I had to go somewhere on Christmas Eve – a long drive south in snow and fog. I knew it was going to be a potentially risky journey, so I took special care.

You see, the night before – bearing in mind the many, many roads our illustrious Nottingham City and County Councils had seen fit not to grit – we had a strange combination of weather. The roads were already slick with compacted snow, and what first happened was that is rained heavily on top of this .

I’m not sure if those who work for the councils are aware of what happens when you pour water on top of ice when the outside temperature is at or below freezing, but if they do they certainly don’t seem to care.

After about half an hour of rain, the precipitation turned progressively through sleet and then to heavy snow. I should say that about another 1cm or more fell by the time it stopped.

Now, just imagine the surface that resulted from the following:

1. compacted and untreated sheet ice
2. water at 0°C
3. partially frozen water (sleet)
4. frozen water (snow)
5. further compaction by vehicles
6. sub-sero temperatures

I didn’t have to drive on this, fortunately (though there were some rural roads in Gloucestershire and Wiltshire closed for similar reasons). But listening to the radio as I started my journey on Christmas Eve, it appears that conditions Wednesday night and Thursday morning were some of the worst in memory. Police had had to close roads on just about any hill (according to the radio) because it was impossible to get up them. But unlike Gloucs and Wilts, where it was a few isolated rural roads they had closed, at least some of these in Nottingham were in the centre of the the City (Mapperley and Carlton).

Last night (Christmas Day evening) the temperature stayed above freezing and a lot of the snow finally began to melt properly – although the compacted and untreated surfaces are even more treacherous in this state. The roads have been iced over for a whole week, yet the Nottingham City and County Councils have done almost nothing.

The last week has cost me at least £400 in lost income.

Still, at least the councils saved some rock salt, eh?

And strike 3! My 9.37am test this morning at Colwick MPTC has also been cancelled. That’s all my tests this week.

I was thinking: since the Nottinghamshire County Council and Nottingham City Council have shown their combined incompetence by not gritting so many roads for over a week now, I wonder if there is any avenue for litigation by driving instructors? You know, suing them for lost income?

The roads around both test centres are abysmal – even a week after the bad weather arrived. I have seen gritters out, and I can see exactly what our illustrious councils are up to: they are only gritting large roads – no doubt in an attempt to conserve rock salt supplies so they can’t be accused of running out of that again (remember February this year?)

What makes it worse is that Nottingham has had no more than 1-2cm of snow spread over 3 or 4 light dustings. The problem is hard, compacted, and completely untreated ice.

My web host is 1&1 – I joined up with them a couple of years ago because they were doing a ‘free year’ offer, and my then web host (UKHosts) had really annoyed me by being hacked (and whoever did it had deleted all the index files and main images)… but not telling me until some of my clients complained their websites were down, and I called them! (And see the comment right at the end of this article – looks like it may have happened again.)

The old “we tried to call you when it happened” crap didn’t cut any ice with me.

Anyway, the great thing about 1&1 is that if you email them with a technical query (or any other type of question come to that), they respond within an hour. UKHosts used to ignore their emails and it was always the same guy who eventually dealt with any query after you’d eventually lost your temper and sent an arsey email. Plus, their phone was permanently engaged or otherwise on answerphone – which they also never used to respond to.

Anyway, I use WordPress to run this blog. Every so often there is an upgrade to fix bugs or add new features, and so far that hasn’t been an issue. However, with the last upgrade you can only run WordPress from a MySQL database version higher than 4.1.something (I forget which now). Mine was 4.0.something.

My account allows me to create MySQL 4 and MySQL 5 databases, and in the recesses of my mind I seem to have a recollection that WordPress specifically mentioned MySQL 4 when I first set it up. Therefore, I was running WordPress from the earlier version of a MySQL database.

Creating a new MySQL 5 database was easy – but it was empty! I needed to be able to transfer my old database data into the new one. Everything indicated that this was a walk in the park. An absolute doddle. After all, I had made periodic backups of my database, so I could restore the site quickly if anything ever went wrong. Well, all I can say is, I am bloody happy that I never had to do that. I had plenty of fun and games doing what appears to be a simple operation.

The only criticism I would have of 1&1 over this was their FAQs. Basically, they are wrong (unless they have updated them as a result of my problem). At best, the FAQs are incredibly misleading – missing out spaces on instructions for command line operations is a guaranteed disaster – and command line systems are not known for being logical in the first place.

Anyway, without going into huge detail over what went wrong, here is how to do it right (and it was 1&1 who sorted this out for me). I will assume you have created a new MySQL 5 database from within your Admin Panel.

First of all you need to back up your old database. Go to yourAdmin Panel, go to the MySQL Admin area, and choose the database you want to back up:

Select Your Database

In the PHPMyAdmin area, click on “Export”:

Export The Database

In the database window (shown below), leave everything unchanged except for the tick box (circled) – you want to save your file – and make sure the SQL option is selected:

Select Settings And Save File

Just choose somewhere to save the file where you can find it (call it something simple like ‘dump_db’), then click GO. This will create your backup file.

Now you need to use your FTP client to upload the ‘dump_db.sql’ file to the root directory of your webspace – that’s the highest level you can go to, above all your folders for your websites.

All of this was the easy part. 1&1 has various FAQs for importing the dumped database, but none of them worked for me. It turned out my database was too big (it was less than 7MB, but they’d told me it just needed to be less than 9MB for the standard import from MyPHPAdmin to work).

If you are lucky, clicking on the SQL button will allow you to browse your PC for the dumped file and restore it from there. But I wasn’t lucky. I had to use SSH to complete the restore.

I downloaded PuTTY (an open source telnet client). You just run this program from the downloaded file – it doesn’t install anything to your PC. When it opens, it looks like this:

PuTTY Settings Window

Type in your host name – it’s the name you use in your FTP client and will be something like ‘ftp.yourdomainname.co.uk’. Make sure SSH is selected, then click ‘Open’. You will now get the telnet window, like this:

PuTTY Telnet Window

At the prompt, type in your username (again, the one you use to access your webspace using your FTP client – with 1&1 it’ll be something like ‘u50012345’), then press ENTER. Enter your password (same as your FTP again), and press ENTER. You’ll now see something like this:

Logged Into Your Server

Now you’re ready for the most important – and most tricky – part. You’ve got to run a command to copy the dumped database into the new one. It has to be typed EXACTLY right using the EXACT parameters (this was one of the confusing parts of the FAQs, because the usernames and passwords are not what you’d expect unless you’ve done this before).

Look at your list of databases again (in your MySQL Admin area):

The Database List

Those values I have highlighted are the database name, the database username, and the database host name. You’ll also need a password – and this is one which you set up specifically for SSH from your main Admin Panel. Note that the names are for the MySQL 5 database – the one you want to copy your dumped data into.

At the prompt in the telnet (PuTTY) window, you must type the following. It has to be exactly like this (substituting the relevant data from your Admin Panel):

mysql -h db9876.oneandone.co.uk -u dbo343434343 -p db343434343 < dump_file.sql

Let me just repeat that, but highlighting the spaces you must type using the symbol “• ” in red:

mysql• -h• db9876.oneandone.co.uk• -u• dbo343434343• -p• db343434343• <• dump_file.sql

Press ENTER, then type in your SSH password when prompted, and press ENTER again. The command will execute and your new MySQL 5 database should now contain all your dumped data.

EDIT 03/01/2010: I noticed someone searching for “how to open an sql file and edit”. This is quite simple – you need to use a text editor that doesn’t alter the file by adding headers or messing with file extensions. Notepad++ is an open source program and works perfectly for this and other code editing.

EDIT 22/1/2010: In the last two days I have had several hits on the search term “ukhosts hacked”. My experience was well over a year ago (I’ve been with 1&1 for over a year, and I changed to them directly as a result of the example I gave at the start of this article). I can only guess that UKHosts has been hacked again.

If anyone knows, use the Contact Form from the menu above and give me the details.

This is a very old post from the harsh winter of 2009! This is the post you are probably looking for – it’s about lessons and tests in snow.

That’s another one gone!

I had a 9.17am test and didn’t expect it to go ahead. It snowed a little more last night and the temperature is stuck at -1ºC – and the roads were already treacherous around the test centre and on side roads.

To add to the problems, a lorry had shed its load this morning on the Colwick Loop Road – the examiner I spoke to on the phone said that alone was enough for them to have to cancel the first couple of tests as there was gridlock down there, but the weather was going to stop them going ahead anyway.

It is still hard to believe that the Nottingham City and County Councils have not gritted the minor roads. All it would take is one pass and they’d be free of ice.

Yesterday afternoon I had a lesson with the pupil whose test today has been cancelled. We couldn’t get up her road on the way back – the only way was with a run up, and trying to do it from a standing start was impossible (and that prat in the ice cream van who lives on Allington Road in Lenton who hooted us got stuck as well – serves the tosser right).

As an artefact to upgrading my database from mySQL 4.0 to mySQL 5.0 (so I could apply the latest WordPress update), I noticed a whole heap of  ‘Â’ symbols had appeared in my previous posts.

I started to edit them out, then realised there must be a better way. Thanks to Brad J Frey’s blog, I fixed it in about 15 seconds.

All you have to do is log into your PHPMyAdmin control panel for the database you want to change, then choose the SQL button, as shown here:

PHPMyAdmin For Database

This opens up a window – make sure you select the SQL tab:

MySQL Query Window

This is the query I used to get rid of the  symbols:

UPDATE `wp_posts` SET post_content = replace(post_content,””,””);

The general format is:

UPDATE `tablename` SET fieldname = replace(fieldname,”what-to-replace”,”what-to-replace-with”);

Just hit GO and the replace operation is done very quickly.

EDIT 22/12/2009: But even better than this, I found a plugin for WordPress which does the search and replace for you. Thanks to thedeadone.net for that. It’s much better.

This is a very old post from the harsh winter of 2009! This is the post you are probably looking for – it’s about lessons and tests in snow.

OK. One down, two to go!

I had an 8.40am test this morning, and I picked the pupil up at 6.45am. It was deadly on some roads – on some downward slopes you simple couldn’t stop.

I knew the test would be cancelled, but I couldn’t confirm it until the test centre staff got into work (that turned out to be 7.30am). I didn’t charge her – how can you? – but we used the hour we were driving around to get some valuable snow/skidding experience.

I’m not optimistic about my next two early tests tomorrow and Wednesday.

EDIT 21/12/2009 #1: Oh. And I have STILL not seen one gritting lorry. Some of the bigger roads have been done at long last – but 99% of the others haven’t. Good ol’ Nottingham City and County Councils, eh?

EDIT 21/12/2009 #2: The test centre cancelled the whole day of tests in the end – I had a quick chat with the SE this afternoon while I was out with a pupil. And I saw ONE gritting lorry while I was out with another pupil tonight at around 6.15pm.