Maintenance

The update to MariaDB 8 has made a number of things more difficult when it comes to configuring databases. Today we worked through a number of issues with JA, and this is what we learned:

1. HCMC can grant permissions to users on specific dbs, but it only seems to work at the command line, not using the adminer form interface. Use CLI commands in the adminer interface.
2. When you grant permissions to a user using GRANT SELECT.... ON `db`.* to `user` (where user has already been created), you should NOT specify any server (no @something following the user name). If you specify nothing, you get the wildcard %, which is what you want.
3. Once you have a wildcard % in the permissions, do NOT specify any further permissions which are more specific for that user; if you do, the wildcard will be rendered useless, although you'll still see it in there. So:

- DO NOT specify a host in the command

- Thereby get a wildcard

- Don't undermine the wildcard by adding further more specific permissions.

Homebrew’s website:
https://brew.sh

Install with an account with admin privileges if possible. If that is not possible at all then you can go down this rabbit hole (if not be prepared for permissions issues):
https://superuser.com/questions/619498/can-i-install-homebrew-without-sudo-privileges

based on this (untar anywhere):
https://docs.brew.sh/Installation#untar-anywhere

Normal installation procedure:

Install command line tools if you don’t have them:
xcode-select --install

Launch the terminal, then copy this command and press enter, homebrew will install (this command is found on homebrew’s homepage)
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Now install svn by typing this command into the terminal:
brew install subversion

Common installation issues can be found here:
https://docs.brew.sh/Common-Issues

On macOS it usually involves reinstalling the command line tools after a major OS upgrade, so:
xcode-select --install

Then:
brew upgrade

Uninstalling homebrew will fix a FUBAR install:
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/uninstall.sh)"

While GoAccess provides a shed load of detail about a site's monthly performance it's frequently the case that we need more cumulative stats - how many hits did the site get least year? how about compared to the year before? how many hits so far this year?

So, I've been working on an 'executive overview' kind of representation of site data using XSLT and I've been having an interesting problem. Saxon errors out on some files with:
Failed to read input file file:/path/to/file.html (java.nio.charset.MalformedInputException): Input length = 1

Looking at a such a file using file --mime-encoding /path/to/file.html produces something like 'file.html: us-ascii'

I suspect that the output is more a function of the characters that the 'file' application finds in a file. It's unlikely that GoAccess is intentionally encoding the files this way (reports usually come up 'us-ascii', but sometimes it's 'utf-8', sometimes it's 'iso-8859-1', and sometimes it's the literally unidentifiable 'unknown-8bit').

Looking at the specific point in the file that causes grief it looks like it's generally the result of intentionally malformed requests. GoAccess blithely includes the funky chars and XSLT coughs up a hairball.

So it looks like XSLT is out and I'll need to find another way of processing these files.

I discovered that my code wasn't filtering htaccess (and similar) artifacts that end up on a live server so I've updated it to accommodate. I've also added a cron job to automatically run the script each month.
Note that documentation for the wrapper is available in the README included in the codebase.

I've written a wrapper for GoAccess to process the logs produced for the 30ish project sites that we're watching.
Today I deployed it to the server and ran a wrapup task that will bring all of our reports up to date.
Next month I'll see how it works when run from a cron job.

I've always been frustrated by only being able to have one copy of Oxygen running. I like to work on different projects in different workspaces, so when something large is building, I can just switch to another project for a bit. I discovered this:

https://www.oxygenxml.com/forum/topic14636.html

which solves the problem. Edit the oxygen.sh file in the Oxygen folder and add this:

-Dcom.oxygenxml.MultipleInstances=true\

in the set -- \ section. Then edit the .Desktop file that starts the Oxygen editor and comment out the existing line, which looks like this:

Exec="/home/mholmes/Oxygen XML Editor 23/oxygen23.1" %U

and add this one instead:

Exec="/home/mholmes/Oxygen XML Editor 23/oxygen.sh"

You have to omit the %U. Then you can start Oxygen as many times as you like. However, the last one to close will dictate the remembered settings.

If you want to use an emoji (like ❎) but don't want it to be green you can use the variation selector (0xFE0E)to change it to the text representation.
Use it in CSS like this:
.myClassName::after { content: \274E\FE0E; }
which will look like this ❎︎

Some emojis don't have a text representation.
To check what the text version looks like (if one exists) for any given character, go here and enter a utf-16 string (like 274E) or the character itself (❎). This is a very crude tool. Don't expect much.

My machine at home has one 4K monitor on the right and a 1920x1200 monitor on the left, which is in portrait mode. I'm using Wayland.

Getting the monitor settings to persist through reboots and screen locking/sleeping is problematic. Even worse, when the screen blanks (locking) and is subsequently unlocked I lose my rotation and the resolution drops to 1680x1050.

Annoyingly, the max resolution of 1920x1200 is not available at this point (no idea why) so, although I can rotate it, the resolution is rubbish. At this point I can only reboot the machine to get things back to a usable state.

The problem has been partially resolved by setting kernel args in grub (video=DP-1:1200x1920@60). Although this makes my settings persistent through power cycles it has no impact on the screen blanking issue.

I came upon a suggestion to add my monitors.xml to the gdm settings, which sounds reasonable:
sudo cp ~/.config/monitors.xml /var/lib/gdm3/.config/
sudo chown gdm:gdm /var/lib/gdm3/.config/monitors.xml

Apparently the monitor layout will persist across restarts and screen locks.
We'll see.

I'm just posting this because I've had to spend over an hour trying to figure this out. I had what I thought was a bog-standard Ubuntu 20.04 installation with ImageMagick installed from the repos. This gives you ImageMagick 7. On my desktop, it just wouldn't work properly; attempting to process images at the command line gave me missing delegate errors:

no decode delegate for this image format `JPEG' @ error/constitute.c/ReadImage/562

I remembered having hit this before once, and knew to go and change some settings in policy.xml, but that just didn't work. Eventually I had to do this:

• Uninstall and purge imagemagick
• Find all imagemagick-related folders and files and delete them (there are lots, including symlinks to the binaries all over the place)
• reinstall imagemagick (still didn't work)
• sudo apt install graphicsmagick-imagemagick-compat

The last one seems to be the magic bullet.

I was able to get the W3C checklink tool working as a Docker container after modifying the Dockerfile found at https://github.com/stupchiy/docker-w3c-checklink/blob/master/Dockerfile to add some missing dependencies; this is my working file:

FROM ubuntu

MAINTAINER Sergiy Tupchiy <stupchiy@gmail.com>

# Install dependencies required for link-checker distribution installation
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y \
      cpanminus \
      make \
      build-essential \
      libssl-dev \
      curl \
      libnet-ssleay-perl \
  && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*

ENV CHECKLINK_VERSION 4_81

ARG CHECKLINK_URL=https://github.com/w3c/link-checker/archive/checklink-${CHECKLINK_VERSION}.tar.gz

RUN set -x \
  && curl -sSL ${CHECKLINK_URL} -o /tmp/link-checker.tar.gz \
  && mkdir -p /usr/src \
  && tar -xzf /tmp/link-checker.tar.gz -C /usr/src \
  && rm /tmp/link-checker.tar.gz \
  && cd /usr/src/link-checker-checklink-${CHECKLINK_VERSION} \
  && cpanm --installdeps . \
  && cpanm IO::Socket::SSL \
  && cpanm LWP::Protocol::https \
  && perl Makefile.PL \
  && make \
  && make test \
  && make install \
  && rm -rf /usr/src/link-checker-checklink-${CHECKLINK_VERSION}

ENTRYPOINT ["/usr/local/bin/checklink"]
CMD ["-h"]

I'm now able to run it using:

docker run -it --rm link-checker checklink -H --recursive https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca > report.html

The plan is to build a complete local copy of e.g. MoEML and then start a Python simple server there, and point the link checker at it.