Category: Solutions to a Specific Problem

It seems that for a lot of people, perhaps the vast majority, they cannot expect to be 100% happy all the time. Even those incredibly successful celebrities and incredibly rich CEOs and politicians are not happy 100% of the time.

So is it a good idea to seek 100% happiness right away? Or should we always try and select the ‘least worst’ situation? If we keep making progress and optimse our happiness levels through constantly selecting the ‘least worst’ situation whenever we have a descision then it seems to me we will maximise our happiness potential in the long run.

Once we have reached the plateau of happiness for our chosen path though, and we are not getting any happier or there is no way to continue improving our happiness, then the only way of potentially improving our happiness is to do something radical and leap to another approach.

For those with training in A.I. or optimisation algorithms, I see this conceptually as see this as a hill-climbing local optimsation plateau problem. You can optimise locally your happiness level, but you need to take a risk when you have plateau’d in your happiness along your current path, to do something completely different and jump to another hill which might offer a higher level of happiness in the long run, although it may not. The amount of risk you take is dependant on the knowledge you have (the heuristics) that the next ‘hill’ or path you take will lead to a better outcome. But.. if it won’t, and all the paths available to you have been analysed, and you will not make yourself happier, you have won at the happiness problem. You are the happiest you can make yourself and no amount of seeking happiness improvements in your life will help.

This can be extended to job hopping, relationships.. of course there is an amount of risk as we never have a perfect heuristic but the concept is the same. Through constantly hopping hills and constantly seeking 100% happiness you can make yourself less happy than you thought. Maybe you were never born to be 100% happy? Maybe none of us ever were, we can just do the best with the oppertunities we were given.

I don’t know if I explained it well but this does a better job:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_climbing

The Problem

As of the day of posting, Plex Media Server has a suboptimal handling of Various Artists compilations. Unless you follow BOTH of these rules, described clearly on the Plex support here under ‘Various Artists’, then they won’t appear collected under a particular album, they will be spread out filed under the different artists that created them. I think it should only require one of these rules, but it is not up to me. The problem is that release metadata available from the online metadata databases, often doesn’t follow these rules – lots of DJ mix compilations for example, do not set albumartist tag to Various Artists from the online metadata databases.

Also you may want to adopt a different file structure for your music than what is recommended and essential for Plex. I would agree that ONE of these measures should be required, and I would argue that setting album artist would be enough for Plex to figure out this problem, but you also need to structure your music also under the way they suggest, you won’t get the desired result of compilations being collected as a single album and in order.

My Solution

Firstly, you’re going to have to manually add the ‘Various Artists’ content to the ‘albumartist’ tag for all tracks in a compilation that doesn’t have them. Currently I’ve only found a way to do this by hand, would be very interested in any automated approaches, or if someone wants to write a beets.io plugin that would be amazing. You can do this with any tag editor, but I wrote my own solution which is faster for what I want to do and easy to use on my existing Beets.io setup and database which has a lot of these problem compilations already. Because I am using Windows I wrote a batch file which uses several third party tools to fix the metadata fast. You will have to download and setup the tools seperately, details are in the batch file comments.

Secondly, you’re going to have to make sure that Beets.io moves your files into the way that Plex Media Server recommends. This is my current Beets.io config file, the important bits here are the file rename and move structure, as per the support page, it has to be something along the lines of:


$albumartist/$album/$artist - $title


My Process

1. ‘beet ls <query string> to identify tracks that need fixing. ‘beet ls fabric’ for example, got almost all of my dozens of Fabric mix CD tracks, which sped up the renaming significantly than using a GUI editor to go in and manually change each album. You have to make sure that the query string selects only the tracks you want to modify, unless you want to go back and edit those few tracks that got caught in the process later.
2. I send that query string to my batch file which goes through the ‘beets ls -p ‘ full path results iteratively and runs a couple of command line tag editors on them, the first works for all MP3s and the second for all FLACs, e.g. ‘.\tag-various-artists.bat fabric’
3. ‘beet update’ to update my Beets.io database with the new metadata I’ve changed with the batch script.
4. ‘beet dup -d’ to delete any duplicates that have arisen.
5. ‘beet move -p’ to preview the file moves into the new directory structure that is required by Plex.
6. When I’ve scanned through and am happy with the file moves – ‘beet move’ to do the moving.
7. I then backup my files through robocopying to an external drive, but this is not essential.
8. Make sure you have checked ‘prefer existing metadata’ in the Plex options for your music library.
9. Set Plex to rescan your libraries metadata.

Tools

The batch file I use, my beets.io config and other tools I use to organise my music collection on Windows 10.

The Results

All my Fabric mix CDs are now properly collected under one ordered album each on Plex:

You use the ‘touch’ command to create two blank files, with a last modified date that you specify – one with a date of the start of the range you want to specify, and the second with a date at the end of the range you want to specify. Then you reference to those two files in your find command:

touch /tmp/temp -t 200604141130
touch /tmp/ntemp -t 200604261630
find /data/ -cnewer /tmp/temp -and ! -cnewer /tmp/ntemp

I wrote an email alerter that sends me an email whenever the upcoming temperature may dip below freezing. It uses the Magpie RSS reader to pull down a 3 day weather forecast that is provided for my area in RSS form by the BBC weather site. It then parses this forecast and determines if either today’s or tomorrow’s weather may dip below freezing. If it might, it sends an email to my email address to warn me.

I scheduled this script to run every day by adding it as a daily cron job on my web host. You can set this up for any web hosts that support cron jobs.

items) != 3){
                $message .= 'Error: problem parsing BBC weather feed';
        }
        $i=0;
        foreach ($rss->items as $item) {
                $href = $item['link'];
                $title = $item['title'];
                preg_match('/Min Temp:.+?-*d*/',$title,$mintemp);
                preg_match('/Max Temp:.+?-*d*/',$title,$maxtemp);
                $mintemp[0] = str_replace('Min Temp: ','',$mintemp[0]);
                $maxtemp[0] = str_replace('Max Temp: ','',$maxtemp[0]);
                $mins[$i] = (int)$mintemp[0];
                $maxs[$i] = (int)$maxtemp[0];
                $i++;
        }

        // freezing warnings

        if($mins[0] < 0){
                $message .= "Today's temperature in W3 may go below freezing, anything down to ".$mins[0];
        }
        if($mins[1] 

You can right click on this link and ‘save as’ to download the script.

Here is some python code I adapted from this stackoverflow post to get the first day of a week specificed by a week number. This method includes leap year and summer time differences.

import time
def weeknum(num,year):
	instr = str(year)+" "+str(num-1)+" 1"
	print time.asctime(time.strptime(instr,'%Y %W %w'))

Here is me exectuting the code in Python’s IDLE shell:

See that the first week of 2009 actually started in 2008, but by the end of that week we are in 2009.

Quite cool little app that allows you to listen to different BBC Radio programmes from within a standalone application, instead of iPlayer:

http://whomwah.github.com/radioaunty/

MediaMonkey is a popular free media player for Windows. It has a great feature that allows you to transfer to and from an iPhone that is not registered with your computer. Normally only one iTunes install can be associated with your iPhone, but MediaMonkey allows you another way to transfer music and audio files with a ‘guest’ iPhone. Check it out, it works:

MediaMonkey

This is just a quick note to remind myself how I did this.

• Hypercam2 is a good, free, video recorder that can cope with recording game videos. It’s freely available from http://www.hyperionics.com/hc/downloads.asp – just make sure when you install it you don’t tick on the spyware toolbar installation options.
• My motherboard has a 5.1 digital soundcard built in. However the only way I can record off the soundcard is to plug in a standard audio cable from the speaker out (green) to the microphone in (orange).
• The soundcard switches off the headphone output when it detects a speaker attached to the speaker out, so you have to go to the recording options in Windows 7 and right click on the microphone in. It will give you an option to ‘Monitor this input using the headphones’ – which will allow you to listen to anything coming into the microphone socket through the headphone socket on the front on my PC.
• In hypercam, set the sound to record from the default input device, set the frame rate to 10/10
• Record using the ‘select window to record from’ option, select the game window, and use the F2 button to start and stop the recording.
• The video will be output in AVI format, but you can transcode or convert it into a quicktime MOV file for editing in iMovie, or you can use windows movie editor, which is free and quite good.

Today I encountered problems configuring the windows version of the popular text editor VIM, so I thought I’d write up a quick post talk about configuration files under the Windows version, if anyone becomes stuck like I did. I use Linux, OSX and Windows on a day-to-day basis, and VIM as a text editor for a lot of quick edits on all three platforms. Here’s a quick comparison:

Linux

Linux is easy because that’s what most people who use VIM run, and so it is very well tested.

~/.vimrc – Configuration file for command line vim.
~/.gvimrc – Configuration file for gui vim.

OSX

OSX is simple also, as it’s based on unix:

~/.vimrc – Configuration file for command line vim.
~/.gvimrc – Configuration file for gui vim.

Windows

Windows is not easy at all.. it doesn’t have a unix file structure, and doesn’t have support for the unix hidden file names, that start with a ‘.’, ie: ‘.vimrc’, ‘.bashrc’, and so on. Most open-source programs like VIM that require these hidden configuration files, and have been ported over to windows, seem to adopt this naming convention: ‘_vimrc’, ‘_bashrc’.. and so forth. So:

_vimrc – Configuration file for command line vim.
_gvimrc – Configuration file for gui vim.

Renaming configuration files from “.” to “_” wouldn’t make much difference on its own. You’d have to rename your files, but.. big deal. It’s not much of a problem.

Another, more tricky, problem you may encounter however, is that there’s no clear home directory on windows systems. Each major incarnation of windows seems to have a slightly different way of dealing with user’s files.. from 2000 to XP, a change, from XP to Vista, there is a change. I haven’t tried VIM on W7 yet, but it seems similar to Vista in structure, so this information may actually be consistent to W7.

The Vista 64 version of VIM I have, looks in another place for configuration files. For a global configuration file, it looks in “C:Program Files”. Yes.. “C:Program Files”. According to Vista 64’s version of VIM.. that’s the exact directory where I installed VIM. This is clearly not right. What’s happening is that the file system on windows is different to the unix-type file systems, and the VIM port is having problems adapting. The real VIM install directory is C:Program Filesvim72. Because VIM is looking for a global configuration file in “C:Program Files_vimrc”, it’ll never find it.

Now you could override this with a batch file that sets the right environmental variables on startup, or you could change the environmental variables exported in windows, but I prefer to have a user-specified configuration file in my personal files directory, as it’s easier to backup and manage. If you wanted to specify the environmental variables yourself, which I’m guessing many will, the two environmental variables to override are:

$VIM = the VIM install directory, not always set properly, as I mentioned.
$HOME = the logged in user’s documents and settings directory, in windows speak this is also where the ‘user profile’ is stored, which is a collection of settings and configurations for the user. The exact directory will depend on which version of Windows you’re running, and if you override the HOME folder, you may have problems with other programs that rely on it being static.

On my Windows Vista 64 install:

$VIM = “C:Program Files”
$HOME = “C:UsersDave”

You can see what files VIM includes by running the handy command

vim -V

at a command prompt; it will go through the different settings and output something similar to this:

Searching for "C:UsersDave/vimfilesfiletype.vim"
Searching for "C:Program Files/vimfilesfiletype.vim"
Searching for "C:Program Filesvim72filetype.vim"
line 49: sourcing "C:Program Filesvim72filetype.vim"
finished sourcing C:Program Filesvim72filetype.vim
continuing in C:UsersDave_vimrc
Searching for "C:Program Files/vimfiles/afterfiletype.vim"
Searching for "C:UsersDave/vimfiles/afterfiletype.vim"
Searching for "ftplugin.vim" in "C:UsersDave/vimfiles,C:Program Files/vimfiles,C:Program Filesvim72,C:Program Files/vimfiles/after,C:UsersDave/vimfiles/after"
Searching for "C:UsersDave/vimfilesftplugin.vim"
Searching for "C:Program Files/vimfilesftplugin.vim"
Searching for "C:Program Filesvim72ftplugin.vim"
line 49: sourcing "C:Program Filesvim72ftplugin.vim"
finished sourcing C:Program Filesvim72ftplugin.vim
continuing in C:UsersDave_vimrc
Searching for "C:Program Files/vimfiles/afterftplugin.vim"
Searching for "C:UsersDave/vimfiles/afterftplugin.vim"
finished sourcing $HOME_vimrc
Searching for "plugin/**/*.vim" in "C:UsersDave/vimfiles,C:Program Files/vimfiles,C:Program Filesvim72,C:Program Files/vimfiles/after,C:UsersDave/vimfiles/after"
Searching for "C:UsersDave/vimfilesplugin/**/*.vim"
Searching for "C:Program Files/vimfilesplugin/**/*.vim"
Searching for "C:Program Filesvim72plugin/**/*.vim"
sourcing "C:Program Filesvim72plugingetscriptPlugin.vim"
finished sourcing C:Program Filesvim72plugingetscriptPlugin.vim
sourcing "C:Program Filesvim72plugingzip.vim"
finished sourcing C:Program Filesvim72plugingzip.vim
sourcing "C:Program Filesvim72pluginmatchparen.vim"
finished sourcing C:Program Filesvim72pluginmatchparen.vim
sourcing "C:Program Filesvim72pluginnetrwPlugin.vim"
finished sourcing C:Program Filesvim72pluginnetrwPlugin.vim
sourcing "C:Program Filesvim72pluginrrhelper.vim"
finished sourcing C:Program Filesvim72pluginrrhelper.vim
sourcing "C:Program Filesvim72pluginspellfile.vim"
finished sourcing C:Program Filesvim72pluginspellfile.vim
sourcing "C:Program Filesvim72plugintarPlugin.vim"
finished sourcing C:Program Filesvim72plugintarPlugin.vim
sourcing "C:Program Filesvim72plugintohtml.vim"
finished sourcing C:Program Filesvim72plugintohtml.vim
sourcing "C:Program Filesvim72pluginvimballPlugin.vim"
finished sourcing C:Program Filesvim72pluginvimballPlugin.vim
sourcing "C:Program Filesvim72pluginzipPlugin.vim"
finished sourcing C:Program Filesvim72pluginzipPlugin.vim
Searching for "C:Program Files/vimfiles/afterplugin/**/*.vim"
Searching for "C:UsersDave/vimfiles/afterplugin/**/*.vim"
Reading viminfo file "C:UsersDave_viminfo" info
Press ENTER or type command to continue

Notice how it does pull in all the syntax highlighting macros and other extension files correctly, which are specified in the .vim files above.. but it doesn’t pull in the global configuration files that I’ve copied also to C:Program Filesvim72_gvimrc and C:Program Filesvim72_vimrc. However, it does pickup the files I copied to C:UsersDave.. both the C:UsersDave_vimrc and C:UsersDave_gvimrc are picked up, although VIM will normally read ‘_gvimrc’ when the gui version of VIM is run (called gvim).

To see exactly what those environmental variables are being set to, when you’re inside the editor, issue these two commands, and their values will be show in the editor:

:echo $HOME
:echo $VIM

It seems to make sense for me – and perhaps you, if you’re working with VIM on windows – to place my _vimrc and _gvimrc files configuration files in $HOME in Vista. They are then picked up without having to worry about explicitly defining any environmental variables, creating a batch file, or any other hassle.

You can do this easily by the following two commands:

:ed $HOME_vimrc
:sp $HOME_gvimrc

That will open the two new configuration files, side by side, and you can paste in your existing configuration that you’ve used in Linux, and windows will pick them up the next time you start VIM.

Bacula is a great open-source distributed backup program for Linux/UNIX systems. It is separated into three main components:

• One ‘Director’ – which sends messages to the other components and co-ordinates the backup
• One or more ‘File Demons’ – which ‘pull’ the data from the host they are installed from.
• One or more ‘Storage Demons’ – which ‘push’ the data taken from the file demons into a type of archival storage, IE: backup tapes, a backup hard disc, etc

I found it extremely versatile yet very complicated to configure. Before you configure it you have to decide on a backup strategy; what you want to backup, why you want to back it up, how often you want to back it up, and how you are going to off-site/preserve the backups.

I can’t cover everything about Bacula here, so I thought I’d concentrate on scheduling. You will need to understand quite a lot about the basics of Bacula before you’ll be able to understand scheduling, so I recommend reading up on the basics first.

I had the most problems with the scheduling. In the end I chose to adopt this schedule:

• Monthly Full backup, with a retention period of 6 months, and a maximum number of backup volumes of 6.
• Weekly Differential backup against the monthly full backup, with a retention period of 1 month, and a maximum number of backup volumes of 4.
• Daily Incremental backup against the differential backup, with a retention period of 2 weeks, and a maximum number of backup volumes of 14.

This means that there will always be 2 weeks of incremental backups to fall back on which depend on a weekly differential which depends on a monthly full. This strategy aims to save as much space as possible – there is no redundancy. This means that if a backup fails, especially a monthly or weekly, it will have to be re-run immediately.

The backup volumes will cycle using this method; they will be reused once the maxium volume limits are hit. Also, if you run a backup job from the console, it will revert to the ‘Default’ pool, so you will have to explicitly define either the daily incremental, weekly differential or the monthly full pools.

Here is my director configuration:

Job {
  Name = "Backup def"
  Type = Backup
  Client = localhost-fd
  FileSet = "Full Set"
  Storage = localhost-sd
  Schedule = "BackupCycle"
  Messages = Standard
  Pool = Default
  Full Backup Pool = Full-Pool
  Incremental Backup Pool = Inc-Pool
  Differential Backup Pool = Diff-Pool
  Write Bootstrap = "/var/bacula/working/Client1.bsr"
  Priority = 10
}

Schedule {
  Name = "BackupCycle"
  Run = Level=Full Pool=Full-Pool 1st mon at 1:05
  Run = Level=Differential Pool=Diff-Pool mon at 1:05
  Run = Level=Incremental Pool=Inc-Pool mon-sun at 1:05
}

# This is the default backup stanza, which always gets overridden by one of the other Pools, except when a manual backup is performed via the console.
Pool {
  Name = Default
  Pool Type = Backup
  Recycle = yes                     # Bacula can automatically recycle Volumes
  AutoPrune = yes                   # Prune expired volumes
  Volume Retention = 1 week         # one week
}
Pool {
  Name = Full-Pool
  Pool Type = Backup
  Recycle = yes           # automatically recycle Volumes
  AutoPrune = yes         # Prune expired volumes
  Volume Retention = 6 months
  Maximum Volume Jobs = 1
  Label Format = "Monthly-Full-${Year}-${Month:p/2/0/r}-${Day:p/2/0/r}-${Hour:p/2/0/r}-${Minute:p/2/0/r}" 
  Maximum Volumes = 6
}
Pool {
  Name = Inc-Pool
  Pool Type = Backup
  Recycle = yes           # automatically recycle Volumes
  AutoPrune = yes         # Prune expired volumes
  Volume Retention = 1 month
  Maximum Volume Jobs = 1
  Label Format = "Weekly-Inc-${Year}-${Month:p/2/0/r}-${Day:p/2/0/r}-${Hour:p/2/0/r}-${Minute:p/2/0/r}" 
  Maximum Volumes = 4
}
Pool {
  Name = Diff-Pool
  Pool Type = Backup
  Recycle = yes
  AutoPrune = yes
  Volume Retention = 14 days
  Maximum Volume Jobs = 1
  Label Format = "Daily-Diff-${Year}-${Month:p/2/0/r}-${Day:p/2/0/r}-${Hour:p/2/0/r}-${Minute:p/2/0/r}" 
  Maximum Volumes = 7
}

I also recommend the excellent O’Reilly book – “Backup and Recovery” which comprehensively covers backups, and has a chapter on Bacula.

At work I’ve written a couple of scripts that send out emails to the appropriate project team when someone checks in a commit to the project subversion repository. Here are the details.

Firstly, you will need a subversion hook setup on post-commit. The post-commit hook needs to be located in SVNROOT/YOURPROJECT/hooks where YOURPROJECT is your svn project name, and SVNROOT is the root directory where you are storing the data files for your subversion repository.

Substitute projectmember1,projectmember2 etc.. in the post-commit script below for the email addresses of the people to be notified when someone commits a change to the project.

#!/bin/sh

# POST-COMMIT HOOK
#
# The post-commit hook is invoked after a commit.  Subversion runs
# this hook by invoking a program (script, executable, binary, etc.)
# named 'post-commit' (for which this file is a template) with the
# following ordered arguments:
#
#   [1] REPOS-PATH   (the path to this repository)
#   [2] REV          (the number of the revision just committed)
#
# The default working directory for the invocation is undefined, so
# the program should set one explicitly if it cares.
#
# Because the commit has already completed and cannot be undone,
# the exit code of the hook program is ignored.  The hook program
# can use the 'svnlook' utility to help it examine the
# newly-committed tree.
#
# On a Unix system, the normal procedure is to have 'post-commit'
# invoke other programs to do the real work, though it may do the
# work itself too.
#
# Note that 'post-commit' must be executable by the user(s) who will
# invoke it (typically the user httpd runs as), and that user must
# have filesystem-level permission to access the repository.
#
# On a Windows system, you should name the hook program
# 'post-commit.bat' or 'post-commit.exe',
# but the basic idea is the same.
#
# The hook program typically does not inherit the environment of
# its parent process.  For example, a common problem is for the
# PATH environment variable to not be set to its usual value, so
# that subprograms fail to launch unless invoked via absolute path.
# If you're having unexpected problems with a hook program, the
# culprit may be unusual (or missing) environment variables.
#
# Here is an example hook script, for a Unix /bin/sh interpreter.
# For more examples and pre-written hooks, see those in
# the Subversion repository at
# http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/trunk/tools/hook-scripts/ and
# http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/trunk/contrib/hook-scripts/

REPOS="$1"
REV="$2"
EMAILS="projectmember1email,projectmember2email,projectmember3email,projectmember4email"
LOG="svnlook log $REPOS -r$REV"
/usr/bin/python /usr/local/scripts/svncommitemail.py $EMAILS $REPOS `whoami` $REV "`$LOG`" > /tmp/svncommitemail.log

Secondly you will need this python script:

Edit the ‘fromaddr’ variable to equal your configuration manager’s email address (probably your own!).

#!/usr/bin/env python

import smtplib
import sys
import getopt
import time
import datetime
import string

def sendMail(subject, body, TO, FROM):
    HOST = "localhost"
    BODY = string.join((
        "From: %s" % FROM,
        "To: %s" % TO,
        "Subject: %s" % subject,
        "",
        body
        ), "rn")
    server = smtplib.SMTP(HOST)
    server.set_debuglevel(1)
    server.sendmail(FROM, [TO], BODY)
    server.quit()

def send(alias,rev,username,repo,changelog):

        today = datetime.date.today()
        fromaddr = 'Configuration.Management@YOURCOMPANY.COM'
        subject = """Subversion repository """+repo+""" changed by """+username+""" on """+str(today)

        aliases = alias.split(',')
        for alias in aliases:
                body = """
Hello,

        This is an automated email to let you know that subversion user: '"""+username+"""' has updated repository """+repo+""" to version """+rev+""". The changelog (might be empty) is recorded as:

"""+changelog+"""

Please contact subversion user: '"""+username+"""' in the first instance if you have any questions about this commit.

Thanks,
Configuration Management
        """
                sendMail(subject,body,alias,fromaddr)


argv = sys.argv
argc = len(sys.argv)
if argc == 6:
        alias = argv[1]
        repo = argv[2]
        username = argv[3]
        rev = argv[4]
        changelog = argv[5]
        send(alias,rev,username,repo,changelog)
else:
        print "Usage: "+argv[0]+"     "

Now once you have this all in place, test it by creating a a test file in the repository, and commiting it. If you issue a “tail -f /tmp/svncommitemail.log” on the box where your subversion project repository is located, you should be able to see what happens when people commit to the project repository.

If it is setup correctly, you will see emails being fired off to all interested parties with information about the svn commit.

For some reason, under ubuntu-server, my default MySQL 5 character encoding was latin1. This caused no end of problems with grabbing data from the web, which was not necessarily in latin1 characterset.

If you are ever in this situation, I suggest you handle everything as UTF-8. That means setting the following lines in my.cnf:

[mysqld]
..
default-character-set=utf8
skip-character-set-client-handshake

If you already have tables in your database that you have created, and they have defaulted to the latin1 charset, you’ll be able to tell by looking at the mysqldump SQL:

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `ARTISTS`;
CREATE TABLE `ARTISTS` (
.. some col declarations..
) ENGINE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=4519 DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

See here this artists table has been set to default charset of latin1 by mysql. This is bad. So what I recommend is:

1. Dump the full database structure + data to a file using mysqldump
2. Substitute ‘latin1’ for ‘utf8’ universally on that file using your favourite text editor
3. Import the resultant file into mysql using the mysql -uroot -p -Dyourdb < dump.sql method

Then everything will be in utf8, and your character encoding issues will be solved 🙂

My GeForce4 MX 420 didn’t work properly with OpenGL under a fresh install of Dapper Drake. Fixing it, however, proved to be really easy:

1) Install the nvidia package:

$ apt-get install nvidia

2) Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and replace the ‘driver’ where it says ‘nv’ with “nvidia”:

Section “Device”
Identifier “NVIDIA Corporation NV17 [GeForce4 MX 420]”
#Driver “nv”
Driver “nvidia”
BusID “PCI:1:0:0”
EndSection

3) Kill X with control-alt-backspace

4) Login again and test if it works by running glxgears and glxinfo on the console