myGrid developer blog

I always seem to have some difficulty getting the Rserve component of the R stats library up and running on OSX.  Installing it via install.packages(”rserve”) from within R  appears to work but when running R CMD Rserve I usually get some sort of error like:
/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Resources/bin/Rcmd: line 62: exec: Rserve: not found
Compiling from source using the […]

Ok, here’s one you don’t see every day.
Importing a mysql dumpfile results in “ERROR 1153 (08S01) at line 265: Got a packet bigger than ‘max_allowed_packet’ bytes”
Errm.
Log in to a mysql console,
enter the magic commands:
set global net_buffer_length=1000000;
set global max_allowed_packet=1000000000;
Modify your import to include the command:
–max_allowed_packet=100M
so you have something like
mysql –max_allowed_packet=100M -u user -p db_name < dump.sql
Try […]

We needed a forum for one of our web projects written in rails and a quick google revealed Savage Beast.  It seemed to fit the bill although needed some css tweeks to co-exist with what we currently have.  However, when clicking on its RSS feed icon it threw an ActionController::Request.relative_url_root method missing error which was […]

URLs pointing to resources in a Rails app tend to look like www.somesite.com/people/1
Add this to your model:

def to_param
“#{id}-#{title.downcase.gsub(/[^[:alnum:]]/,’-')}”.gsub(/-{2,}/,’-')
end
Where title is whatever you want to appear after the id and you will get URLs like
www.somesite.com/people/1-Ian
More info from here

I was having problems with a link to remote that I had encoded as follows:
link_to_remote ‘Variable’, :url=> sort_variables_surveys_url(:sorted_variables=>sorted_variables, :search_query=>query, :survey_list => years, :sort => key)
The sorted_variables param was far too big in some cases and returning a ‘uri too long’ error.  So I scratched my head for a while and then looking at the link_to_remote […]

There seems to be lots of ways to get your databases out of a MySQL database and an even more bewildering array of ways to get it back in.  I have found that the following commands seem to be the best way to do it (for me):
Out
mysqldump –databases database_name -u username -p > dumpfile.sql
In
mysql -u […]

MethodBox currently uses a java servlet to create Comma Separated Value (CSV) files inside a zip file.  These are then sent back to the rails application on demand over http.  What we needed was a metadata file to go into the zip file explaining what the CSV files had in them.  It was easiest to […]

Snow Leopard install went fine.  Running methodbox after this didn’t.  ImageMagick, libxml and mysql gems were all broken.  Followed this advice to get it all working.  Boils down to re-install MacPorts, install ImageMagick and libxml2 from ports, re-install the RMagick and libxml-ruby gems, install mysql-64bit, re-install mysql gem (in 64 bit mode).
Easy!!  Only took 2 […]

Up until now we have been using images to fake rounded edges on divs etc.  This is fine until you want to change the styling and resize anything.  So, I had a look at doing it in pure CSS.  Luckily, so have lots of other people eg. Nifty Corners and Spiffy Corners.  I used the […]

So it’s been a few months since the last post about adventures in flex.  The final verdict, quite nice but without more developer support the obesity-elab project was too big for one person.  So, we decided to go with the flow and follow the rails path like myExperiment and Sysmo.  This gave us a big […]