“Read-Error. This is not a WinWord97 file.”
Sounds familiar? Sounds scary? At least for me it was. I still don’t know how it happened but as a matter of a fact I could not open my .doc file that I was edition with Open Office. I had a printed version of the corrupted document but still … having to retype everything isn’t exactly what you want to spend your time on.
As I got most of my data back I want to share my findings on how to do so.
Getting the data …

When upgrading to Xampplite 1.6.1 I had this MySQL error:
Unknown initial character set index ‘48′ received from server. Initial client character set can be forced via the ‘characterEncoding’ property.
More information on my MySQL settings:
MySQL charset is UTF-8 Unicode (utf8)
MySQL connection collation is set to latin1_general_ci
I solved this issue by commenting this in line the file my.conf (residing at xampplite/mysql/bin):
#collation-server = latin1_general_ci
More information on this issue can be found at:
http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=780244
I actually don’t know what the reason for this problem is, so if you know, just leave a comment.
Link Listhttp://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=780244

As I needed a PHP 5 >= 5.1.2 to make use of XMLReader, I had to install the newest version of Xampplite, which is 1.6.1. In the older version I had installed I made use of many aiases of this form in my conf/httpd.conf:
ALIAS /somename C:/projects/someFolder
Somehow these aliases were not longer working with the new Xampplite and trying to access the alias at localhost/somename produced this error:
[Sun May 20 23:57:40 2007] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] client denied by server configuration: C:/projects/someFolder
A quick search at google brought up the solution:
Apache 2.2 client …

As a follow up to my first post on GMailnow my description of how to import your Mozilla Thunderbird address book (your contacts) into your GMail account.
Its not that much of a big deal but I want to give you some hints on how to do it.
Just export your Thunderbird contacts to a csv file. If you don’t know how to do this, just read How to Export Contacts from the Mozilla Thunderbird or Netscape Address Book.
Edit this file and remove all colums except the ones holding Name,E-Mail and Notes.
If …

I am a long time user of Total Commander as my file explorer.
It costs 20 EUR as a student version and I can only tell you: It is worth more.
I do all file related stuff with it, say FTP & SFTP, connection to my digital camera, everything.
I found this description on how to integrate TortoiseSVN in Total Commander.
It is pretty short, so I will post it in full.

How to configure Total Commander (6.52) for TortoiseSVN
Total Commander Homepage: http://www.ghisler.com/
1. Enable right-click functionality
Go to “Configuration” > “Options” > “Operation” and choose “Left …

For testing of themes/plugins etc I found it useful to replicate my online blog to my local pc.
I am using xampp as a windows environment for testing/debugging. It comes with a preinstalled apache,phpmyadmin,mysql database and much more. For me the lite version of xampp was sufficient, but have a look at the xampp site and decide for yourself.
What I did to get my local blog going:
WordPress

Copy all online files of WordPress to your local disk
e.g. “C:\path\to\local\blog”

Database

Backup the online database
import database backup to local database
edit the database informations in wp-config.php in …