Category: Notes (Page 1 of 45)

Notes on programming-related problems that I’ve encountered while working on various projects.

Happy Thanksgiving

November 26, 2020 / Tom

I never know how many people are reading articles like this the day they are published, but I’ve always been a fan of sharing a note of Thanksgiving Day (at least that’s what it is here in the USA).

Quick Tip: Get the Size of a MySQL Database

November 9, 2020 / Tom

TL;DR: In this quick tip, I provide a simple query for determine the size of a database (that includes all tables). This is useful when determine what the largest tables are, especially if there are custom tables in your WordPress installation, and how large they actually are.

What To Do When Xcode CLI Tools Won’t Install

October 8, 2020 / Tom

TL;DR: If the standard terminal commands don’t work for uninstalling and reinstalling the Xcode CLI tools, use this page and search for the latest version of the tools to download. You don’t need a developer account to access it.

If you work both in a terminal and on a Mac, then you’re likely familiar with the Xcode Command Line Tools (and the necessary utilities they provide for things like Git, building front-end assets, etc.).

If you’re not familiar, here’s the gist:

[Command Line Tools] enables UNIX-style development via Terminal by installing command line developer tools, as well ass macOS SDK frameworks and headers. Many useful tools are included such as the Apple eLLVM compiler, linker, and Make.
Apple Developer Downloads

Obviously, I’m not an iOS or a macOS developer, but there’s plenty of work that I do in the terminal and I need some of these tools for.

Quick Tip: Fix Library Not Loaded for Node

June 3, 2020 / Tom

If you’ve installed Node via Homebrew and, at any point, are trying to execute a shell script to start up a containerized environment (or maybe something else – I’m speaking solely from my experience) and you’re presented with this message or something like it:

dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/local/opt/icu4c/lib/libicui18n.64.dylib
  Referenced from: /usr/local/bin/node
  Reason: image not found

How To Fix TypeError: Cannot Read Property

May 21, 2020 / Tom

If, at some point, you’re working on some front-end code using NPM and when you attempt to install a package, you get a message that resembles something like this (you’re mileage obviously may vary):

TypeError: Cannot read property 'properties' of undefined
...
at Object.<anonymous> ([...]/node_modules/webpack/bin/webpack.js:156:2)

That is, the primary problem being: TypeError: Cannot read property ‘properties’ of undefined

The best solution I’ve found to the problem is to remove webpack and the webpack-cli and reinstall it using the --save-dev directive.