a big thanks goes out to 1&1 Web Hosting for finding the problem and dealing with it in a reasonably quick fashion. Naturally I’ll be scrutinizing my WordPress themes a bit more closely from now on.

This is opening weekend for Thor! Geeks of the world unite in celebrating yet another comic book hero brought to life. And while you’re standing in line for tickets or popcorn, why not show that you’re a true Thor fan with one of these cool T-Shirts from NerdyShirts.com.

Thor Serving Hammer

Thor Little Red

Thor Costume

Thor Core

The Dreaded crcdisk.sys

I found this symptom of the problem by booting into Safe Mode and watching the drivers load. I noticed that it always hung for a long time on the crcdisk.sys file. Well, if you perform a search on Google for “windows vista crcdisk.sys” you will find a plethora of woes from computer users desperately trying to regain the functionality of their PC. There are also a plethora of fixes, advice and this worked for me posts. I tried many of these to no avail.

The Road To Recovery

The laptop I was working on was a Toshiba laptop and it had a system restore disk. Great! Sort of. Restoring the system to factory condition from the disk (after the owner had backed up their data of course) resulted in a system that was broken and still had the problem listed above. Hmmm.

Another operating system perhaps? I installed Windows XP from scratch. Worked great. I installed Windows Vista SP2 from scratch (another disk). Worked great. Re-tried the system restore from Toshiba. No good.

At this point I figured I was just going to install Vista from scratch. So I reinstalled Vista and downloaded the Toshiba drivers from their website. One by one I started installing the drivers. Until I got to the driver for a flash media card reader (front of laptop). Bam! It froze up during the install. So I rolled that change back using Windows System Restore and then continued with all of the other drivers. No problems. I tried the flash media driver one more time just to be sure, and sure enough it failed again. That’s good! Predictability is key in diagnosing computer problems.

The Solution

So now I knew that the flash media card reader was probably bad, and so when the drivers were applied it froze the system. I unzipped the driver distribution and made a list of the files in it. Then I went back and restored the system from the Toshiba system restore disk. I did NOT however, reboot and continue the installation. I rebooted to a Windows system disk and brought up the recovery console (command prompt). I then went into the Windows directory (C:\Windows) and deleted ALL of the files that I had listed from the flash media card driver. One reboot later and the system was continuing the installation all the way to success.

Suggestions

SO… what does this say about our crcdisk.sys error? Absolutely nothing! Well, almost. It makes sense (to me at least) because the system was trying to access a disk and it was failing, thus the “disk” part of crcdisk.sys. So my suggestion for solving the above problem would be to put your troubleshooting hat on. You can try the steps above or one of the many that you’ll find on the internet, but keep this in mind. Just make one small change at a time until you find something that makes a difference. That should give you some good clues as to the root of the problem.

I was recently working on a project that is built on WordPress / BuddyPress. I built up some content using the CMS features of WordPress in my development server and then I transfered the WordPress content to a beta server using the export/import functionality. That kind of stinks having to do that every time I want to push updates to my beta server. So I looked into using Doctrine to generate data fixtures which I could repeatedly run against the different database. Doctrine supports YAML files, which are extremely easy to edit by hand, so it seemed like a good idea.

So what’s the problem? Well, I didn’t currently have any of my data in YAML files. I didn’t want to had edit them or do some sort of copy and paste madness. So, I wrote a script in PHP to dump my data into a YAML file.

The Solution

I’m not going to do much explanation because the code is fairly well commented. You can download the file here or you could just copy and paste it from below, but you may get some weird character conversions. The script can generate YAML for all the tables in your database, for a specific list of tables or you can specify an SQL query. Just execute the script without any arguments to see the usage statement (or just read it at the top of the file). Without further ado, here’s the script.

#!/usr/bin/env php
<?php
/* ========================================================
 * File           : dumpyaml.php
 * Date           : July 15, 2010
 * Author         : Jonathan Franzone
 * Author Website : http://www.franzone.com
 *
 * Script to generate YAML (http://www.yaml.org/) from
 * a MySQL database. Will generate YAML for either all
 * tables in the specified database, only the specified
 * tables in the specified database or only the given
 * SQL query.
 * ========================================================
 */
 
/* ========================================================
 * Configuration (read from command-line)
 * ========================================================
 */
$DBHOST = '';
$DBUSER = '';
$DBPASS = '';
$DBNAME = '';
$TABLES = array();
$DBQUERY = '';
$QUERYNAME = '';
$CONVERT_NAME = false;
 
/**
 * Prints the usage for this script
 */
function usage() {
  echo "
MySQLToYaml [Jonathan Franzone; http://www.franzone.com]
 
  Script to generate YAML (http://www.yaml.org/) from
  a MySQL database. Will generate YAML for either all
  tables in the specified database, only the specified
  tables in the specified database or only the given
  SQL query.
 
Usage : dumpyaml.php [options] -d <database>
        dumpyaml.php [options] -d <database> -t table1,table2
        dumpyaml.php [options] -d <database> -q \"SELECT * FROM `mytable`\" -qn custom_name
 
  -h <host>       MySQL database host
  -u <user>       MySQL username
  -p <pass>       MySQL password
  -d <database>   Name of the MySQL database to dump
  -t <table(s)>   Comma delimited list of tables to dump from database
  -q \"<query>\"    SQL query to dump
  -qn <query name>  Name of the \"table\" when using the -q option
  -n              Convert table names to class names
 
";
}
 
/**
 * Reads/parses the command-line arguments
 */
function read_args() {
 
  global $argc, $argv, $DBHOST, $DBUSER, $DBPASS, $DBNAME, $TABLES, $DBQUERY, $QUERYNAME, $CONVERT_NAMES;
 
  while(!empty($argv)) {
 
    $arg = array_shift($argv);
    switch($arg) {
      case '-h':
        $DBHOST = array_shift($argv);
        break;
      case '-u':
        $DBUSER = array_shift($argv);
        break;
      case '-p':
        $DBPASS = array_shift($argv);
        break;
      case '-d':
        $DBNAME = array_shift($argv);
        break;
      case '-t':
        $TABLES = explode(",", array_shift($argv));
        break;
      case '-q':
        $DBQUERY = array_shift($argv);
        break;
      case '-qn':
        $QUERYNAME = array_shift($argv);
        break;
      case '-n':
        $CONVERT_NAMES = true;
        break;
    }
  }
 
  // Validate Command-Line Arguments
  $retVal = true;
  if (empty($DBHOST)) {
    echo "-h <host> is required\n";
    $retVal = false;
  }
  if (empty($DBUSER)) {
    echo "-u <user> is required\n";
    $retVal = false;
  }
  if (empty($DBPASS)) {
    echo "-p <pass> is required\n";
    $retVal = false;
  }
  if (empty($DBNAME)) {
    echo "-d <database> is required\n";
    $retVal = false;
  }
  if (!empty($TABLES) && !empty($DBQUERY)) {
    echo "-t <table(s)> and -q \"<query>\" are mutually exclusive options\n";
    $retVal = false;
  }
  if (!empty($DBQUERY) && empty($QUERYNAME)) {
    echo "-qn <query name> is required when using -q \"<query>\"\n";
    $retVal = false;
  }
  return $retVal;
}
 
/**
 * Takes a table name with underscores and converts it to something
 * like a class name (CAML case and remove the underscores).
 */
function convert_name_to_class($string) {
 
  // Return Value
  $retVal = '';
 
  $tokens = explode('_', $string);
  foreach($tokens as $token) {
    $retVal .= strtoupper(substr($token, 0, 1));
    if (strlen($token) > 1) {
      $retVal .= substr($token, 1);
    }
  }
 
  // Return Value
  return $retVal;
}
 
/**
 * Takes a SQL query and dumps YAML
 */
function sql_to_yaml($link, $sql, $table) {
 
  global $CONVERT_NAMES;
 
  // Run the query
  $result = mysql_query($sql, $link);
 
  if ($result) {
 
    // Output the table name
    echo ($CONVERT_NAMES === true) ? convert_name_to_class($table) . ":\n" : "{$table}:\n";
 
    // Loop over the result set
    while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
 
      // Output the row/collection indicator
      echo "  -\n";
 
      // Loop over the columns output names and values
      foreach ($row as $key => $value) {
 
        // Do have any newlines or line feeds?
        $literalFlag = (strpos($value, "\r") !== FALSE || strpos($value, "\n") !== FALSE) ? "| " : "";
 
        // Output the key/value pair
        echo "    {$key}: {$literalFlag}{$value}\n";
      }
    }
  }
 
  // Free the result resources
  mysql_free_result($result);
}
 
/**
 * Retrieves the database tables from the database and puts them into the $TABLES array
 */
function get_database_tables($link) {
 
  global $TABLES;
 
  // Run the query
  $result = mysql_query('SHOW TABLES', $link);
 
  if ($result) {
 
    while ($row = mysql_fetch_row($result)) {
      $TABLES[] = $row[0];
    }
  }
 
  // Free the result resources
  mysql_free_result($result);
}
 
/**
 * Main program loop
 */
if (read_args()) {
 
  // Open database connection
  $link = mysql_connect($DBHOST, $DBUSER, $DBPASS);
  if (!$link) {
    die("Could not connect to DB [{$DBUSER}:{$DBPASS}@{$DBHOST}] :: " . mysql_error()) . "\n";
  }
 
  // Select the database
  if (mysql_select_db($DBNAME)) {
 
    // Output header
    echo "---\n";
 
    // Query Mode
    if (!empty($DBQUERY)) {
      sql_to_yaml($link, $DBQUERY, $QUERYNAME);
    }
 
    else {
 
      // If the user has not specified tables then query for them
      if (empty($TABLES)) {
        get_database_tables($link);
      }
 
      // Loop over tables and output YAML
      foreach ($TABLES as $tbl) {
        sql_to_yaml($link, "SELECT * FROM {$tbl}", $tbl);
        echo "\n";
      }
    }
 
    // Output footer
    echo "...\n";
  }
  else {
    echo "Could not select database [{$DBNAME}] :: " . mysql_error() . "\n";
  }
 
  // Close Database
  mysql_close($link);
}
else
{
  usage();
}
?>

Command Line Options

First I wanted to see if there was a command line option that I could pass to PHP to tell it what include_path to use for just this one execution. If you execute the following you’ll see the usage:
php --help
There is no include_path command line option, but there is the -d foo[=bar] option which allows us to modify any of the INI entries by key/value.

A Little Parsing

Now all we need to do is combine the -i option, which lists a bunch of information about PHP including the INI entries, with some parsing and we can get the current include_path value. This command will show us the current value:

php -i | grep include_path
 
include_path => .:/usr/local/lib/php:/usr/local/php5/lib/pear => .:/usr/local/lib/php:/usr/local/php5/lib/pear

Of course we’ll need to get just the value if we want to modify it:

php -i | grep include_path | awk 'BEGIN{ FS=" => " }{ print $NF }'
 
.:/usr/local/lib/php:/usr/local/php5/lib/pear

In the awk script above you’ll see that we set the FS (field separator) system variable to split up the line we get from the php -i | grep include_path call. We also take advantage of the NF (number of fields) system variable to print out the last field, which happens to be the value of include_path.

Putting It All Together

Using this, we can now construct our own value to pass in to the include_path for PHP.

#!/bin/bash
 
INCPATH="`php -i | grep include_path | awk 'BEGIN{ FS=" => " }{ printf($NF) }'`:/my/custom/path"
echo "Using include_path = ${INCPATH}"
php -d include_path=${INCPATH} my_php_script.php
 
exit 0

Note that instead of using the print command in our awk script we use printf instead. This just prevents awk from outputting a newline after it prints our data. Also note the use of back tics so that we can assign the output of an execution to a variable. We then append our own path to that and we have our new include_path.