Tag: troubleshooting

Filemaker and MySQL Floats in Relationship

I’ve been connecting a Filemaker Pro solution with a WordPress website for a client. In a matching relationship to a Gravity Forms table (rg_lead_detail) I was matching a local field with the Gravity Forms column “field_number” which is defined as a float. I noticed that the relationship was only matching whole integers, not numbers with decimals like “1.3”.

Researching this problem led me to this article about MySQL float columns not being precisely recorded:

If you store the number 1.3 in a float column of your database table, MySQL actually stores the number 1.2999999523162842.

My quick solution was to create two calculation fields, one high and one low based on the local field. The high calculation added 0.05 to the field, and the low field subtracted 0.05. This assumes the field only goes to tenths.

Edit Relationship

It works for this application, but I don’t see it working for solutions needing precision and accuracy to multiple decimal places.

WordPress 3.7.1 Update Causing Errors

upgrade_wordpressUpgrading to WordPress 3.7.1 broke a lot of backend (admin, wp-admin) pages. I got 404 Missing and sometimes 500 Internal Server Errors for themes.php, and options.php. No quick fixes were working…

Upgrading PHP from 5.3 to 5.4 solved all issues.

WordPress.org states that the minimum PHP version required is version 5.2.4 or greater. I was using 5.2.11 and upgraded to 5.3.15. Good luck!

Slow Mail.app in Lion OS X 10.7

I recently helped a client with a terribly crippled Mail.app on their Mac. They had upgraded to 10.7 (Lion) from 10.6 (Snow Leopard) not long ago and are a heavy user of Mail.app. Unfortunately, as seamless as upgrading OS X often is, installing a new system over an existing one sometimes brings current issues along with, or create new ones.

They reported that Mail.app would get so slow that typing would be delayed to an unusable extent.

Here’s the initial course of action I suggested:

  1. Install any updates by going to “Software Update” in the Apple Menu
  2. Open “Disk Utility” (find in Spotlight menu or in Applications folder > Utilities)
    1. Select your harddrive on the left pane
    2. Click “Verify Disk”
    3. Note if there are any errors reported once the process is done
    4. Click “Repair Disk Permissions” (errors are probably not important with this step)

This last step, “Repair Disk Permissions” is a sort of cure-all for Mac problems. It isn’t a specific, targeted, remedy, but often can solve problems (especially after something like a system upgrade.) In the case at hand, this was enough to fix the poor performance in Mail.app.

If this hadn’t solved the problem, I would have continued with the following, proceeding down the list if the problem wasn’t remedied:

  1. Remove all Mail preferences
  2. Remove all Mail files in the user Libary (this will remove all locally stored emails! Procede with caution and back-up!)
  3. Create a new user account and manually migrate your data