How to Tell How long Since a PC has Been Restarted
July 13th, 2010
Archive
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Perl: Regexp to filter out/match just the price/floating point number ie digits and dots
April 15th, 2010
There are two ways:-
$price=~tr/0-9.//cd; # delete anything but 0-9 and a real dot
$row_array[6]=~s/[^0-9.]//g; # clean up price, remove pound/dollar sign etc
Useful VIM Abbreviations for Debugging Perl
March 5th, 2010
iab perlb print “<p>debug ::: $_ :: $’ :: $` line “.__LINE__.”\n”;exit;
iab perlbb print “<p>debug ::: <C-R>a line “.__LINE__.”\n”;exit;
iab perlbd do{print “<p>debug :: <C-R>a line “.__LINE__.”\n”;exit} if $_ =~ /\w\w/i;
iab perld use Data::Dumper; print Dumper %ENV;
iab perlbb print “<p>debug ::: <C-R>a line “.__LINE__.”\n”;exit;
iab perlbd do{print “<p>debug :: <C-R>a line “.__LINE__.”\n”;exit} if $_ =~ /\w\w/i;
iab perld use Data::Dumper; print Dumper %ENV;
the <C-R>a automatically inserts whatever variable you had previously stored in register a
Copying all but today’s files
February 25th, 2010
I’d put some new files into a folder before remembering to mothball all the old files:-
Here is a zsh solution:-
>mv *.*(^m-1) ./old
Viewing Remembered Password in Firefox
January 18th, 2010
You know the frustration of being able to log into a website because your browser has
remembered the password but you have forgotten it and so cannot login from another pc.
Well FireFox will show them to you
options->security->Saved Passwords then click Show Passwords
You may want to consider the security implications as well, to disable this feature while
retaining the ability of the browser to remember passwords
go to
options->security-set master password
I personally never let a browser remember say my PayPal password
copy a file while modifying a value inside it
January 14th, 2010
The sed does the filtering, you should be able to see how to adapt this to your own requirements
So I want to duplicate init.php while changing the value of a flag inside it for each copy
cat init.php | sed s/flag=2/flag=3/ > dir3/init.php
cat init.php | sed s/flag=2/flag=4/ > dir4/init.php
If you see the first comment Bawdo suggests rightly that this is a UUOC
sed “s/flag=2/flag=4/” init.php > dir4/init.php
I’ve always underused sed unfortunately
which then can written (zsh)
for i in {3,4}; sed s/flag=2/flag=$i/ init.php > dir$i/init.php
sed stands for stream editor and therefore cannot do an in place edit this is where perl thrives
perl -p -i -e ‘s/\surname\b/form_surname/g’ *.php
or safer
perl -p -i.bak -e ‘s/\b23\b/34/g’ fred.php (creates a backup of each file eg fred.bak)
Forgetting How You Solved a Problem the First Time
January 13th, 2010
Today I had to update a 12 year old Higgledy-piggledy Microsoft Access Database application to work with the year 2010 instead of 2009 amongst other things . The original designer had needlessly hard-coded the current year’s and previous year’s date anyway I had some notes from when I did it 12 months ago which described what values need changing, but could I find where those values were defined? My notes were not specific enough. The REAL PROBLEM was that last year I must have altered these values without too much of a sweat and so not taken much trouble to note down exactly.
Fortunately I remembered the wonderful stackoverflow.com website. I posed my question and got several useful pointers in a few minutes and these helped me find the solution which was to set the option search whole project.
This is actually a generic problem in life when we realize that we’ve been doing something automatically and been unconscious of how we did it.
PHP : Read XML File with simplexml_load_file Test Script
December 16th, 2009
<?php
/* create test.xml from following lines
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<note>
<to>Fred</to>
<from>Joe</from>
<heading>Reminder</heading>
<body>Meeting Tomorrow</body>
</note>
*/
error_reporting(E_ALL);
if (!function_exists('simplexml_load_file')) exit('<br>function does not exist');
if (file_exists('test.xml'))
{
$xml = @simplexml_load_file('test.xml');
echo "<pre>";var_dump($xml);
}
else { exit('<br>Error could not locate XML file'); }
?>
LED Lighting Taking Over the World
December 13th, 2009
LEDs are taking over in the following sectors:-
- LED Flat Screen Televisions are actually LCD TVs which use LEDs for backlighting.
- LED Flashlights or Torches now totally dominate this sector
- LEDs for general lighting
- LEDs for Street Lighting
- LEDs for Traffic Lights
LEDs are taking over because they are incredibly reliable with a life usually easily longer than the expected life of the equipment. They also are more efficient causing less heat dissipation problems. They are very popular for helping to reduce global warming and other Green issues.
zzapper’s Technical Tips
July 16th, 2008
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