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For anyone who’s read the Sprawl Trilogy, this will definitely flip your switches:

You can buy ‘em on T-Shirts and hoodies and all sorts of stuff over at memetictees.

I think the “Tessier-Ashpool IT Department” and either the “Chatsubo Bar” or “Sprawl Cowboy” shirts would make a fine addition to any geek wardrobe

Confirming that a work-around is to manually unmount the ~/.gvfs using:
$ fusermount -u ~/.gvfs

Then close/unmount all opened remote locations in Nautilus and log out and back in, again. This restores the .gvfs-functionality for me.

Source: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gvfs/+bug/212789/comments/6

Works for me in XFCE Thunar too, though I can’t say I ever had this crop up for me under Gnome.

Note: Don’t sudo this command, if you get a permission denied error add your user to the fuse group and try again.

Warning: Be careful with the usermod command – the following line will add the user to the fuse group:

sudo usermod -G fuse <USER-ACCOUNT-NAME>

Unfortunately, it will also remove the user from all other groups. What you instead want to use will be the -a(ppend) switch, giving you:

sudo usermod -a -G fuse <USER-ACCOUNT-NAME>

If you did accidentally remove permissions from your user account (like I did), then reboot into a recovery console (you’re not in the sudoers group anymore!) and run the following as root:

usermod -G <USER-ACCOUNT-NAME>,adm,dialout,cdrom,floppy,audio,dip,fuse,video,plugdev,scanner,sambashare,lpadmin,admin <USER-ACCOUNT-NAME>

The first time you put in your user-account name you are specifying it as the first group your user is a member of (hence the account’s primary group), the rest are the standard Ubuntu groups which you might want to modify as required (i.e. add the vboxusers and any other groups you might be using). You can check the current group membership by running:

groups

or,

groups <USER-ACCOUNT-NAME>

or,

cat /etc/group | more

Tricksy hobbitses…

I was helping a student with a bit of project work the other day and had to create a properly formatted Date object from input provided by some dropdown menus, so in the spirit of only ever solving the same problem once, this is how you go about it… I’ll use MySQL for this example, but if the DATEs or DATETIMEs or whatever you’re using have a slightly different format in your DBMS of choice, then the principle’s the same to generate a compatible object.

MySQL Time Formats

The MySQL DATE type has the format YYYY-MM-DD, so for example today (or at least when I’m writing this post) would be 2011-08-19.

The MySQL DATETIME type has the format YYYY-MM-DD HH:ii:SS, so if it’s 9:36am and 53 seconds into the 19th of August 2011, that would be 2011-08-19 09:36:53.

The formatting of the numbers (i.e. the sequence of digits) is super important, but the dashes and colons are optional. This means that when you’re creating a PHP object to represent a DATE or DATETIME, you could create an object which contains 2011-08-19 or 20110819 etc. and MySQL would accept them as the exact same thing.

Constructing a suitable object in PHP

To create our PHP object, we’re going to use the PHP date and mktime functions. For this example I’m just going to create some variables which hold any date or time values, but in the real world you’d probably get them from a dropdown menu or calendar control.

<?PHP
	// Create variables to store 1:15pm and 28 seconds on the 20th of August 2011
	// NOTE: If you don't enclose your values with apostrophes or quotes, then things will go wrong because
	// single digit values need the leading zeroes, for example the 08 below will turn into 8, and then
	// the whole thing's broken. See the bottom of this post for an alternative padding method for numbers.
	$theYear   = '2011'; // YYYY
	$theMonth  = '08';   // MM
	$theDay    = '20';   // DD
	$theHour   = '13';   // HH
	$theMinute = '15';   // ii
	$theSecond = '28';   // SS
 
	// Create an object suitable for insertion into a MySQL DATE field
	// The date 'YmD' parameters mean: year as YYYY, month as MM w/ leading zeroes, day as DD w/ leading zeroes
	// Full PHP date parameters can be found at: http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php
	// The format of mktime is: hour, minute, second, month, day, year
	// Full PHP mktime parameters can be found at: http://php.net/manual/en/function.mktime.php
	$sqlDate = date('Ymd', mktime(0, 0, 0, $theMonth, $theDay, $theYear));
 
	// Create an object suitable for insertion into a MySQL DATETIME field
	// The date 'YmdHis' means: Ymd as above, hours as HH w/ leading zeroes, minutes as ii w/ leading zeroes, ss as seconds w/ leading zeroes
	$sqlDateTime = date('YmdHis', mktime($theHour, $theMinute, $theSecond, $theMonth, $theDay, $theYear));
 
	// Now you've got your DATE or DATETIME object, sling 'em in your database with something like this...
	$dbConn = mysql_connect("localhost", "root", "") or die("It is a good day to die!: " . mysql_error()); // Default WAMP settings
 
	// Choose the database to work with
	mysql_select_db("MyLovelyDatabase", $dbConn) or die("It is a good day to fail to connect to your DB!: " . mysql_error());
 
	// Create the insert statement
	$sqlStatement = "INSERT INTO TestTable (someDate, someDateTime) VALUES ('$sqlDate', '$sqlDateTime')";
 
	// Execute the statement
	$result = mysql_query($sqlStatement, $dbConn);
 
	// Display result of the statement. If this is 1 then the insertion was successful, otherwise it wasn't
	echo "Statement executed and gave the following result: " . $result;
 
	// Shut down the connection to the database
	mysql_close($dbConn);
?>

Which when we then take a look at the database shows us:

Result!

Automatically padding out numerical data with leading zeroes

If you need to work directly with numerical data (as opposed to strings), then you can use the following function (written by matrebatre over on the str_pad page) to pad out your data:

<?PHP
	function padNumber($theNumber, $numDigits)
	{
		// str_pad format: value, desired number of characters, what to pad with, where to place the padding
		return str_pad((int) $theNumber, $numDigits, "0", STR_PAD_LEFT);
	}
 
	$value = 5;
	$paddedValue = padNumber($value, 1); echo $paddedValue . "<br/>"; // 5
	$paddedValue = padNumber($value, 2); echo $paddedValue . "<br/>"; // 05
	$paddedValue = padNumber($value, 3); echo $paddedValue . "<br/>"; // 005
?>

Done & dusted.

I’m not a big fan of this song, but my wife put me on to it because she knows I’ve got a lot of time for Leonard Nimoy – and fair play, the video made me laugh, so maybe you’ll like it too =D

Cool by association…

The news that Ridley Scott is going to be directing a brand new Blade Runner movie completely blind-sided me this morning, and I’m yet to pick my jaw up off the floor. I love Blade Runner – it’s my favourite film of all time, and I’m sure I must have watched it like 20 times. I loved the Philip K. Dick book, I really enjoyed the K. W. Jeter extensions, I finished the PC adventure game multiple times so I could see all the different endings… So yeah, bit of a fan, then. To find out they’re making a new movie, and that Ridley Scott’s at the helm has officially just made my year =D

If you don’t know what you’re missing, check out the Blade Runner Final Cut (2007) trailer below:

Surely more of this has got to be A Good Thing =D

P.S. If you like the music in the trailer, it’s Death is the Road to Awe by Clint Mansell.