Monitor your server with Zabbix (pretty graphs included)

Saturday 01/17/2009  –  Category: Uncategorized

(…or, how MRTG is too much trouble to setup)

My server was having spiking load averages this past week and I had no idea was going on; my top output didn’t have any processes that stood out and I didn’t have any cron jobs running either.  A friend suggested I use a monitoring tool like MRTG [...]

Remotely access your Mac with Screen Sharing (and other fun stuff!)

Saturday 01/17/2009  –  Category: Uncategorized

I’ve recently transitioned to using a  separate machine work but wanted to be able to access my home lappy in case I needed anything.  Here’s how I got stuff working:
Set up Screen Sharing (from the helpful guide at Lifehacker)

Make sure Screen Sharing and Remote Login are enabled in your Sharing preferences pane
Configure your router to [...]

Combining AND and OR for complex expressions (SQL)

Thursday 01/8/2009  –  Category: Uncategorized

This is a pretty basic concept, but for some reason I forgot the power of parentheses:
To select people with first name equal to “Jason” and last name equal to “Tom” or “Ting”:
SELECT * FROM people WHERE
first_name=’Jason’
AND (last_name=’Tom’ OR last_name=’Ting’)

PHP strftime on Windows is stupid

Thursday 01/8/2009  –  Category: Uncategorized

Apparently %e, %T, %R and %D (there might be more) don’t work on Windows because “not all conversion specifiers may be supported by your C library”.
Workaround: You can add the # flag to force single digits and remove the leading zero without the space that %e will add.
Examples:
%#d for day of the month
%#I for the [...]

Visualize your music listening habits with LastGraph

Saturday 01/3/2009  –  Category: Uncategorized

Ok, so this requires that you have a Last.fm account with recorded data…if you don’t, you can just admire my pretty graph.
LastGraph lets you create really cool stacked graph of your listening habits.  Just stick in your Last.fm username and you can generate a timeline poster based on a certain timeframe.
LastGraph is inspired by Lee [...]