So, in the process of organizing photographs, I wanted to examine my deeply-nested hierarchy to figure out how it’s possible I have 30,000 images (Aperture only wants me to have 10,000 in a project, so I need to re-organize the hierarchy even before I import).

So, I figured it’d be easy to use find to list all my directories, and how many images they contain. It turns out that (at least for me) it’s not.

My best stab so far is to use find and a loop, which gives me almost what I want (it not only includes the count of images in the each directory, but subdirectories as well). It fails if there are too many directories. It’s good enough. But it’s not elegant.

So CLI Deities — how would you make this pretty?

find . -type d | while read dir; do echo `ls -1 "$dir" | wc -l` $dir; done

Potential type-face issue disambiguation: after the ls, that first argument is a one, not an ell, although I suppose an ell would work too. The wc option is an ell.

As I described back in this article, I was getting segfault errors from eAccelerator.

I’m experiencing it on another, similarly-equipped GoDaddy VPS server. Same software versions, even, for Apache, PHP, eAccelerator, and OS, although this is not a old CMS Made Simple install.

Still, no good solutions out there, as far as I can google.

Here’s the clues I have found:

• The syntax function fun_name ($arg = array (blah)) is fatal.
• The order in which PHP extensions are loaded might matter.
• There are issues with files that get included or required multiple times via different paths.
• Software versions are just Too Old.

This is teh suckage.

Next thing I’ll try, when I have the time, is to upgrade the VPS to Fedora Core 6, and see if pushing those version numbers up a bit helps.

So, I’m working on an old RoR application, and was having a hard time getting it to work on my newer development machine.

The error dump was not at all clear:

C:\project\foo_bar_baz_quux>rake migrate --trace
(in C:/project/foo_bar_baz_quux)
** Invoke migrate (first_time)
** Invoke environment (first_time)
** Execute environment
** Execute migrate
rake aborted!
wrong number of arguments (1 for 0)
c:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-1.13.2/lib/active_record/vendor/mysq
l.rb:551:in `initialize'
c:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-1.13.2/lib/active_record/vendor/mysq
l.rb:551:in `new'
c:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-1.13.2/lib/active_record/vendor/mysq
l.rb:551:in `scramble41'
c:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-1.13.2/lib/active_record/vendor/mysq
l.rb:141:in `real_connect'
c:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-1.13.2/lib/active_record/connection_
adapters/mysql_adapter.rb:316:in `connect'
c:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-1.13.2/lib/active_record/connection_
adapters/mysql_adapter.rb:87:in `initialize'
c:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-1.13.2/lib/active_record/connection_
adapters/mysql_adapter.rb:37:in `new'
c:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-1.13.2/lib/active_record/connection_
adapters/mysql_adapter.rb:37:in `mysql_connection'
c:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-1.13.2/lib/active_record/connection_
adapters/abstract/connection_specification.rb:145:in `send'
c:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-1.13.2/lib/active_record/connection_
adapters/abstract/connection_specification.rb:145:in `connection_without_query_c
ache='
c:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-1.13.2/lib/active_record/query_cache
.rb:54:in `connection='
c:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-1.13.2/lib/active_record/connection_
adapters/abstract/connection_specification.rb:106:in `retrieve_connection'
c:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-1.13.2/lib/active_record/connection_
adapters/abstract/connection_specification.rb:20:in `connection'
c:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-1.13.2/lib/active_record/migration.r
b:178:in `migrate'
c:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rails-1.0.0/lib/tasks/databases.rake:3
c:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.7.2/lib/rake.rb:399:in `call'
c:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.7.2/lib/rake.rb:399:in `execute'
c:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.7.2/lib/rake.rb:399:in `each'
c:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.7.2/lib/rake.rb:399:in `execute'
c:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.7.2/lib/rake.rb:369:in `invoke'
c:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.7.2/lib/rake.rb:362:in `synchronize'
c:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.7.2/lib/rake.rb:362:in `invoke'
c:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.7.2/lib/rake.rb:1935:in `run'
c:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.7.2/lib/rake.rb:1935:in `each'
c:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.7.2/lib/rake.rb:1935:in `run'
c:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.7.2/bin/rake:7
c:/ruby/bin/rake.bat:20:in `load'
c:/ruby/bin/rake.bat:20


I went through a lot of work to use older versions of Rails, etc, but none of it worked. I didn’t find much out
there that helped, either, until I finally happened across this page.

Turns out it’s one of those pernicious password / old style password hash issues with MySQL. Simplest solution for now: use no database password on the dev box.

Here’s a weird one. There was the need to extract the contents of all Javascript <script> … </script> tags from an html page, using Javascript in an Ajax-y environment^*. I tried using a similar regular expression to the one published by Matt Mecham, but found that IE threw an error. IE didn’t like the [^] construct.

So, since I knew that the pages that this would need to process would be standard strings with nothing odd in them, I substituted [^\0]. Works in Firefox and IE. I don’t know if it breaks under different encodings, though.

The other problems was conceptual — I didn’t remember that regex.exec() only gives you the first match in the resultant array (but gives you your submatches); I confused it with the behavior of string.match() which doesn’t give you your submatches. *sigh*

So the code looks like this:

var reg = new RegExp("<script[^>]*>([^\\0]*?)<\\/script>","ig");
while( (m2 = reg.exec(http.responseText))  != null )
    {
        for( i = 1; i < m2.length; i++ )
        {
           alert(i + '('+m2[i].length+')' + m2[i]);
           // do other stuff
        }
    }

(Please note that WordPress seems insistent on munging that code. Spacing, in particular, might be corrupted.)

(* note that use of the passive voice. To protect the innocent, we won’t say who/why it was needed.)

OK. I’m a bonehead. The link I provided to my backup script tarball was broken. The link is fixed.

But wait! A new version of the scripts will be posted in a few days. It’s got some bug fixes and some new features. With it, the little birds really do sing more cheerfully, and the colors really will be brighter.

(As an aside … I don’t know why none of the people who clicked on the broken link bothered to send me an email or leave a comment to tell me there was a problem. Could that all have been robot traffic?)