List of Indexed Tags in Solr

Apache Solr is one of the best search engines I use(d). It’s fast, simple to use, indexing is reasonably fast, and sports great many features.

IE Certificate Error with Signed Certificate

So, you’ve got your shiny new certificate, and your good old server. You’ve installed the certificate, chain or intermediate certificate, and all is nice and clean in FireFox, Chrome, Chromium, etc.

Then, your boss opens up his IE, and gets Certificate Error – “not issued by trusted certificate authority” and/or “issued for a different website’s address”. Of course, that’s a major pain, as IE – however bad, buggy and crappy it is – still holds majority of browsers market, as most computer users are incapable of installing a better browser.

HowTo: Make a FaceBook profile public even if not logged in

I’m not a big fan of FB (don’t even have an account), but needed this to be set…
They hid it quite well, both in settings, and in the help section, under a cryptic name “public search” (which makes sense once you know it, but until then…).

So, to make you profile visible even to people who do not have FB account and/or are not logged in, go to Edit Profile, and then Privacy Settings > Apps and Websites > Public search > Enable public search.

That’s it.

PHP+MySQL and Unicode/UTF-8

Most of the wide-spread languages support Unicode and/or UTF-8 at least in some form; post-2K languages support Unicode quite commonly, but there are always few things to look after.

What’s wrong with PHP?! part 3

The magic quotes, and the safe mode… ‘nough said.

Fortunately, both of these are deprecated in new versions of PHP.
Unfortunately, most hostings are not that keen on updating PHP to the newest version (mainly they’re still stuck at the likes of version 5.1.x).

What to do?

Create User in MySQL if It Does Not Exist

MySQL does not support create user if not exists syntax as it does with create table and create procedure. This is pretty weird, as it just boils down to checking whether single row exists in the `mysql`.`user` table.

Troubles with svnserve, svn+ssh, and SSH

I encountered this today, and it took me some time to figure out what’s going on, as the behavior was so strange it shut off my reasoning.

How to Setup SVN Server on Shared Hosting

You’ve got a hosting, neat… a shared one. Now it’d be cool if you could move your subversion repositories there also. But, you can’t just daemonize svnserve or enable webdav in Apache.

SSH is the solution for you. SVN+SSH to be precise. The setup and configuration is pretty straight-forward, but there are quite a few glitches along the way.

All you’ll need for this is SSH access to the server and basic experience with the shell.

Hope this guide will help you: Setup a SVN Server on a Shared Hosting – it took me some time to get over all problems, I hope it’ll save some time to you!

Convert Accented Characters to Non-Accented in PHP

Often “in the wild”, even in English texts, you meet both accented versions and non-accented versions of certain words, such as brand names.

You’re then facing two options – you can either work with both versions, or get rid of accents. The latter option bears advantage of cutting down the dimensionality of the problem, as you don’t need to presume that you support all existing versions of the spelling, but how to get there?

Disable touchpad on Ubuntu Linux

Quite annoyingly, I was unable to disable touchpad on laptop through the dedicated fn combination. Bit of googling brought results fast, here’s a simple script I use now for switching on and off.