UTF-8 is hell. I have run into problems with UTF-8 before (see Migrating MySQL to UTF-8 encoding).

I moved a site that was displaying fine from an old Apache server to a new Apache2 server and quickly identified that the Apache2 server was displaying odd characters.

The site is running a PHP application with a MySQL backend. The MySQL database is using latin1_swedish_ci character encoding. The old site was displaying correctly. Both the new and old site are using the same database.

So what was going on?

I was running into an issue with a vserver where the disk space usage was at 23% but I was getting a 'No space left on device' error message. I run vserver with 12 virtual servers and none of the other servers exhibited the same behavior.

I was getting OutOfMemoryErrors when running Eclipse with multiple projects open. To solve the problem I added the following arguments to my quicklaunch:

eclipse -vmargs -Xms512m -Xmx1024m -Xss2m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m

Reference

-Xms

Specify the initial size, in bytes, of the memory allocation pool. This value must be a multiple of 1024 greater than 1MB. Append the letter k or K to indicate kilobytes, or m or M to indicate megabytes. The default value is chosen at runtime based on system configuration.

-Xmx

To generate random numbers with bash use the $RANDOM internal Bash function. Note that $RANDOM should not be used to generate an encryption key. $RANDOM is generated by using your current process ID (PID) and the current time/date as defined by the number of seconds elapsed since 1970. The range of returned values is 0 to 32767.

This will return a number between 1 and 100:

NUMBER=$[ ( $RANDOM % 100 )  + 1 ]

Here is a function to dynamically imitate a die:

#!/bin/bash
#
# Simple script to generate a random number
#
# written by Dallas Vogels

While installing the subversion plugin Subclipse in the Eclipse IDE I came across a problem. Subclipse uses "JavaHL (JNI)" to interface with subversion by default. This default setting generates an error when accessing the "Window->Preferences->Team->SVN" preferences:

Failed to load JavaHL Library.
These are the errors that were encountered:
no libsvnjavahl-1 in java.library.path
no svnjavahl-1 in java.library.path
no svnjavahl in java.library.path
java.library.path = /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.03/jre/lib/i386/client::/
usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.03/jre/lib/i386::/usr/lib/firefox:/usr/lib/
firefox/:/usr/java/packages/lib/i386:/lib:/usr/lib