Tips: General

Listed on this page are things that I have found useful and may need access to from a computer that isn't in my house and therefore may not have any relevant pieces of paper with the useful things written down on.

2007

The .htaccess file

If you've changed your .htaccess file and you get a 500 internal server error but you've added valid directives, then check the encoding of the file is set to ANSI when saving the file, not unicode or anything else like that. My server uses Apache.

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Validating XHTML containing Flash code

Often, if you copy and paste a Flash object into your own code, it won't validate as XHTML because HTML tags or invalid tags are used. One way of solving this is the Flash Satay method, which is explained far better than I can explain it by Drew McClellan. I used this for the Last.fm widget, although I didn't need to use the whole hog. Simply removing the invalid tags and properties worked for me because the widget wasn't too horrendous, and the style section wasn't even needed.

November, 2007

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Unix

To remove all the .svn directories from the current folder downwards:

find . -name ".svn" -exec rm -rf {} \;

A safer version:

find . -name ".svn" -print0 | xargs -0 rm -Rf

a little bit later, 2007

Thanks to my C for finding these, especially the safer one, for me on the Internet. Sorry I can't acknowledge their sources, but I didn't note where they came from.

2007

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Ubuntu (Linux)

To get a PuTTY-like thing in Ubuntu:

ssh -l <username> <directory>

2007

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PuTTY

Sometimes, when you logout of PuTTY, it says There are stopped jobs. In order to log out, you need to be able to kill off these so-called stopped jobs. Do that by typing this in at the prompt:

kill %
 until it stops complaining.

This is another one supplied by my lovely husband.

13th November, 2007

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