For reasons not known to man nor beast, on XAMPP on Mac OS X (and not XAMP but another all in one WAMP stack, but not that name either) will not work with the wildcard availability host name (%). It will work (or anyhow may work for you, it worked for Agaric!) with the @localhost for host name.

The too-true typo of the week, from Kyle Mathews' Unit Testing Success Story:

The Lullabot crew had a recent podcast on the wanders of unit testing.

The wanders, indeed.

Use the MySQL: SELECT SCHEMA_NAME FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.SCHEMATA WHERE SCHEMA_NAME = 'database_name'

<?php
if (mysql_num_rows(mysql_query("SELECT SCHEMA_NAME FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.SCHEMATA WHERE SCHEMA_NAME = '". $dbname ."'"))) {
echo "Database $dbname already exists.";
}
else {
// go on and create the user, database, etc.
// create the user

When you run
sudo svn status -u
and see

M 6549 www/.htaccess

you can see exactly what's up with those changes with
svn diff www/.htaccess
Showing something like:
Index: www/.htaccess

===================================================================
--- www/.htaccess (revision 6549)

RSA host key for example.com has changed and you have requested strict checking.
Host key verification failed.

In the line above it will actually tell you where the bad key is, with known_hosts being the file and 2 being the position of the problem key:

Offending key in /home/you/.ssh/known_hosts:2

The first step to getting out of the local permissions / server login catch-22 is to know you're in it.

Perhaps you found this page searching for "Permission denied on publickey even though I can log into the server with a public key it doesn't make any sense grrr argh how dare it deny me i created it why won't it work permissions are correct this isn't right" or something like that.

the original line is almost as short as the function, but if we want to add checking on "empty()" or need to change anything else, it's all in one place

/**
* Set a default value for an array key if that key does not exist.
*
* The _au_ namespace stands for agaric utility, and are things
* we may reuse in so many modules we'll want to put in a helper

http://neoarch.wordpress.com/2007/07/13/bash-cap-command-not-found/

vi ~/.bashrc

#Set path for Piston
export PATH=$PATH:/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin

source ~/.bashrc

server:~$ sudo vi /root/.bashrc
server:~$ source /root/.bashrc

/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin

restart bash

ben@server:~$ sudo /bin/bash --login

root@server:~# piston -h
Usage: piston [options]

UPDATE: A better, universal approach which should be all you need is immediately here--

Simply provide the internal path that really belongs to the old site (in 'path', and the URL you want to send things with this path to, in the 'url' value of 'callback arguments').