Category: Coding

How-To: Extract PHP-Nuke Articles from an SQL INSERT Statement in Python

I found an old SQL dump of this r3dux.org site yesterday which I thought was lost to time. The site ran php-nuke back then, and rather than importing the SQL into a database and fiddling with it to export all the old articles I thought I’d take the python hammer to it. It’s a bit of a bodge/hack – but it seems to work well enough.

The idea is you copy JUST the insert statement which deals with “stories” (nuke’s word for articles / posts) from the SQL dump and put it in a file (mine’s called “nuke_stories.sql”), then run the parse_nuke_stories python script and it’ll dump out all the articles into separate files with filenames like “Article_ID_YEAR_MONTH_DAY.html” and such.

Here’s the top few lines of my SQL insert statement:

Here’s what it’ll dump out into a file called Article_001_2004_09_10.html if this was all that was there:

Article ID : 1
Author : r3duxAdmin
Title : W00t! The site it be a-changin’…
Date : 2004-09-10 12:35:06

Well, PHP-Nuke seems to be up and running, so now it’s time to mess w/ it in a huge way and configure all the millions of options needed to make it just the way I want.

Daunted? Me? Er, yeah. You could say that…

And here’s the actual python (version 3) code to parse the SQL file:

As mentioned, it’s a complete hack – but if you need to do something similar it may work as a starter to get you going…

How To: Convert Day Number to Month and Day

I needed to convert the day number, that is, what day it is between 1 and 365, into a month and day without using Calendar / DateTime classes and such today, so I knocked up a few simple functions that work assuming it’s not a leap year (i.e. that February has 28 days).

Here they are if they’re of any use to you:

A touch cheap, but it gets the job done.

How To: Identify which pointer moved in Android

Heads up: When I say pointer in this article, I mean a finger or a stylus – anything in contact with the touchscreen.

Multi-touch in Android is a bit of a strange beast, although you could argue that it’s by necessity. With ACTION_DOWN (primary pointer in contact) or ACTION_POINTER_DOWN (non-primary pointer in contact), or even the corresponding ACTION_UP or ACTION_POINTER_UP events it’s fine. But when it comes to ACTION_MOVE events – you can’t just ask which finger moved, all you’re told is that A finger moved, and you have to figure out which one for yourself as far as I can tell.

This is what I’ve come up with to figure out which pointer has actually moved – it falls behind by one ACTION_MOVE event because there doesn’t seem to be a way to ask for the current X location of a pointer by its index location (that is, there’s no getX(pointerIndex), only a getHistoricalX(pointerIndex, historyPosition)) – so this code misses the very first move event when a pointer moves – BUT – moving your finger generates a large number of move events, so I’m thinking this might not be that much of an issue.

Update: I’d forgotten you can getX(pointerIndex) and as well as getHistoricalX(pointerIndex, historyLocation) – so I’ve modified the code below to do that, which means I don’t think we miss any move events anymore because we’re now comparing current location to historical(0) rather than historical(0) to historical(1).

Anyway, here’s my code which addresses this finicky problem:

As I’ve been playing around with this it seems to match up with what I’m doing very well without issue, for example:

Alternative Solution

Keep a sparse array of whatever you’re keeping track of – for example, let’s say we’ve got the world’s simplest Circle class:

Then in your class handling the onTouchEvent() method you could have something like this (in this particular example we have a view which responds to multi-touch events):

This technique doesn’t miss any ACTION_MOVE events because it looks them up by pointerId in the SparseArray – which is potentially a nicer solution. Go with whatever works for you.