Default HTML stylesheet
Ever wondered exactly what the default settings for elements like ‘h1′ are?
The W3C claims it is this
“Valid Until” field for Chinese Visas issued on the mainland
What follows is my story, YMMV – always confirm independently.
I renewed my Chinese tourist L visa (technically, I got a new visa) last month. Unlike those issued outside china which give a number of days for your visit, this one has a “Valid Until” field.
See:
Now I plan to actually travel on the date that was listed under Valid Until. So I thought I better confirm whether I could actually leave on that date, and not have to go the day before (I assumed I could – but I have found, particularly with the Chinese Government, always to check ones assumptions).
Checking was much harder than expected. Took me about 5 hours (on and off working on the problem). So if you benefit from my pain, feel free to buy GPS Log for your iPhone ;-)
Calling the Puding “Entry and Exit Administration of the Shanghai Public Security Bureau” turned out to be neigh impossible for an English speaker. It’s hard to find information about it in English, and of the 3 numbers I tried, only 1 worked, I said “hello” in English to the operator and was transferred somewhere, but the phone just kept ringing (I gave up after 10 minutes).
Fiona helped me by calling and speaking Chinese. The number they gave her to call was 68345199. This is the number of the Shanghai Airport Immigration and Inspection division. I.e. the guys who check your passport – so that’s useful.
They have a pre-recorded message seemingly to address my exact question, but actually it was little help, as the message is barely valid english and they just restate “that is the date it is valid until”, without clarifying. Trying to get the English operator failed (maybe you’ll have more luck than me). So Fiona tried this number, and spoke to the Chinese operator – and confirmed my original assumption that you can exit China on the Valid Until day. Still – best you check yourself.
Remember, this experience was with a Visa issued from inside Mainland china. This is NOT how the overseas-issued Visas work (rather, those are based on number of days for each visit).
phpMyAdmin ignores PmaAbsoluteUri
Had a problem when phpMyAdmin was redirecting to the non-secure version of the URL.
Setting PmaAbsoluteUri seemed like the solution (rather than using the auto-detection, I specify it!), but it oddly didn’t work.
Turns out, phpMyAdmin doesn’t trust your settings, and tries to “fix” them for you. As some have pointed out, this is rather odd design.
From the phpMyAdmin source:
// The URI is specified, however users do often specify this
// wrongly, so we try to fix this.
(Lesson: if a user specifies the URI – use it! If it doesn’t work, they will fix it.)
The fix is this, in libraries/Config.class.php, function checkPmaAbsoluteUri(), put a return statement on the first line (to stop this method messing with your PmaAbsoluteUri setting.
I encountered this problem in 2.11.11, which is the latest version of the 2.11 branch (which I am forced to use due to my PHP version).
