rvdavid: A Web Developer's Blog

A periodical blog of experiences from the angle of an autodidactic, paranoid and narcissistic web developer…

Archive for May, 2009

MySQL Funny/Strange Characters replacing apostrophes after import

May 26th, 2009

Our client contact from a Web Design Company we develop web applications and business websites for rang us late yesterday with a problem they had encountered. They were migrating a database from one MySQL database server to another and noticed that question marks and other strange characters such as aeons or blackbox question marks are appearing everywhere.

How did this happen?
This happens because the test server’s character set (utf8) did not match the production servers client (which is set to latin1 by default) this is what does all the importing and since UTF8 Unicode has some characters that are missing or are different to latin1, they are replaced with a question mark.

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Posted in MySQL

Tags: databases MySQL

First episode of Comic Strip: The Developers … at Silverwater

May 18th, 2009

Ask and you shall receive… well… sort of. I called a meeting one morning regarding our “DevProducts on Blogger” project – I said that I did not want it to be so serious as our new Website is going to be and I asked for some fun elements to it along with updates on what we’re doing.

What I get is “The Developers… at Silverwater”!

The crazy gal I put in charge of the project came up with a witty ~~cartoon~~ comic strip based loosely on our web development company. Anyway, we’ve released our first episode of “The Developers … at Silverwater” called: Databases.

Check out the episode 1: databases on our blogger website: http://devproducts.blogspot.com/

Personally, I think it’s going to be a lot of fun and look forward to future episodes. We’d love to know what you think of the cartoon so leave us some feedback! good or bad.

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Posted in General

NSS Backup – a “Not So Simple Backup” solution for Linux

May 14th, 2009

As mentioned on my previous post, I’ve started using NSS Backup as my primary backup solution for my mobile workstation which runs Ubuntu Linux. I gotta say, it’s running pretty well, although recently I’ve had issues with Ubuntu recognising the mountable external hard disc I’ve been using as a back-up drive – save that story for another time – but yeah, it’s running pretty well. As mentioned I had asked the question. One of the development team members answered the question and requested that I open a ticket.