Some interesting finds...
Friday, February 16. 2007
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!
Server Monitoring
Saturday, February 10. 2007
While wandering around the web, I somehow accidentally came across a free service that allows people to monitor their servers for free. Free has always been a nice "selling" point for me... Anyhow, this service allows me to send HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SIP, TCP, UDP, IMAP, SMTP, POP3, PING, and DNS all for a specified IP or domain (and/or subdomain). I can create reports, allow more than one person to view the resulting information (I think), do some benchmarking, subscribe to feeds on my data...and it can contact me in various ways in the event of any failures:
Contact Options:
Contact Options:
- SMS (cellphone)
- ICQ
- Yahoo
- MSN
- Google Chat
Continue reading "Server Monitoring"
I had so much to talk about...
Monday, February 5. 2007
...but I (accidentally, and messily) tore down the blog earlier today after I realized my feed wasn't working properly due to "pretty urls" not being turned on after I did the clean install. I'm going to try to get this back to where it was before the move (again) and hopefully I won't kill it (again). Once again, I've no idea what happened, all of a sudden it just started getting 404 errors. I don't know if a setting was changed on my server or what, but my only fix for it was to force my domain to use PHP5 instead of PHP4 (which works for me since I prefer it anyhow). Unfortunately, I only guessed at that potential solution.
Continue reading "I had so much to talk about..."
