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
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
My error logs were recently filled with repetions of the the following line: [Date] [warn] [client IP] Not GET request: 2., referer: As it turned out this was caused by the mod_pagespeed module (from Google). Disabling it has stopped the … Continue reading
I had a few files containing email attachments that needed to be converted into usable files. The following code (which has no checks in it), did the trick: <?php function decode_email_attachment(){ $data= file_get_contents($inputfile); file_put_contents($outputfile, base64_decode(str_replace( “\r\n”, “”, $data ))); } … Continue reading
For many people the mere mention of fractions elicits a wince, and while these lovely math constructs played a notable role in our early years of math, they are reasonably simple entities. While most humans revisit fractions over many years … Continue reading
On servers running certain forms of chroot, a file system loop is created (in /var/named/chroot), causing errors when attempting to bundle the volume. This occurs in particular when running BIND (named). To successfully bundle the volume, simply stop named: sudo … Continue reading
Versions of PHP after 5.10 include the date.timezone directive in php.ini. Many applications which reference time need this directive to be set. A list of accepted values can be found at: http://www.php.net/manual/en/timezones.php The timezone is set as a quoted string, … Continue reading
The time on the Amazon Linux AMI is set, by default to UTC. To change this, symlink one of the timezone files from /usr/share/zoneinfo/ to /etc/localtime. The change takes effect immediately (and will also affect most logs, etc). For example: … Continue reading