A few days ago I was given the job of changing the caching engine used in a Zend Framework based application from a simple flat file system based caching system to a memcached based object store that could be used by multiple servers. After extending the existing application bootstrap file…
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RaspberryPi Car Computer 15,000km Later
PNG Crush: PNG image optimisation script
Building a Cordova based mobile application recently at work we were facing an issue with an application size that was literally growing by the day. The project leveraged a lot of PNG templates sent to us by the design department and these template files were contributing about 50mb to the…
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Linux CLI: File Text Search & Replace
Occasionally you need to change the contents of some files easily to save a lot of manual work. In my case it was a server migration, the old IP address of a server was referred to from numerous DNS records. This meant the contents of a couple of hundred Bind…
Read MoreTunnelling data over SSH with Putty
An SSH tunnel is used to route unencrypted traffic through an encrypted SSH channel. Its comes in handy for routing traffic over untrusted or hostile networks as the data is encrypted to maintain privacy and prevent eavesdropping. It is also very handy in for bypassing firewall restrictions on networks where…
Read MoreEncypting Diectories With eCryptfs
eCryptfs is an encrypted file system that works at the file system level. In this post I am going to cover the basic usage of eCryptfs and some of the situations you may want to think about using a encrypted file system. What is an encrypted file system? File system…
Read MoreInstalling SVN support in Aptana Studio 3
Its been a few years since I have worked anywhere that still uses Subversion as their day to day version control system. But the other day at work I needed to check out some old legacy code which was stored in a svn repository on an old development server. Then…
Read MoreDebugging Web Applications With Fiddler On Linux
Fiddler is by far one of the most popular web debugging proxies available. It allows you to capture, examine, save, edit and replay all HTTP / HTTPSÂ requests made by a web based application. For many years it was available only on Windows systems. But recently the creator of Fiddler,…
Read MoreAdding MP3 Support To K3b
Being sick of the music selection in my car the other day I decided I needed for fresh blood. But not being motivated enough to replace the car stereo with one that has an auxiliary input. I tried to simply burn a few mp3 files onto a blank CD. Dragging…
Read MoreInstalling Safari on Linux Mint 15
Cross browser testing your sites is unfortunately a necessary evil. Installing virtual machines with the required browsers installed is one way to test your code. But a lot of the time I don’t want to wait for a VM to boot just to quickly test something. In this article I…
Read MoreTracing Email Sending PHP Scripts On Servers
It happens sometimes, a server you are responsible for seems to be sending out spammy emails, and its normally caused by legacy or insecure code. The mail log indicates there are plenty of potential spam messages going out that are originating locally but most Linux servers host a lot of…
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