Feb
16
It's not that I've been enormously busy lately, I just haven't had much to talk about that I felt would be interesting. Today, I ran in to two neat things, and remembered another one.
1 - Ever wanted to allow collaboration within your department (teleconferences on-the-road, telecommute, etc...)? From a quick view of this project, it appears that (with difficulty, mind you), you can...for free* (cost of hardware and labor not included!)! Check out 1videoConference for more information. They have a project page on SourceForge.net (also linked to from their homepage).
2 - While recently trying to figure out if there's an easy way to implement syntax highlighting in an HTML textarea box that is cross-browser compatible, I found ECCO, a web-based text/programming editor. There are plugins to Firefox that do similar things, but this one looks more promising. I honestly don't see a whole lot of merit to this, but it's definitely a really cool proof of concept with some amazing coding (and/or JS hacking).
3 - phpMyBackupPro has recently released a new version after a very long hiatus. I was looking for a quick means to run backups on our MySQL server(s) and didn't want to have to use a GUI to do so...why would I want the troublesome bother of a win32.dll kernel panic error when a database backup was going to run, and getting data is rather simplistic anyway from the command line (and I was too lazy to write my own batch scripts). I found this... It's actually really handy. It allows you to dynamically select which databases/fields you want to backup from any number of different servers...it'll also do error checking to be sure that you're configuration files are properly set. I run a batch script to call the CLI version of this PHP script each Friday night after the library is closed (at slow usage times), and then another batch script to transfer those GZ compressed backups from off my machine to yet another server that gets backed up every few days (you could always let the script delete backups older than X days, and simply copy the backups to an external server, that way there are 3 unique points of failure instead of 2).
There you have it, some possibly useful, somewhat interesting things to report on. Have a great week!
1 - Ever wanted to allow collaboration within your department (teleconferences on-the-road, telecommute, etc...)? From a quick view of this project, it appears that (with difficulty, mind you), you can...for free* (cost of hardware and labor not included!)! Check out 1videoConference for more information. They have a project page on SourceForge.net (also linked to from their homepage).
2 - While recently trying to figure out if there's an easy way to implement syntax highlighting in an HTML textarea box that is cross-browser compatible, I found ECCO, a web-based text/programming editor. There are plugins to Firefox that do similar things, but this one looks more promising. I honestly don't see a whole lot of merit to this, but it's definitely a really cool proof of concept with some amazing coding (and/or JS hacking).
3 - phpMyBackupPro has recently released a new version after a very long hiatus. I was looking for a quick means to run backups on our MySQL server(s) and didn't want to have to use a GUI to do so...why would I want the troublesome bother of a win32.dll kernel panic error when a database backup was going to run, and getting data is rather simplistic anyway from the command line (and I was too lazy to write my own batch scripts). I found this... It's actually really handy. It allows you to dynamically select which databases/fields you want to backup from any number of different servers...it'll also do error checking to be sure that you're configuration files are properly set. I run a batch script to call the CLI version of this PHP script each Friday night after the library is closed (at slow usage times), and then another batch script to transfer those GZ compressed backups from off my machine to yet another server that gets backed up every few days (you could always let the script delete backups older than X days, and simply copy the backups to an external server, that way there are 3 unique points of failure instead of 2).
There you have it, some possibly useful, somewhat interesting things to report on. Have a great week!
