AWG Blogs

Friday, November 27, 2009

Vertical List Oriented Columns with XSLT

The general idea is snake your list of items a set number of times down each column. So for a list of 7 items (XML siblings) and "n-rows" being set to 3, the resulting columns will look like this:



item 1item 4item 7
item 2item 5
item 3item 6

The XSLT code:
<xsl:variable name="n-rows" select="3"/>

<xsl:template name="recurse-rows">

<xsl:param name="index" select="1"/>

<xsl:param name="modrow" select="1" />

<tr>

<xsl:for-each select="/root/item[position() mod $n-rows = $modrow]">

<td>

<xsl:value-of select="value" />

</td>

</xsl:for-each>

</tr>

<xsl:if test="$index &lt; $n-rows">

<xsl:call-template name="recurse-rows">

<xsl:with-param name="index" select="$index + 1"/>

<xsl:with-param name="modrow" select="($index + 1) mod $n-rows"/>

</xsl:call-template>

</xsl:if>

</xsl:template>


sources for ideas:
http://www.stylusstudio.com/xsllist/200407/post30810.html
http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=518095

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Tips for when Setting up WordPress

Platform: Ubuntu 9.04/Apache 2

To set up WordPress as a virtual directory under a VirtualHost, add an alias to the host file in /etc/apache2/sites-available:

e.g.:
<VirtualHost 172.16.134.5:80>

Alias /blog/ "/usr/share/wordpress/"

ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
DocumentRoot /home/wordpress/public_html
DirectoryIndex index.php

<Directory "/usr/share/wordpress/">

Options Indexes FollowSymLinks

AllowOverride All

Order allow,deny

Allow from all

</Directory>

...

</VirtualHost>
The guide I used was https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WordPress.

Note: where you run the command "sudo bash /usr/share/doc/wordpress/examples/setup-mysql -n wordpress localhost" you MUST change localhost to the IP or DNS name if you are setting up the site on a remote server. The reason, as I found out the hard way (I use "localhost" at first) is that the script creates a file under /etc/wordpress called config-<hostname>.php. Then when you go to run the web installation routine, the application can't find the config file, unless you set <hostname> in the above command to match exactly the domain used in the URL. This is because the config file is constructed in /etc/wordpress/wp-config.php using $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Dell Memory Errors with BIOS USB Support

My 2550 Dell Server was displaying memory errors. It would split the amount of memory available and errors would be produced in the Windows Memory Diagnostic utility starting with the MATS+ test. It also mentioned something about an invalid NVRAM configuration in the startup messages. Dell Diagnostic utility was not helpful. I started disabling all options in the Integrated devices section of the BIOS. I found that by disabling BIOS USB support, the memory errors went away. Go figure!