Archive: page 17
Marion and I were wed with a lovely ceremony on the 26th of July at the Brighton Pavilion in Brighton, England. We are now travelling around western Europe and enjoying every moment of it even if we had to slum it in a Hilton in Innsbruck! ;-) In other news I have now left my job at Wickedweb in Edenbridge, Kent and I will be moving to Auckland, New Zealand in October. Read more ⇒
Wordpress I have now moved my website over to WordPress; it is more widely supported than TextPattern and it has a regular release schedule. Read more ⇒
Windows Cron Jobs using Scheduled Tasks
UPDATED: I have written a new, more indepth, article on this subject here: </post/2009/01/linux-to-windows-server-migrating-and-securing-your-cron.html> Every now and then you end up having to develop on a Windows box. Here are some handy hints for getting your cron jobs up and running. The user interface for the Scheduled Tasks in Windows can be found at Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Scheduled Tasks. For performing cron jobs on webpages I recommend that you get the following binary: WGET for Windows Read more ⇒
Here are some hints for those of you that use a XAMPP install for testing your developments on your local machine. I am using a Windows machine running XP Pro and this is how I setup my VirtualHosts. The conf file you need to amend is located at c:\xampp\apache\conf\extra\httpd-vhosts.conf Open it up in your favourite editor and un-comment the following line near the top of the file: NameVirtualHost *:80 This will enable the creation of VirtualHosts in your XAMMP installation. Read more ⇒
Installing Agavi on XAMPP Windows
Having recently heard of the Agavi project from a web framework showdown at a PHP conference in the UK I have decided to trial it. My setup is a WinXP computer with a default install of the latest XAMPP which has thrown up some issues with installing and building Agavi. Please see my hints below to overcome these issues. Open a command prompt (type cmd in the run console) Navigate to your XAMMP PHP directory. Read more ⇒
A few common PHP mistakes: Using require_once when a simple require would achieve the same result. Using require uses less system resources and therefore executes more quickly. You should engineer your code so you don’t need to use require_once. The same of course applies to include statements. Failing to declare variables before attempting to use them. Don’t use absolute paths and URLs where relative will suffice Not opening code for peer review. Read more ⇒
Suzuki Bandit Carburettor Clean
Suzuki Bandit in the snow When I went away on holiday the other year I left my Bandit standing for about 3 weeks and it must of had a bad batch of fuel in the tank. The bad fuel turned into jelly in the carburettors and of course the bike started running like a dog. In the back of my mind I had thought I should drain the float bowls before leaving, but it got forgotten in all the excitement of the trip. Read more ⇒
Vauxhall Astra For those you who possess an Astra from 1990-1998 the following hints might prove useful along with the more long winded description provided by the Vauxhall Astra (1991-98) Service and Repair Manual. I bought a set of two vented rotors and four brake pads for about £40 on ebay so they are reasonably cheap. Removing the calliper from the calliper carrier requires a 7mm allen key and to remove the calliper carrier from the hub you will need a 10mm allen key. Read more ⇒
I have recently been using the web from my mobile quite a bit. My email is hosted by Google for my domain name so I use their freely available mobile java app (with the blue icon) to view my mail. The best web browser on the mobile is of course Opera Mini. I make no secret of my love of Opera on the desktop. After having downloaded and used Opera Mini I am very impressed with the way it renders pages and the browsing experience it offers on such a small screen. Read more ⇒
SQL Server 2005 Dump to SQL statements
Say you have a development environment setup using SQL Server 2005 Express Edition and your customer has a SQL Server 2000 database accessible only via ODBC and you can only run a DB import via a script. How would you do it? Easy you might think just run msdbdump.exe on the command line, well this isn’t MySQL so you are not so fortunate. Backing up your DB is easy with SQL Server using the following commands: Read more ⇒