While some articles may be timeless, depending on the type of content being published, many posts have a definite expiry date. It is the double edged sword of rapidly evolving technologies – they improve swiftly, but articles written about them … Continue reading
The intent of this article is to address a very specific case – it is not meant as a best practices guide. Scenario: A. You have a windows computer (Computer 1) with files that are remotely accessed from second windows … Continue reading
Consider the scenario of a PHP script which can be run for a period of time, stopped, and continue its task later on. A common necessity for such a script may be to detect when the script is terminated, and … Continue reading
I recently noticed that the mail command is not available by default on the latest version of Amazon’s Linux AMI (v2011.09). This functionality is available in the mailx package, which can be installed with the following: yum install mailx
While it is easy enough to use F12 to display Firebug in Firefox, I just like the status bar icon. Unfortunately, it has been hidden in the last few releases of Firebug. To display it, open about:config, and set extensions.firebug.showStatusIcon … Continue reading
A one-liner to optimize all MySQL tables, in all databases. Be advised that running optimize on InnoDB does a ‘recreate and analyze’. Run as root in the example below. mysqlcheck -o -u root -p –all-databases
Adobe’s Flash plugin (v10.3) is setup to check for updates on restart. However, at least recently, on my setup, there have been a couple of little annoyances. Either it launches and tries to check for updates before my wifi connects … Continue reading
To verify that SSL caching is on, check the Session-ID across multiple sessions (i.e. resume/reconnect) – they should be the same: openssl s_client -host HOSTNAME -port 443 -reconnect | grep ‘Session-ID:’ The equivalent, using gnutls-cli should be: gnutls-cli -V -r … Continue reading
Following the significant disruption of EBS volumes in April, the importance of backups was once again brought to the forefront. Amazon’s method of generating EBS backups is the ‘snapshot’ – a differential backup stored in S3. While Amazon provides tools … Continue reading
Recently, after upgrading a program (FileZilla in this case), the program’s icon would not display on the desktop (Windows 7). Even deleting and recreating the shortcut resulted in a broken icon (although, the shortcut itself worked fine). No amount of … Continue reading
A surprisingly large number of math based computer problems appear to require factorization, finding prime number, or prime factoring. Presented below is a reasonably fast algorithm for prime factoring a number – it is limited to the integer size on … Continue reading
There are some instances when it is desirable to change the default interval between synchronizations by the Windows Time Service (i.e. NTP). For instance, I recently encountered a computer where the clock would run a few seconds fast each day (it was … Continue reading
Despite having been around for a long time, telnet is an invaluable tool for testing a mail server. It allows one to pinpoint errors in the process – some which are not logged – and to quickly validate that things … Continue reading
While modern computers have greatly advanced in their ability to handle video editing, it remains one of the slowest commonly performed operations. Within the realm of video editing, common tasks include: splitting a video (e.g. into two files to fit … Continue reading