Gitify Your Life

Git was written to manage code, but Richard Hartmann presents a whole range of projects and tools that use Git for all sorts of things. 😀

From tracking personal notes to managing your website, wiki, and blog over tracking system and personal configuration files to managing videos, photos and other large files and making system backups, a lot of tools have been grown around the git ecosystem to help you support most tasks of your digital life. This talk will show you a lot of neat tools and tricks and it’s highly likely that you will adopt at least one of the various solutions.

http://youtu.be/Ln1Ri8kLzok

Watch it on YouTube or get it from the Debian Archives.

Maintaining Maintenance

Sometimes well-intentioned features have unintended side effects. Case in point: WordPress’ maintenance mode. Whenever you update plugins WP will automatically enter maintenance mode, which displays a nice message to your visitors that the site will be back online shortly. It will automatically go out of maintenance once the updates are done.

Well, sometimes unexpected things happen: you are stuck in maintenance mode. WP will effectively lock you out … even the admin section will not be accessible. *ugh* This is the moment you start panicking … luckily if you wait 10 minutes or delete the .maintenance file manually you’ll be able to access your site again. *phew*

Just went though that whole cycle. m(

Custom CAs everywhere

I recently finished introducing custom CA infrastructure in two instances. Each having two sub CAs, two Servers and a bunch of users. The “create your own CA” part was quite easy after I found  a dated but still accurate tutorial. In hindsight it is quite silly why I didn’t do this before.

On the server side I had to make it work on:

  • Apache
  • Nginx
  • Postfix
  • Cyrus
  • Dovecot

Each expecting its own Format/Packing of certificates, keys and certificate chains. :/

On the client side I had to produce installation and configuration howtos for Windows and OS X and a bunch of popular browsers and email clients. Then there is the “user education” part … this is still in progress, but its looking good.

All in all, I’m happy with the result. 🙂

Fixing Borked UTF-8 Data in MySQL

While updating ownCloud to version 4 it reencoded my already UTF-8-encoded data and left me with borked strings.

I thought about trying to do a bunch of find and replace operations, but I knew this was error prone.

A little internet research produced a very simple simple solution for fixing double-encoded data in MySQL:

mysqldump -u DB_USER -p DB_PASSWORD --opt --quote-names --skip-set-charset --default-character-set=latin1 DB_NAME > DB_NAME-latin1-dump.sql
mysql -u DB_USER -p DB_PASSWORD --default-character-set=utf8 DB_NAME < DB_NAME-latin1-dump.sql

Just replace DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD and DB_NAME with the appropriate values and your good to go. 😀