MySQL ERROR 1153: Got a packet bigger than ‘max_allowed_packet’ bytes
Default packet settings can be problematic when you’re doing backups/restores of large DBs.
To overcome this issue, just set larger buffers by running these SQL statements in your normal SQL window:
set global max_allowed_packet=1000000000;
set global net_buffer_length=1000000;
Images not appearing in Ubercart for Drupal
Ubercart relies on the imagecache module to serve it’s images, so this must be installed first, and the PHP GD2 Module activated.
Once this is done the “presets” the settings required by imagecache to know how to handle the images must be defined. This is done automatically by clicking on “store administration” and then the “images” link at the bottom in the “status messages”. As long as you have got the imagecache module installed correctly they should create correctly and images will show in your catalog.
You have specified an invalid media URL for Custom URL
Now here’s one for the “Read the manual” and “Bad validation messages cause big headaches”. On setting up a feed import for a Flickr based feed I was unable to import the images correctly (despite being sure I had set up my CCK fields and mappings correctly). Each time I ran the import (using the excellent () the image field came back blank. In addition when I tried to update the field manually I kept encountering the error “You have specified an invalid media URL for Custom URL”
Now a quick search on drupal.org revealed this problem wasn’t unique to me but no solution was quite right. In the end I was browsing through the source code for references to Flickr when I found the readme.txt in the emimport folder, which made specific references to:
“Go to /admin/content/emfield/import to change the settings for imports.”
While the path wasn’t quite the same for me (for me is was /admin/content/emfield/media) , when I did go to the settings for emfield it revealed that I had not set up the Flickr Api settings for this (as I didn’t need to do anything with the Flickr api i hadn’t even looked for this).
Anyway, having updated these settings the import and the manual edit worked a treat, no more “You have specified an invalid media URL for Custom URL” errors in Drupal.
Where to find your Flickr user ID (not display name)
While working on a new Flickr/Drupal integration I came up against the problem that I couldn’t find what my actual Flickr user ID was, obviously I knew my screen name but this isn’t what is needed for interations with the API.
the only place I could find it was on the useful information column of the Api Explorer, e.g. on the right of pages like this:
Talking about Flickr Api Explorer – flickr.photos.getAllContexts
If anyone else knows the “official” place for this please let me know!
Text wrapping in Photoshop: An excellent tutorial
Today I found an excellent tutorial to demonstrate how to wrap text in Photoshop. Wrapping text in Photoshop is something I’ve needed to do for a while but never bothered looking it up. So check it out if you want to wrap text in Photoshop.
Simple horizontal (inline) list CSS
A little reminder as to how to achieve a simple horizontal (inline ) list using CSS because I keep forgetting. The key is obviously the display: inline bit.
#mylist li {
display: inline;
list-style-type: none;
padding-right: 20px
}
FTP + SQL2000 DTS – excellent!
For all of us dinosaurs still using SQL 2000, an extremely useful (if you need this of course!) custom DTS task is the SQLDTS FTP Task which “is designed to give you greater control over FTP operations compared to the task supplied with SQL Server 2000″. The ability to FTP text files (in both directions) lends itself to greater use of DTS for common text processing tasks, which can only be a good thing, but whether it does or not, if you need greater flexibility with FTP in your existing DTS processes it’s extremely useful (and works perfectly from what I can tell).
sql 2000 DTS ‘cannot open a log file of specific name’
When migrating DTS packages today I came across a problem with DTS log files I had completely forgotten about.
The DTS package seemed to run perfectly but on completion it said ‘cannot open a log file of specific name’ – this revealed itself to be a problem with the packages logging properties which I’d forgotten to set. To resolve this issue, right click on the DTS page area, select ‘properties’ then navigate the the logging tab thus:
Then make sure the path as indicated is actually valid.
Drupal search index not updating (Says “The index will be rebuilt”)
In early days of experimenting wiht Drupal, mostly pretty good news I have to say, I’m enjoying it’s flexibility and the large number of modules that speed things up!
One problem I just came across was that under admin>settings>search the “Re-index site” button was not working when clicked, it just kept repeating “The index will be rebuilt” while maintaining that nothing was in the index. Not terribly helpful a message, but taking a guess I figured there was something up wiht the a Cron automation process (Cron wasn’t set up, I’d seen a lot of references to it on the Drupal site).
As it turns out it was a Cron problem, to resolve i browsed my way to >admin>reports>status to see the status of “Cron maintenance tasks” had a cross next to it and the option to run the cron tasks manually, which I did.
The problem thus resolved itself and I will set up the Cron proces later.
Drupal installation fails at Database configuration
Trying to install Drupal? Failing at the Database configuration stage?
Read the manual!
Or, when you fail to do that properly refer to posts like this:
http://drupal.org/node/484534#comment-1675612
As it says:
default.settings.php isn’t supposed to be “changed” it is supposed to be copied and renamed settings.php
this in sites/default you should have 2 files default.settings.php and settings.php
This is exactly the opposite of what I had done, and exactly what fixed it!