The reason for this warning is because PHP4 can’t communicate with a MySQL5 server unless it’s using old passwords (set by using the OLD_PASSWORD() function below.)

There are two simple ways to fix this. The first would be to upgrade your version of php. Unless you *really* need php4 (or below?!) upgrade! I’m not sure php4 is supported any more and should be considered a security risk. If you can’t upgrade, just do this in your database:

update mysql.user set password=OLD_PASSWORD('thepassword') where user = 'theusername';
and:
flush privileges;

This should do the trick. Be warned, if you issue any GRANT statements after this you will have to update mysql.user again.

Set the variable @id to 0:
SET @id = 0;

Update the column id to be id + 1 – this will re-index your id column in one fell swoop. Very nice:
UPDATE tblname SET id = (@id := @id + 1);

Set the first value for an auto_increment column:
ALTER TABLE tblname AUTO_INCREMENT = 196;
(this won’t work if there are rows with a higher value already in the table)

All in all, a few nice bits and pieces for cleaning up your tables.

If you know what clearsilver is and you use php, you might find it interesting.

Installing PHP Clearsilver module for apache on Ubuntu and Debian

After a lot of hair pulling, I finally got it to work:

#navigation ul {
  margin:               0;
  padding:              0;
  background-color:     #eee;
  height:               2em;
  border-bottom:        1px solid #888;
}

#navigation li {
  float:                left;
  list-style-type:      none;
  border-right:         1px solid #888;
}

#navigation a {
  float:                left;
  margin:               0;
  background-repeat:    no-repeat;
  background-position:  5px 50%;
  text-decoration:      none;
  color:                #333;
}

#navigation .inner {
  padding:              0 .4em 0 26px;  /* Adjust based on the width of icon + 10px */
  display:              inline;
  line-height:          2em;
  vertical-align:       middle;
}

#navigation .contacts {
  background-image: url(/crm/resources/icons/contacts.png)
}

#navigation .activities {
  background-image: url(/crm/resources/icons/activities.png)
}

#navigation .reports {
  background-image: url(/crm/resources/icons/reports.png)
}

#navigation .utilities {
  background-image: url(/crm/resources/icons/utilities.png)
}

#navigation a:hover {
  background-color:         #fff;
}

And here’s the HTML:

<div id="navigation">
<ul>
  <li><a href="" class="contacts"><span class="inner">Contacts</span></a></li>
<li><a href="" class="activities"><span class="inner">Activities</span></a></li>
<li><a href="" class="reports"><span class="inner">Reports</span></a></li>
<li><a href="" class="utilities"><span class="inner">Utilities</span></a></li></ul>
</div>

*I got my icons from the fantastic FamFamFam web site. This guy gives away loads of great icons for free. You might want to convert them to transparent gifs though as obviously IE6- won’t handle the transparency in the PNGs.

I’m no css expert, so if you can see anything silly in the css/markup or know of some way of improving this, please drop me a comment!