Andrey Vystavkin Blog

Perl, from Excel to MySQL

Andrey Vystavkin — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:24:39 +0000

One of the reasons I like Perl – it’s really fast on solving daily routines. The request was to get a list of shipping flags from one of the websites to Excel and paste it to the site’s database. Quick and dirty solution:

#!/usr/bin/perl
 
use strict;
use warnings;
use DBI;
use Spreadsheet::ParseExcel;
 
my $file = 'flags.xls';
 
my $xl_parser = Spreadsheet::ParseExcel->new();
 
my $workbook = $xl_parser->Parse($file);
my $worksheet = $workbook->worksheet('Sheet1');
 
my ($c_min,$c_max) = $worksheet->col_range();
my ($r_min,$r_max) = $worksheet->row_range();
 
my @flags;  # used for storing an array of flags;
 
for my $row($r_min..$r_max) {
 
    for my $col($c_min..$c_max) {
 
        my $cell = $worksheet->get_cell($row,$col);
        my $val = $cell->value;
 
        $val =~ s/^\s+(.*?)\s$//g;
 
        push @flags, $val;
        #some extras on different cells/etc/
 
    }   
}
 
my $dsn = "DBI:mysql:database=db_blah;host=host;port=blah_port";
my $dbh = DBI->connect( $dsn, 'usr_blah', 'pwd_blah') || die("Couldn't connect to database\n");
 
 
$dbh->do("INSERT INTO flags(name) VALUES(".$dbh->quote($_).")") for @flags;

CakePHP: remove tmp folder from svn control

Andrey Vystavkin — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:35:40 +0000

We’d have to use propset command from SVN.

$#: cd /path/to/repository/cake_project
$#: svn delete app/tmp/*
$#: svn propset svn:ignore '*' tmp/

Now, after you commit the changes your tmp/files won’t be commited to the SVN repo.

service mysqld restart: no file or directory

Andrey Vystavkin — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 08:25:20 +0000

rpm -qa | grep mysql (find out the version of mysql you got)Somehow managed to break mysqld file (wow! applauses).

Errors received from ‘mysql -u -p ’:
ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock'
On using ‘rpm -e mysql-server’ was getting:
error reading information on service mysqld: No such file or directory error: %preun(mysql-server-3.23.58-4) scriptlet failed, exit status 1

The solution ended up in:

rpm -qa | grep mysql (find out the version of mysql you got)
Get the right version of you RPM
rpm -Uhv –force mysql-server-xx.x.rpm
service mysqld restart

Avatar: we want more!

Andrey Vystavkin — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 12:15:27 +0000

Yesterday, finally watched Avatar movie. I don’t want to talk on the story line – IMHO, everything was simply great. Hopefully, the story will continue, because ending this whole universe only with one movie would have been a crime!

What about:

It’s year 2154 – how far the humanity went in the Universe?
It’s been just the beginning of the story (aka first Dune movie). What about “they’re coming back” part?
Pandora planet was shown just specifically in one region, what about other tribes and areas?

Google: recent privacy buzz

Andrey Vystavkin — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 15:56:42 +0000

Recently, Google CEO Erick Schmidt gave interview on privacy of Google users. Here’s the quote:

If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines — including Google — do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.

Global and Russian internet communities got nuts about this news, especially when Google published their User Dashboard service. Users got amazed by how much information Google is keeping and tracking about their users. Some of people straight away started crying about moving all their searching activities to Bing and switching from Google Apps to other alternatives. But, hold on, let’s take a closer look!

What’s Patriot act?

The Act increases the ability of law enforcement agencies to search telephone, e-mail communications, medical, financial, and other records; eases restrictions on foreign intelligence gathering within the United States (c) Wikipedia

As any US based company Google either Yahoo, of Bing(aka Microsoft) will never deny this Act. And by any call from “upstairs”, any US company will provide all the information about the user, no matter how strict their privacy policy is. Do you really have something “interesting” for US National Security Agencies to show? Or, you’re worrying about this?

If you don’t like the privacies user agreements that US based companies are offering – you can always switch to your native search engine (i.e. Yandex for Russians), but – I doubt that the company would refuse providing private information of the user by the request of National Agencies from your country – it’s 21th century, and we kinda “fighting the same enemy together”, in other words – if you information has anything violating National security – you’re going to get caught anyway – from this side of the boarder, or the other one.

How do we get data about customers?

As any company whatever it is, has the customer database, whatever you search, watch, read, download. All those “marketing” guys doing research on consumer behavior, and product marketing need the trends to prove that the company “needs” given product they’re about to launch. Banks do the same thing with department stores: they know more then you expect. The whole goal of it: give the customer what he wants! If you’re afraid of searching for something ridiculous official, you can always cover yourself with bunch of proxies – and the data will be kept there, not in Google/Bing/etc.

So, what to use?

Anything you like! No matter what you’re going to use, the twist that “everybody knows that you’re not a dog in the Internet” has come, unless you’re really paranoid about your private searching (hiding the fact that you’re googling how to make an apple pie in microwave!).

If you’re really afraid about the fact that you’ve been searching for something completely out of range/law – then you should really think that “you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”…

IE7 “operation aborted” error

Andrey Vystavkin — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:41:53 +0000

Once you have “Operation aborted” error in IE7 for the website that means:

You’ve placed JS file in the head of the document.
This script tries to work with DOM with appendChild, createElement methods that drive IE crazy!

Solution is simple – move the JS file out of the head-tag at the bottom as (YDN advices), or at least – inside its container. For example, body-tag.

Google Dashboard and preferred language issue

Andrey Vystavkin — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:37:13 +0000

Well that’s annoying…one thing Google doesn’t do intelligently is languages. I am logged into my account, they KNOW I speak English as a preferred language, but when I go to my iGoogle [google.com] page on my iPhone whilst I’m in Belgium it insists on displaying everything in Dutch.

That was annoying enough…but now the dashboard is doing the same, even when I visit the page from my laptop.

Google, you KNOW I speak English, stop overriding my account setting for my language with demographic data based on my IP address. When I’m traveling it doesn’t make me fluent in the local language…

*slaps the company on the nose with a rolled up newspaper* Bad Google, bad bad portal!

– Pete. (c) Comment

That’s one of the reasons I love Slashdot – proper way of commenting the things!

Oh, yeah, about Google Dashboard – yep, it’s quite handy and useful!

Hugh Laurie – “America”

Andrey Vystavkin — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:45:16 +0000

Memo: SVN creation, trunks and tags

Andrey Vystavkin — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 07:26:03 +0000

1. Trunks

svnadmin create --fs-type fsfs /svn
cd /svn
svn mkdir file:///svn/<project> -m "creating project directory"
svn import /dir/of/project_files file:///svn/<project>/trunk -m "initial import"
svn checkout file:///svn/<project>

2. Creating Tags

cd /svn/<project>
svn mkdir tags
svn copy trunk/ tags/<version_tag> 
svn ci -m "version tagged"
cd /svn/<project>
svn checkout file:///svn/<project>/tags/<version_tag>

Memo: fast grep of the word in the directory

Andrey Vystavkin — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 09:59:31 +0000

 find ./ | xargs grep -i search_string