Very quick post today. I rather foolishly didn't look at a back-up of a MySQL database someone sent to me this morning. I didn't realise it contained a copy of *their* mysql table. So when I restored it, all my user data got replaced with their user data.

Frack.

Worse. Their setup did not have a root user. I'm not sure how that works out for them, but it properly stumped me! Anyway, after a good degree of poking around on Google and trying various techniques, I finally found a restore for the MySQL root user that actually works:

Just thought I'd throw this one up there. It's a Linux bash shell script I wrote this morning. You know when you want to take a copy of your production database down to localhost for testing? Not rocket science, but a bit of a pain. This dramatically speeds things up.

In the past I've copied and pasted an old shell script that's been kicking around on my hard disk for years, changed the details and run it. Well this morning I thought "Enough!" I tidied it up so it accepts arguments and even has a --help argument response. This is the code:

if [ $1 = "--help" ];

Olly Mardling, the founder of one of my clients - WhatTalent.com [new window] - sent over an interesting blog post today. He has just completed an application to Seedcamp [new window], the European angel investment guys.

One of the team there made this post showing word clouds of the answers to some of the application questions:
http://blog.seedcamp.com/2008/08/2008-application-zeitgeist.html

So, you want to have many websites with many different content sets but a shared set of users, roles and sessions? Not a problem. There are many ways to skin the Drupal multi-site cat.

I was installing a fresh copy of Drupal on Ubuntu this morning when I hit upon a problem. Half way through the installation script, Drupal kept throwing this at me:

PHP Warning: mysqli_error() [function.mysqli-error]: invalid object or resource mysqli

Followed by the equally useless:

Unable to connect to database server. The MySQL error was: .

Well thank you very much, Drupal. The message might as well just read "Something broke!"