MySQL Cannot Convert Value '0000-00-00 00:00:00' From Column XX To TIMESTAMP

The fix is to put this in the cf data source connection string:

zeroDateTimeBehavior=convertToNull

I don’t know if anyone else would want this crazy set up, but here it is for posterity.

First install apache2 with sudo apt-get install apache2. Test it out in http://localhost/. If it says it works, it works.

Download Coldfusion from the Adobe site. MX7 supposedly has kinks with installing on Linux, so get 8 or 9. I’m using 8. chmod u+x the binary and then run it. Follow the prompts and let it configure apache for you; don’t use the standalone server. The standalone server probably eats resources like mad, though I eschewed it mainly for sanity since I wanted apache to do it all. Feels less dirty.

sudo apt-get install php5. Then aptitude search php | grep apache to get the necessary mods if it’s not installed already.

sudo apt-get install ruby rubygems ruby-dev and also look through aptitude for the necessary mod. You need the ruby-dev to install stuff later with gems.

I’ve stuck my project files in my homedir because I prefer easy access from my homedir. Some peeps say this is not as safe, but for local sandboxy development it’s grood.

Now lets install us some gems. sudo gems install passenger come to mind, and install whatever else it says you need. If it installs stuff to your ~/.gem folder because you didn’t call it with sudo, rm -rf .gems and redo it properly this time, you nonce.

Now to put it all together in your /etc/apache2/ confs:

The CF installer should have written something to the httpd.conf. Again, for sanity’s sake, I moved this into its own file in conf-available then symlinked it in conf-enable.

In the now-blank httpd.conf, put in:

LoadModule passenger_module /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.15/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
PassengerRoot /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.15
PassengerRuby /usr/bin/ruby
DirectoryIndex index.phtml index.php index.php3 index.shtml index.html index.htm index.cfm

And rig up the necessary aliases in sites-available/default:

RailsBaseURI /redmine
<Directory "/var/www/redmine/">
        Options Indexes ExecCGI FollowSymLinks
        Options -MultiViews
        AllowOverride all
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
</Directory>

Redmine was the only one that I couldn’t get to go just with an alias, so I cheated and symlinked to its ‘public’ directory in /var/www/. I’m not sure why. Ruby had some other fussiness as well. I can’t remember what exactly, though. Just pushed it around until it worked. Look around on google if it gives you error messages; ruby’s good for that. Check stuff inside /var/logs/apache2/error.log to see if you can get more details.

Alias /cf/ and /cf to your coldfusion apps directory. Same goes for your php apps, like my phpmyadmin, which can be symlinked from /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf.

Brief synopsis: after upgrading to Lucid, my slicehost server went kaput and couldn’t get up for some time. I tried all the pills I could, but finally declared it unrevivable and nuked it. I thought I could export my blog posts from facebook afterwards but noooo… The RSS feed was broken and there was no guarantee that it would ever come back for the handful of us who care enough to want it. So it was manual copy+paste for the 40 or so posts stuck in facebook neverland.

BUT NOW

WordPress is up running this blog, tracks is up on a subdomain, and squid3 is making life easier at work too!

The main problem I had with tracks today were goofs… First I used the wrong password in database.yml, then I told lighttpd to look for dispatch.fcgi in the wrong place. BUT NOW everything is working and I can start focusing on getting the WP theme to not suck.

W is a sweet boy of six years, which is about 13 or 14 years in human years. He’s quite a dear for trying to rub me off on trees, but otherwise he was fairly laid back and would have to be pushed quite a bit to get up to a good speed. P is the opposite. The chubby girl was raring to go at every chance, and barely needed a nudge to take me on a short canter. Freaked out our hosts. They kept saying I did good.

The part that surprised me was how much Papa knew about horses. Over dinner one night he rambled off all sorts of breeds from around the world, who raced in what races, what awaits a horse when he comes of age… I think I’ve found that bond I need with my father, at last. I wager he’s probably a better rider than I.

I’ve also started riding my bicycle again. It was spurred on by the need to get better at it for my 101 pledge, and again by the peeps who got me into motorcycles. M is en route to getting his motorcycle already and soon I’ll get my gear as well, so I can ride safely on his bike. I wanted to get licensed myself this summer but there isn’t enough time. So I just got a new pedal-bike. Good enough. <rubs hands together>

I started writing on 750words as much as I could to get my writing going again. It’s fun, almost obsessive-compulsive. (Gotta ollect all them badges!) I’ve been griping about not creating enough recently—I’m reading tons of blogs, too many perhaps, and am immersed in social media stuff, again too much perhaps—so the free-writing opportunity was a great place to kick that.

The content of that isn’t too different from my other writing, but I do tend to self-edit more here than there. It’s almost difficult for me to not self-edit as I write. I’m not used to the mechanism of simply writing… it seems the voices in my head quiet down when the spotlight is shone on them.

Anyway, I feel I’m off balance again. Too much consuming not enough creating. I need to rein in from the diaspora.

Not to be confused with the Diaspora, of which I am lucky to backer (albeit a minor one).

I am also a backer of Am I Broken?

I am also loving education blogs. I might become an educator some day, though right now I oughta focus on becoming a shrink.

Right now right now I oughta go to bed…

Preamble: I have an ubuntu host and a Windows XP virtual machine. I prefer doing most of my development in linux and it works out OK when I’m physically connected to the work network, but because a) I’m too lazy to copy over the MS SQL Server database to work locally somehow and 2) I don’t have a linux VPN client I have to do pretty much everything through VirtualBox. That is the way of the world. So here’s what I do—I can think of only one other person who might want this, but I’ll jot this down for posterity anyway:

1) Make everything work in ubuntu first—get all the needed tools (git, vim, etc.) and mappings in CFIDE working. Installing ColdFusion 8+ with Apache2 in ubuntu is a piece of cake nowadays.

1a) Little quirky step that’s just for me: symlink ~/Public to /var/www so I can do my development all inside my homedir.

2) Share ~/Public with the Windows virtual machine.

3) Install all the necessary tools in the Windows VM: git, vim, xampp, and ColdFusion. Make CF use Apache instead of the standalone server.

4) Fix up apache’s conf to include the UNC path (//vboxsvr/public) as an alias (to /public)

5) Map everything in CF Administrator with the UNC path, NOT THE MOUNTED PATH, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.

Also, ListInsertAt() does not work at all when you have an empty list.

A bit of background: supermodel abstracts the data structures of an object. At the moment, it can validate data and read/write to tables all in a single command. It can load external data (say, from a form or a struct) in a single command.

Its functions are based on ruby’s, since one of our engineers is a ruby fanboi… and though it’s been fun to use we’d like to expand it, and at the same time, streamline it. Currently its overhead is at best unwieldy and at worst unusable. Objects created this way are easily readable, but it is at the expense of a lot of oft-extraneous disk access.

The chunk I’m working on right now has to do with inheritance. In order to expand on the existing functionality of save(), which writes the object data to the database, we have to somehow keep track of extra data for each object’s parent.

Recursion

Important datums like table names are overridden when a child inherits from a parent. I could use a struct to store the parent’s component information.

void addProperty(name, type) {
    StructInsert(properties, name, getMetadata(this).name);
    StructInsert(types, name, type);
}

Bigger hitch: when a child inherits from a parent, the this in getMetaData(this) will always be the child. So I can’t do this recursively. Curses! Maybe the seemingly more clever way is easier to implement…

Clever Detection

If an attribute can’t be found in this object’s database, go up a level and use that database. Repeat.

But database access is very slow! This may be elegant to write — it crams all the complexities into grotesque queries, which are sort of like another abstraction layer down — but it’s extremely costly when scaled up. Well then, maybe a simpler implementation of the first idea?

Recursion Again

Instead of taking the name of the component, I take only the name of the table. Since table_name is set in configure(), I’m able to do this with relative ease. Next challenge is actually using this data…

To be continued…

However, pretty nearly everything goes by the virtual path, so passing /olympics/scripts to appease the FileExists() and DirectoryExists() that are wrapped around the ExpandPath() will break stuff that needs the parameter to be /scripts.

The bug has been around since MX6, but CF has yet to issue a fix.

When I looked in the database, I found the original page path. Duplicated over five rows. I selected them, then purged them permanently. I inserted a brand new row with the new page’s information.

To my chagrin, when I refreshed the page the old link came back, and the new one is nowhere to be found. When I looked in the database again… there it was! under a new id! When it exists I can change all its properties except for its path. If I get rid of the path, a new row is inserted with the old information when I refresh the page.

The last thing I tried was restarting my local CF server. That fixed it… for now.

Something somewhere was storing that stale bit of information and is re-instating it to the database when I refresh. I’ve turned off query caching in the CFIDE Admin Panel for now, but this will have to be revisited.

UPDATE: Nope, it’s come back. This time I’ve created close to a thousand extra rows because I’ve been making incremental changes that didn’t get caught… or something. Anyway, I’m very tempted to drop table.

UPDATE: It seems to only happen with this particular application. Pages from other applications are not at all stubborn when I want to change their names or links.

UPDATE: The number of pages seem to double each time I’m accessing a page from the application (i.e. each time the left-nav generator function is called).

UPDATE: It… stopped happening. I just let it sit while I worked on another app, and then twenty minutes later I went back to delete the one-thousand-odd duped pages. Now it’s fine. <cue eerie music>

Until now I have only worked on making the other applications work with the CMS. This week, I will make my first foray into the CMS back end. I will write of the particularly grueling or hilarious instances here.

<cfif IsDefined('variable') /></cfif>

For some reason that makes coldfusion very, very grumpy and leaves it with no idea what’s going on. Normally, the slash (which is the result of an overzealous XHTML-compliant conversion of my typing habits) kicks back with an expected syntax error along the lines of “hey, your cfif tag is being closed prematurely, noob.” Blowing up the first function in the component file though? That’s a first for me. (Haw, haw, haw.)