Recently, one of our customers had a unique problem. The national Do Not Call (DNC) list they pay $15,000 (yes, that’s a comma and yes those are zeros after it) per year for access to exceeded the 2Gb limit imposed by older systems they were running. Specifically, fox pro couldn’t handle 2Gb+ files. So they asked if we could make something for them that would separate the file into smaller files that could be consumed by the out dated system.
So we did…
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The other day, several clients from up north came to visit as we helped them launch a new marketing product. As they sat watching me pound out code on my computers, they were quite curious about my three monitors. They watched me flow back and forth amongst the three, changing this, checking that, saving here, reloading there… normal operations for me, but not for them. One, who had some previous programming experience, asked if I preferred Linux to Windows. I replied that both had their uses and so I was using both. He was somewhat taken aback by my statement and looked closer at my monitors.
Yep, two windows, and one linux…
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For those of you who follow our blog, Brett does a lot of articles about PowerShell and how great it is. So the other day when I need to do a mysql dump of some data on a Windows 2008 server, I fired it up. The deep blue background touched my inner California beach bum, and the verbose bright red error messages made my inner programmer smile.
“This is pretty neat,” I thought. “Maybe Windows has finally made something to compete with Unix’s shell in a real and meaningful way.”
The dump finished and immediately my Common Sense began tingling…
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Lately I’ve been experimenting with an application called Xming. The short and sweet of Xming is that it is a free X windows server for windows. When you use Xming with PuTTY or any other SSH application capable of X11 forwarding, it allows you to remotely run Linux applications on your local windows workstation.
Without a doubt, the Missing Dependency: perl(URI) error is the most annoying error to run into when doing a quick, so-called painless yum install of subversion. We use subversion here to handle all our source code and when rolling that code out to new servers. So it’s pretty important that all our Linux servers (all running CentOS) are equipped with subversion. But time and time again, I was running into this problem and finally, through many Google searches, and compiling tips from a variety of sites, found a method that works for us here. Hopefully it works for you too.
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When running a shared hosting environment, it is impossible to stay competitive without the use of some form of control panel. And in the world of linux shared web hosting, no control panel is as widely used as cPanel Inc‘s cPanel/WHM combo. The Cpanel team has put a lot of time and effort into the remote administration of WHM, and through that Cpanel. With a little ingenuity and not much work, really, this API can be extended to include any functions you can imagine, up to and including the system administration of the machine itself. So lets look at the basics thereof.
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The art of debugging differs, some, with each language and it’s specific tools. Perl provides an interesting challenge to programmers since it, like most linux-originating languages, has no real IDE wherein it can be debugged step by step with breakpoints and like methodologies. Instead, the perl programmer must resort to using print statements, logging mechanisms, and then there is the __END__.
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It’s the same old story every year: Linux will finally dominate Windows, Windows will finally kill off that pesky open-source Linux. My dad’s better than your dad; my mashed potatoes can beat-up your mashed potatoes. The truth simply is it’s not going to pan out like that. Linux will still dominate the server world and Windows will still dominate the desktop world (and if you think vista’s failing is a sign of Microsoft’s slipping, I kindly ask you to remember Windows ME followed by the popularity of XP). So what’s new to the battle front? Well, honestly, it’s not really ‘new’ it’s just what people are talking about these days. ‘Netbooks’. And I highly doubt it will be some epic battle of Good Vs. Evil, either. Continue reading
Pretend you’ve got 5 identical windows 2003 servers (or any server for that matter – cent os, windows 2003, 2008, and mac os even!) to setup in one work shift. Why break your back trying to install them one at a time on top of doing all the updates? You can just do one base install and ‘ghost’ the drive. “That’s expensive”, you might proclaim! Not so – in fact, I’ll let you in on a little secret – Gparted. Why spend $700 on cloning software when you can just do the same job for free? Yeah, free! Free as the air you’re breathing right now (unless you’re in space, reading from the ocean, or maybe reading from Mt. Everest).
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Every trade has it’s tools and web development is no exception. It has quite a few in fact. Throughout the years of doing web development I have used many different tools and have settled on a core group of half a dozen or so. It is definitely worth your while examining those I recommend, and possible a few that will receive honorable mention here. While it’s true that tools don’t make talent, they certainly speed it along!
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