The error message looked like:
“Illegal mix of collations (latin1_swedish_ci,COERCIBLE) and (utf8_general_ci,IMPLICIT) for operation ‘find_in_set’”

I ran into this problem today while importing text from a CSV file. Evidently, the text format of the document had UTF characters, which caused CodeIgniter to error out when it tried to insert it to the database. The line had French characters (The ç in Français) My database fields by default are set to “latin1_swedish_ci” character set.

The fix?
I decided the best way to fix this was to set the Collation option for that specific field in the MySQL database to  “utf8_general_ci View More...

If you are in the market for a Canon 7D or a Canon 5D Mark II and a lens, March 7, 2010 – April 3, 2010 is a great time to buy one. Canon is offering 2x the rebates for lenses if you pick up the 5D Mark II at the same time.

Historically, the 580 EX II had a $50 instant rebate during Winter 2009, so the rebate isn’t as good (unless you buy the 5D Mark II at the same time) The $100 off on the 7D looks like a great deal, especially for such a new camera. One of my favorite lenses for indoor use is the 16-35mm, $200 off w/ the 5D II is a good deal.

MySQL by default will make the ORDER BY option in queries case sensitive. This means that rows with the same starting letters (but different case) may be ordered non-alphabetically. There are three solutions to this. One is to force all database entries to be forced to upper-case or lower-case when inserting. Another is to use the collate option. The other solution is to change the query itself.

I just finished installing my new server at home on an Intel SS4200-E box. The server is an incredible value at $135 on eBay. It has a solid case with 4 SATA ports, Celeron 1.6 Ghz processor, 512 MB DDR2 RAM (which I upped to 1GB), rubber drive mounts, and 4 USB ports. The intended use for this box is for running Windows Home server 2003 w/o any video ports.

How do you get video on the Intel SS4200? Read the blog entry for more information.

If you install the amanda-client package on Debian, some things need to be configured before you can actually use the service. By default, the server will not be able to connect to the client. The common error is: “selfcheck request failed: timeout waiting for ACK”. Read the post for the solution.

I noticed with the latest version of WordPress, an older template may not display the sidebar correctly. If you look at the source code, you notice a lot of HTML code is missing in the sidebar div. The easiest fix I found was to update the “sidebar.php” file in the template. Revised 4/28/2010 with a new fix.

I’ve been noticing that a lot of documentation in CakePHP seems to be spread out onto many different sites. In my opinion, the CakePHP manual isn’t comprehensive enough for learning.

Here’s a list of useful CakePHP resources I’ve used recently:

CakeForge – Great resource for Open Source CakePHP applications. This site has many more applications than the CakePHP Bakery.
http://cakeforge.org/

Bakery – How to use different CSS files in CakePHP
http://bakery.cakephp.org/articles/view/some-ideas-to-organize-your-css-files-and-autoload-them-in-cakephp

Giga Promoters – CakePHP tutorials and scripts:
http://www.gigapromoters.com/blog/category/cakephp/

I’ll be updating this list as I find more resources.

Here’s the quickest way to sort data in MySQL after retrieving the last 10 entries with the LIMIT and ORDER BY DESC commands. If you simply do a ORDER BY DESC LIMIT 10, this will return the last 10 results in reverse order (newest first). Adding an inline SELECT command will sort the results after retrieving the last 10 items. (oldest first)

SQL Command

$sql = "SELECT * FROM (SELECT * FROM [TABLE] WHERE ORDER BY modified_date DESC LIMIT 10) AS tbl ORDER BY tbl.modified_date"

This will retrieve the last 10 rows while sorting by date chronologically. I used this SQL command for …

My review on the “I am T-Pain” app is in the latest issue of iProng magazine. Check it out at:
http://www.iprong.com/ipodiphoneitunes/app-review-i-am-t-pain/. I really enjoyed the app with its auto-tune feature. Here’s a really good video of how it works, with musicians testing it out for the first time.

Here’s the fix for the common error with ScpOnly when using the Jail SFTP option. The error message for WinSCP clients is “WinSCP: this is end-of-file:0 failed with invalid output” when trying to connect to a SFTP server. View the post to see the fix for WinSCP.