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If you want to validate strings, text, or whatever it may be, validating with Regular Expression is an easy way to determine that the data is valid. Whether it’s an application or a web-site, you can validate users’ input to ensure it has met all requirements before continuing, or validate your own data.
Had a dodgy disk playing up in one of our production servers, thought that the quickest way to check it out would be to use the servers’ Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) interface. I am running Debian Etch server on a DELL 1850 with a Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) card.
A strange query came in the other day from one of our clients. They wanted to know why our custom statistics package was reporting more click throughs to their site than Google Analytics was. The margin of error I may add was in the order of 30:1.
Nicki mentioned redirects this morning and that started me thinking (light strains of banjo). There are many ways to change the destination of a URL to another URL depending on language and access to the web server. Let’s look at the implications of some of these methods. [Read more →]
This is just a quick run down on getting replication going as a mild form of backup. It WILL NEVER ever replace a good backup strategy, but it at least ensures that most of your SQL data is in two places.
The many configurations of MySQL Servers can be tricky. A real problem can arise when a development database server is not identical to the production one. Obviously, one can’t cater for every possible deployment environment; especially when you use other ISPs servers.
FTP is pretty much taken for granted, and is the often overlooked de-facto method for back-end updates and scripted data transference. In fact, I personally only ever use SFTP and if I need to automate such things I use rsync tunneled through SSH. So, it comes as no surprise that a lot of programmers (read that as developers) use what’s easiest and most prevalent, hence a lot of client applications using the far simpler FTP protocol.
A common scenario occurs when you have more data to store than the original analysis indicated. How do you expand your storage or shift to a more capable machine without disruption to the site? I always use Logical Volume Manager (LVM), where possible. You never know when you might need to increase the size of your disk.
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If you are like us and like a good stable build of Debian (Etch 4.0), you may have had trouble locating a recent build of MySQL as a DEB package. Arjen and the kids over at OurDelta have rolled a magic build of MySQL (Release 5.0.67.d7).
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Everyone wants fresh and interesting content for his or her web site, but very few people have the time to write it unless you have no life like me.
Most web users have different requirements for viewing the web. I personally know several people that increase their font size for one reason or another. As a web developer, it is our duty to ensure that this ‘simple luxury’ is not taken away.
Fonts can be set to pixels, ems, % or keywords. All methods have their place, but some are better than others. Pixels give the most consistency, but lack flexibility for the user, as we will discuss. Keywords are ‘small’, ‘x-small’, ‘large’ etc. Each computer has a default font size setting. Setting text with percentages or ems relates to this default font size -1em is the users’ default font size, which follows that it would also be equal to 100%.
Good browsers like Firefox let the user resize the text by simply pressing ctrl+ or ctrl- no matter how the font size is specified. IE, however [Read more →]