Found a handy web-based utility for encoding/escaping text in JavaScript: Text Escaping and Unescaping in JavaScript.
Text Escaping and Unescaping in JavaScript
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Author Archives: Jay Jay
Trimming new line in bash
To trim new lines in bash:
tr -d '\r\n'
Getting a file by HTTP and redirecting file contents to stdout
To download a file from the web and send its contents to standard out, try this:
wget -O - -o /dev/null https://www.unconfusable.com
Change root password in MySQL
Needed to set a MySQL root password. Found this article which suggested a way when no password is yet configured:
mysqladmin -u root password NEWPASSWORD
And a way when a password is already configured:
mysqladmin -u root -p'oldpassword' password newpass
Note: you use ‘mysqladmin’ not ‘mysql’.
Fixing mailman can’t discard/defer message via web config
I had a notice from Mailman for one of my lists that there was a message that required administrative attention (i.e. it was spam). The mailman web-interface provides a facility for treating email, however when I went to discard the message it wouldn’t go away. I tried a heap of things and it took a long time to figure out, but eventually I noticed that in the mailman web page the domain name it was using was “intranet.blackbrick.com” whereas that should have been “www.intranet.blackbrick.com”. So I did a little searching about how to configure a list’s base URL and discovered this, which fixed my issue:
/usr/lib/mailman/bin/withlist -l -r fix_url support \ --urlhost=www.intranet.blackbrick.com
Where ‘support’ above is ‘list name’.
RIP Phil Saunders
Here’s my old mate, Phil Saunders. Phil died recently, at the age of 32, after an accident with a train. He was a great guy and I’m going to miss him. RIP Phil.
What’s new in Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS
Been meaning to get around to reading this white paper from Canonical: What’s new in Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS.
XML on the Web Has Failed
Here’s an interesting article from way back in 2004: XML on the Web Has Failed.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) — Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Learning how to program the EC2 system via the PHP API. I needed to know about RunInstances and AssociateAddress.
You can send Amazon a Request to Remove Email Sending Limitations which by default limit the amount of email traffic instances can process.
Also read about Amazon EC2 Instance IP Addressing and Elastic IP Addresses (EIP).
Although I settled on using the PHP SDK I read the doco for the Java SDK EC2 client: Class AmazonEC2Client. The corresponding PHP API is here. Also How to get list of EC2 instances with Amazon PHP SDK 2 from StackOverflow was useful. All AWS SDKs are here and there are command-line tools. There is AWS SDK for PHP Documentation. This article Provision an Amazon EC2 Instance with PHP was a handy starting place. I also saw the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud API Reference. I also read AWS SDK for PHP: Run an Amazon EC2 Instance.
I started a project at ProgClub called make-love, which is my server re-instantiation script. It shows how to use the AWS PHP SDK and the r53.php code for programming AWS Route53 DNS services. Documentation on the Route53 client can be found at Ordering Disorder. More on r53.php at SourceForge. I added a new function listAllResourceRecordSets to the Route32 class and commented out some SSL validation code because validation was failing and it’s no big deal to ignore it.
Printing PHP Call Stack
Discovered how to print a call stack in PHP from a StackOverflow article listing $ex->getTraceAsString().