November 2011 - main

[ALUG Announce] ALUG Norwich Pub Meet Thursday 10th November
by Viperfang 07 Nov '11

07 Nov '11

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- Hello Aluggers, Our monthly ALUG Norwich social meeting will be held this Thursday, 10th November at The Coach and Horses (82 Thorpe Road, Norwich, NR1 1BA). The meeting officially starts at 8pm, although some people may arrive earlier. More information on those people can be found on the list and the IRC channel. If you are unsure if you will recognise us then make yourself and your intent to attend known by either posting on list or visiting us on IRC so we can look out for you rather than hiding in the corner. Optionally you could ask at the bar if they know where the geeky computer weirdos are and they'll point you in the right direction (seriously!). Another possibility is look for heaps of electronics on a table that may possibly look like movie props that would used for detonating explosives. Feel free to bring electronics/laptops/gadgets to the meet, you will by no means be alone. Ben Bewick aka Viperfang NB: This mail is automated, please refer to the usual sources for more information. ALUG Contact Details: Website : http://www.alug.org.uk/ IRC : #alug on irc.alug.org.uk List : http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo Twitter : http://twitter.com/anglianlug Identica: TBA Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2381613902 ----- Send discussion replies to main(a)lists.alug.org.uk (Reply-To set) Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce

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A more subtle (?) sqlite (or actually just SQL) question
by Chris Green 06 Nov '11

06 Nov '11

I have a database which, among other things has a date column and also has some text columns. Is there any way to ask for:- The value of a text column for the last date less than the current date E.g. I have data like the following:- Date Text --------- --------- 2011-11-4 Cabbages 2011-11-5 Fireworks 2011-11-7 Nutcase and I want the result 'Fireworks' given the date 2011-11-6. SELECT Text from db WHERE Date < '2011-11-6'; will give all previous rows, not just the row I want. I sort of need to to say:- SELECT Text from db WHERE Date 'is the biggest one less than' '2011-11-6'; I guess I can do:- SELECT Text from db WHERE Date < '2011-11-6' ORDER BY Date DESCENDING; and use the first row returned but this somehow seems inelegant. Does anyone have any better ideas? -- Chris Green

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How to work out what "SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 25 bind or column index out of range" actually means
by Chris Green 06 Nov '11

06 Nov '11

I'm getting this error when using PHP's PDO to insert records into an sqlite3 database. It's only happening on some inserts. SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 25 bind or column index out of range Now I realise it's probably telling me that some column constraint is being contravened or maybe that I have an invaldid column name or something in the insert. However I can't work out what the error is and without some sort of pointer as to which column (or whatever) is causing the problem I'm at a bit of a loss to find the error. The insert query string being handed to the prepare() function is:- INSERT INTO log (seqno, year, month, day, hour, minute, waterway, pk, place, distance, eng_hrs, fuel_cm, fuel_lt, note, type ) VALUES (:seqno, :year, :month, :day, :hour, :minute, :waterway, :pk, :place, :distance, :eng_hrs, :fuel_cm, :fuel_lt, :note, :type ); and the execute query is being handed an array with matching keys. I'm *wondering* if the issue may be that a couple of fields have characters like '-' and ',' in them, do I need to quote or escape these maybe? -- Chris Green

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HTML question - any way to do this other than using tables?
by Chris Green 02 Nov '11

02 Nov '11

I know HTML isn't strictly linux, but still it's related isn't it and there are lots of clever and helpful people here. I want to lay out some web pages in the following sort of fashion:- Top of Page Heading Sub-heading C1 Data C2 Data C3 Data More C1 data More C2 data More C3 data Sub-heading C1 Data C2 Data C3 Data More data More data More data and more etc etc Sub-heading Etc. Etc. Etc I want all of the columns under the sub-headings to be the same widths so they're aligned all the way down (i.e. the same column widths under all of the sub-headings). Using tables one could either set all the column widths explicitly (but very difficult to make it work at different resolutions then) or one could make the sub-headings a column span and just make the text bold (so as a result it's all one table). Is there any other way that would be less painful? I suppose using the column spanning method isn't too awful but it's a really pity that HTML has no other way of putting text in columns. Note that the columns are not all the same width as I have shown above. -- Chris Green

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Problem 2 - System won't start again after CMOS battery failure
by Chris Green 01 Nov '11

01 Nov '11

I have a fairly infrequently used system in our lounge that I use occasionally when I want to display stuff on the telvision. Yesterday it failed to boot when I tried to use it so, after a few failed retries I went and got my laptop. As per "Problem 1" *that* wouldn't connect to the WiFi. To get round the immediate problem I got a long patch cable and connected that way, so we could see the pictures I wanted to show on the TV! So, I'd like to get the dead CMOS system back up and running. I've replaced the CMOS battery and loaded "Optimised defaults" into the CMOS. That didn't initially work at all because it didn't enable the SATA ROM and the system, though a few years old, has just one disk drive which is a SATA disk. I've now enabled the SATA disk and the SATA ROM in the CMOS and it gets a bit further, GRUB comes up and offers me three or four kernel versions plus memtest. Memory checks OK. If I just let it go on to the default kernel it pops up the disk ID, thinks for a while, then pops up the disk ID again with "Starting system" below, and that's it. I tried the recovery mode and it looks as if it can't read the SATA disk drive, though obviously the CMOS can as otherwise it wouldn't boot into GRUB at all. It goes through a load of timeout messages and then there's a kernel panic. I was going to try and produce some detail by copying to my laptop but that's waiting for the solution to "Problem 1"! Is there any way to copy/save the boot messages produced by GRUB in recovery mode so I can Google for them and/or show them here so that someone might be able to decipher what's wrong? ... and/or can anyone suggest something deep in the CMOS settings that might have been lost and is necessary for Linux to boot from SATA successfully? It's running Xubuntu 10.10 (I think!). -- Chris Green

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