This is the archive for January 2007. Recent posts can be found at the main blog page.

Simple UTF-8 and MySQL how-to

Tuesday, January 23, 2007 ★ 23:48 ★ Category Programming ★ Permanent url

This is a simple howto to have MySQL talk UTF-8 (the One True Encoding in most cases) to all clients. I’ve read the MySQL manual about character encodings, and in the end it’s pretty simple to get it working:

Make sure you append CHARACTER SET 'UTF8' to each CREATE TABLE statement. Example: CREATE TABLE test (id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY, somefield VARCHAR(4)) CHARACTER SET 'UTF8';. This can be done at the database level as well (when using CREATE DATABASE), but most of the times this is done for you by an external party (hoster, sysadmins, ...)

Issue the following query immediately after you established a database connection (most likely somewhere in your initialization routines): SET NAMES='UTF8'
That’s all. All data stored in and retrieved from MySQL is now in UTF-8. Make sure existing data is converted to UTF-8 as well before importing. I found the easiest way is to convert a database dump using a text editor (eg. :set encoding=utf8 in Vim) or a character set conversion utility such as iconv.

What is this?

Wednesday, January 17, 2007 ★ 23:20 ★ Category Photography ★ Permanent url

What is this? Follow link for the answer.

A bit older

Monday, January 15, 2007 ★ 16:44 ★ Category Misc ★ Permanent url

Much like last year, I grew a bit older today…

Me celebrating my previous birthday. Photo is from last year… no camera right here right now. My hair is much longer nowadays.

I’ve ‘celebrated’ my birthday at the university in an almost all-day meeting, spending the rest of my time writing UI design mockups and doing database design reviews. Yay…

JHBuild and SVN account

Monday, January 8, 2007 ★ 10:39 ★ Category Gnome ★ Permanent url

The following is repeatedly coming up on mailing lists and IRC. Hopefully this blog post reaches more people…

Before the Subversion migration you had to use this line in your ~/.jhbuildrc to have JHBuild use your CVS account settings:
```
repos['gnome.org'] = ':ext:wbolster@cvs.gnome.org:/cvs/gnome'
```
Now that we have Subversion, you should use this line:
```
repos['svn.gnome.org'] = "svn+ssh://wbolster@svn.gnome.org/svn/"
```
Don’t forget to change your username!

JHBuild disk usage with Subversion

Monday, January 1, 2007 ★ 19:49 ★ Category Gnome ★ Permanent url

So, am I right in thinking that a full checkout of the Gnome desktop (using JHBuild) will eat a lot more disk space, now that Gnome uses Subversion, which keeps pristine local copies of all files in .svn directories? This will be a serious issue for me and probably lots of other people…

I noticed this discussion on a subversion mailing list, but it’s rather recent so I don’t think it’s available as of yet. Does something like this work in the mean time?