Just putting it here since the next time it’s needed I won’t remember:

ALTER TABLE tbl_name CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

got it from here

I found a good walkthrough the easy way at this page

I’m replicating the text here in case it’s gets lost but the credit goes to Matthew Holt

_______________

What follows is the text taken from Mathew’s blog:

Install Homebrew ∞

In case you haven’t already, install Homebrew by following the instructions at the bottom of this page.

Homebrew’s most legit PHP “tap” (package source) is by Jose Gonzalez. Make sure to install it:

$ brew tap josegonzalez/homebrew-php

We also need a tap for a PHP 5.4 dependency, zlib:

$ brew tap homebrew/dupes

Install MySQL ∞

$ brew install mysql

It’ll chew on that for a few minutes, then we need to get it to run as our user account:

$ unset TMPDIR
$ mysql_install_db --verbose --user=`whoami` --basedir="$(brew --prefix mysql)" --datadir=/usr/local/var/mysql --tmpdir=/tmp

I got a “Warning” during this operation, and while I don’t think it’s critical, I did this and things have seemed to work fine… if you got a warning during the last step, then you could do this:

$ sudo mv /usr/local/opt/mysql/my-new.cnf /usr/local/opt/mysql/my.cnf

Then, to launch MySQL at startup:

$ cp `brew --prefix mysql`/homebrew.mxcl.mysql.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents/
$ launchctl load -w ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.mysql.plist

Done! Next: the web server.

Install nginx ∞

$ brew install nginx

Let that stew, then run these commands to have nginx run as root at startup (so we can listen on port 80, the default, instead of 8080 which is less convenient for development):

$ sudo cp `brew --prefix nginx`/homebrew.mxcl.nginx.plist /Library/LaunchDaemons/
$ sudo sed -i -e 's/`whoami`/root/g' `brew --prefix nginx`/homebrew.mxcl.nginx.plist

(Okay, to be honest, this didn’t work for me to load nginx right away on start; I had to edit the /Library/LaunchDaemons/homebrew.mxcl.nginx.plist file and remove the two lines that specify the UserName key and value (one line specifies the key, the other the value). Then it worked.)

Then create a log file… this allows us to view server logs in the Mac Console, which is really convenient, but isn’t required:

$ sudo mkdir /var/log/nginx/

(Don’t forget to tell nginx to put the log file there in nginx.conf: error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;)

Done! Next up: PHP.

Install PHP ∞

$ brew install --without-apache --with-fpm --with-mysql php54

Make sure to change “php54” to whatever version you want. At time of writing, PHP 5.4 is the latest stable, but PHP 5.5 is in alpha. I assume 5.5 would be php55, etc. Be sure to adjust any following commands with the proper version number.

Quick note: Yes, OS X does come with PHP pre-installed. But we don’t want to use that. We need an install we can use with nginx and FastCGI Process Manager (fpm). Plus, we want the latest version, and I’m just not that into compiling from source.

To run php-fpm at startup:

$ sudo cp `brew --prefix php54`/homebrew-php.josegonzalez.php54.plist  /Library/LaunchAgents/
$ sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew-php.josegonzalez.php54.plist

Done! Next up: configuration.

Finishing up ∞

I want all php commands to be using the latest version, not the default PHP binary. So I use this little trick to create a symlink from the default PHP binary to the new one… I do this for both php and php-fpm. If you’re confused about which versions are where, use the “whereis” command, like: “whereis php”.

$ php-fpm -v
$ sudo mv /usr/sbin/php-fpm /usr/sbin/php-fpm.bak
$ sudo ln -s /usr/local/Cellar/php54/5.4.11/sbin/php-fpm /usr/sbin/php-fpm
$ php-fpm -v

Notice that the version went from 5.3 to 5.4 (in my case). Now for the php binary:

$ php -v
$ sudo mv /usr/bin/php /usr/bin/php.bak
$ sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/php /usr/bin/php
$ php -v

I also added /usr/local/sbin to the PATH by adding that directory to the /etc/paths file, then restarting Terminal. You can see your current PATH by typing echo $PATH.

Important config files: ∞

/usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf
/usr/local/etc/php/5.4/php.ini
/usr/local/etc/nginx/fastcgi_params

You’ll probably want to change these for your

The nice thing about Homebrew installations is that you generally don’t need sudo to use or manage these services, since they’re in /usr/local.

Alright. Well that did it for me. Enjoy your new dev environment!

You can stop nginx with nginx -s stop, and start it again with just nginx. You can also just reload the conf file with nginx -s reload.

I installed MySQL Workbench and was able to make a connection to the localhost MySQL server by adding a connection to host “localhost” with no password. The only thing I typed was that hostname and everything worked like a charm.

I did use my nginx.conf file from my previous install; you can view a sample conf file if you need it, in my other post about using Macports to do this (link at top of this post).

End of Mathew’s text

_______________

In my case, I skipped the homebrew nginx installation because I require openresty (i.e compile nginx with the Lua module support)

The JavaScript Scrabble game that I wrote almost a year ago has been sitting abandoned so I released it as public domain at github for the off chance that someone would like to join the development.

The game is here: http://amnond.github.io/jscrab/
It can be cloned from: https://github.com/amnond/jscrab

So, I was wondering what have I actually spent my time on and was it wisely spent ?

• About of month writing software to simulate forex trading. Downloaded and cleaned years of 15 minute resolution forex data – put it all in a database (sqlite) created software in C++ to test various plug-in algorithms (in Lua) to try and predict market trends. Looked really cool but number of products in this space caused me to abandon it. No, I didn’t find an algorithm that would miraculously guess the forex trends.

• Joined a cyber-security startup for four months. Great founder, great idea. I know I’ll be hearing of them in the news, but my path goes elsewhere…

• Another two months – Created a system for automating work assignments. Created a working solution for two hospitals (on call/on duty posts for Doctors) but realized that at least in the departments I was working with, there are other considerations in addition to efficiency and correctness of the solution, such as “now the computer will be in control – this is bad…”. In addition, here too I noticed that the competition has established itself in this market and the investment was just not worth it.

• Another two months writing a blazing fast, unbeatable, multilingual Scrabble game against the computer with animations, drag & drop and other cool stuff entirely running on JavaScript in the browser – was about to market it in various ways when…

• Now three months into a new startup with 3 other great founders.

Conclusions:
I had hoped to have had some revenue streams by this time based on various products. As it stands, time really goes by quickly and I could have probably have spent the time more wisely by sticking to some carefully selected e-commerce applications and following through – but at this point I still have no regrets – it is fun, educating and still far from over 🙂

Well, almost – but the required effect is achieved.

The problem with using anchors in a dynamic web page is that you don’t always want to show the corresponding href in the browser’s status bar when the user hovers over the anchor link.

Twitters Bootstrap navigation tabs are designed to work with anchor elements. I wanted to use these tabs without showing the corresponding anchor links in the browser’s status bar.

solution is as follows (the assumption is that bootstrap.css is included of course):

Add this to your CSS file:

.link {
        cursor:pointer;
        color:blue;
}

And create the tabs as follows:

<ul class="nav nav-tabs">

  <li id="tab1" class="active">
        <a>
        <span class="link" onClick="firstTab()">
        First Tab
        </span>
        </a>
  </li>

  <li id="tab2">
        <a>
        <span class="link" onClick="secondTab()">
        Second Tab
        </span>
        </a>
  </li>

</ul>

Just add the corresponding DIVs and make them hidden or shown accordingly in the event that a tab is clicked.

Per Nick’s request, here’s a small self contained example for one way of accomplishing the above:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<head>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.5/css/bootstrap.min.css">
    <script>
        function firstTab() {
           putTabText("<br/> Hi, I'm the content of <b>Tab1</b>");            
        }

        function secondTab() {
           putTabText("<br/> ... and I'm the content of <b>Tab2</b>");            
        }
        
        function putTabText(str) {
            document.getElementById('idContent').innerHTML = str;
        }
    </script>
</head>
<html>
    <style>
        .link {
        cursor:pointer;
        color:blue;
    </style>
    <body onLoad='firstTab()'>
        <div class="container">
            <ul class="nav nav-tabs">
            
              <li id="tab1" class="active">
                    <a>
                    <span class="link" onClick="firstTab()">
                    First Tab
                    </span>
                    </a>
              </li>
            
              <li id="tab2">
                    <a>
                    <span class="link" onClick="secondTab()">
                    Second Tab
                    </span>
                    </a>
              </li>
            </ul>  
          <div id='idContent'></div>
        </div>      
    </body>
</html>

Every now and then I formulate to myself some thoughts and current conclusions regarding things in general – be it life philosophy and everything that is derived from it. I’m going to start and write these down just to have them placed somewhere either for others to contemplate or for my future self to laugh at 🙂

So, the first is about a thought regarding when to give something up. The rules are:

1. Never ever give up the battle.
2. Know when its time to give up the fight.

3. Don’t confuse the fight for the battle.

How do you know what is a fight and what is a battle – that’s the million dollar question, but I believe there’s a very good indicator: if the signs show that it is unwinnable, then it is a fight and not a battle – time to give it up.

This is mainly a note to myself. Two tools to help convert pages from LTR to RTL text directions:

RTLit
Convert your CSS-formatter file from left-to-right to right-to-left

• http://rtlit.cloudfoundry.com/ based on:

• https://github.com/zohararad/rtlit (a Ruby project)

CSSjanus: http://code.google.com/p/cssjanus/

When building OpenResty (the excellent Lua add-on for nginx) on OS/X I got the following error:

Undefined symbols for architecture x86_64:
  "_pcre_free_study", referenced from:
      _ngx_pcre_free_studies in ngx_regex.o
      _ngx_http_lua_ngx_re_match in ngx_http_lua_regex.o
      _ngx_http_lua_ngx_re_gmatch in ngx_http_lua_regex.o
      _ngx_http_lua_ngx_re_sub_helper in ngx_http_lua_regex.o
      _ngx_http_lua_ngx_re_gmatch_cleanup in ngx_http_lua_regex.o
      _ngx_http_lua_ngx_re_gmatch_gc in ngx_http_lua_regex.o
      _ngx_http_lua_ngx_re_gmatch_iterator in ngx_http_lua_regex.o
      ...
ld: symbol(s) not found for architecture x86_64

To cut a long story short, download the latest version of pcre (PCRE – Perl Compatible Regular Expressions) from ftp://ftp.csx.cam.ac.uk/pub/software/programming/pcre/, extract it to a directory, say /Users/me/pcre-8.21/ and then from the ngx-openresty source directory run configure with:

./configure --with-luajit --with-pcre=/Users/me/pcre-8.21/

all will be well…

—– update from Sept 2013:

I realised that perhaps a better way to install PCRE would be to install homebrew on your Mac and then just:

brew install pcre

however, you will need to know where homebrew installed pcre as you will need to add that parameter when running configure. There are several ways of locating a file on the Mac (I’ll refer to the command line only. The grep is since I know it is installed somewhere in /usr/local):

• mdfind (uses spotlight), for example:

mdfind pcre | grep usr/local

• a combination of

sudo /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb

and then

locate pcre | grep usr/local

• or just plain old find:

find /usr/local -name pcre -print

in my case the location was /usr/local/Cellar/pcre/8.33/ so the configure parameters were:

./configure --with-luajit 
            --with-cc-opt="-I/usr/local/Cellar/pcre/8.33/include" 
            --with-ld-opt="-L/usr/local/Cellar/pcre/8.33/lib"