Tech.It.To.Me->{By.Anton.Perez}

I haven’t been blogging due to my hectic schedule for the past week.  Most time-consuming is the preparation and shopping I had to attend to for my trip to the Philippines to see my ill grandfather.

I’ve been confirmed to fly on Eva Air via Taipei, Taiwan - and…I found a resource that will be helpful to the readers of my blog: Seat Guru.

According to their website, they state that they’re the ultimate source for airplane seating, in-flight amenities and airline information. 

What I especially found helpful are the diagrams they provide for about 90% of the major airlines’ seating charts.  It lets you know what seats are good and bad, as well as other pertinent information, such as ammenities.

Check it out!  Hope this helps.  =0)

If you’ve worked on text parsing projects - or an app that needed it - then you know what regular expressions are. It truly has been a lifesaver for me on many, many occassions. If, however, you haven’t dealt with it before, here’s some background on it:

According to Wikipedia, in computing, a regular expression is a string that is used to describe or match a set of strings, according to certain syntax rules.

For example, to capture the word Perl in the text below, you would use the following expression: .*(Perl).

Regular expressions are used by many text editors and utilities to search and manipulate bodies of text based on certain patterns. Many programming languages support regular expressions for string manipulation. For example, Perl and Tcl have a powerful regular expression engine built directly into their syntax.

How does it work?

• . (dot) means match anything
• * (asterisk) means match the previous character 0 or more times
• (Perl) (open & close parenthesis) mean capture whatever’s in it

A tool that I personally use to learn, construct, and test regular expressions is called: The Regex Coach. This tool offers many views to show how the regex engine parses text, which garners you knowledge on how it works internally, so you can write more advanced expressions.

Here’s what the tool looks like:

To end this post, I highly recommend reading Master Regular Expressions by Jeffrey E. F. Freidl to learn how/when to use it and the text-processing power it offers. This book, in my opinion, reads like a novel and is the best book on regular expressions.Take care! =0)

I use MySQL as my database server, and thankfully, it’s been reliable and easy to use.  A qualm I have, however, is that it doesn’t include a daily backup feature, unlike Microsoft SQL Server.

The good thing is that the open source community has seen this problem and created a solution for it: AutoMySQLBackup.  (You can download it from here.)

According to the website on SourceForge.net:

A script to take daily, weekly and monthly backups of your MySQL databases using mysqldump. Features - Backup mutiple databases - Single backup file or to a seperate file for each DB - Compress backup files - Backup remote servers - E-mail logs - More..

Here are the quick-and-dirty set up steps (courtesy of debianhelp.co.uk):

1.  Download automysqlbackup.sh and place it into your /etc/cron.daily directory like so: cp /path-to-automysqlbackup/automysqlbackup.sh /etc/cron.daily/.

2.  Edit (at least) the following lines via vim automysqlbackup.sh:
USERNAME=dbuser
PASSWORD=password
DBNAMES=”DB1 DB2 DB3″

3.  Make the file executable by typing: chmod u+rwx automysqlbackup.sh.

4.  Create the following directory by typing: mkdir ./backups.

5.  That’s it!  You can either run the script via the command line: ./automysqlbackup.sh, or let it run its course since we’ve now put it in /etc/cron.daily; make sure the cron service is running, though.  ;0)

Peace. \m/

The Schweizer IT Professional and TechNet Blog is sharing a free Windows PowerShell course book that they’ve translated to English.  The book seems to be pretty good.

From their blog entry:

 Due to its great popularity, we have decided to translate the Windows PowerShell course book to English. So if your mother tongue is not German, maybe you are interested in the English version instead. The book gives you a short introduction with many exercises about the interactive part of Windows PowerShell as well as some hints how to use other objects like WMI, .NET or COM objects like Excel or Internet Explorer.

The book is available for free and you can share it with all your colleagues or friends if you leave it as it is. The books can be used with or without the demo files available at this blog as well.

Enjoy!  =0)

I run my own mail server and use Squirrelmail to facilitate webmail access using HTTPS.  I encountered problems trying to delete a folder that I created as part of a test to find out if things were working correctly:

ERROR : Could not delete “Archive” 
Given: Invalid mailbox name

SquirrelMail is a Webmail application started by Nathan and Luke Ehresman and written in the PHP scripting language. It can be installed on almost all web servers so long as PHP is present and the web server has access to an IMAP and SMTP server

After some digging around, I found that after modifying a setting via ./conf.pl I was able to delete the folder.  If you’re experiencing the same thing, do the following:

1.   Open a terminal window.

2.   Navigate to Squirrelmail’s root dir, which in my case is /usr/share/squirrelmail.

3.   Navigate to the config/ folder then type: ./conf.pl.

4.   Select option 3 then 1 and enter none.

5.   Save your changes and exit.

It may not work on all situations, and some have said that in version 1.4.0, you may need to set/pick your IMAP server (I use Dovecot), like so:

1.   Open terminal window (again).

2.   Navigate to the config/ folder then type: ./conf.pl.

3.  From the menu options, select D, then save and exit.

If you still have problems after performing these steps, modify your php.ini config file to report more verbosely by changing the following lines:

display_errors = on
error_reporting = E_ALL

After saving the modifications you just made, restart your web server via (I run FC6 so) service httpd restart, then watch your Apache error_log for more info. 

That’s it.  Hopefully, this helps you from having to do the legwork.  Take care.  =0)