Was attempting to merge a branch in one of my projects and upon committing the merge, I kept getting this error:

mojo-jojo david% svn commit -m "merge in the maven branch"
Sending        trunk
Sending        trunk/.classpath
Sending        trunk/.project
Adding         trunk/.settings
svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: Server sent unexpected return value (502 Bad Gateway) in response
to COPY request for '/svn/eddie/!svn/bc/314/branches/maven/.settings'

A quick search found several other people having the same problem. Seems it only happens for https repositories using mod_dav_svn. The solution is to make sure that your virtual host in apache has explicit SSL config options, even if you are using an SSL config from a default virtual host. For example, I added the following to my subversion vhost, which was just copied from my default vhost:

SSLEngine on
SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl/catnip.org.uk.crt
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/apache2/ssl/catnip.org.uk.key

I keep writing code to talk to databases in perl and I'm forever forgetting the correct runes for talking to databases, so I thought I'd stick it here for easy reference.

use DBI;

my $db_driver = "Pg" # Pg or mysql (or others)
my $db_name = "database";
my $db_host = "localhost";
my $db_user = "username";
my $db_pass = "password";


my $dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:$db_driver:dbname=$db_name;host=$db_host", 
   $db_user, $db_pass);

It's probably handy to give an example of a common database read operation

my $sth = $dbh->prepare( "SELECT * FROM table WHERE id  = ?") 
      or die $dbh->errstr;

$sth->execute($id) or die $dbh->errstr;

while (my $hashref = $sth->fetchrow_hashref) {
   print $hashref->{id};
}