General

What constitutes a good error message to the user?

Today, will go down in my professional history as quite possibly the lowest I would ever think of a software developer. I’ve carefully avoided the term “fellow coder”, speaking of a IT industry sticking by fellow IT people, but not today.

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Open Office Spell Checker

I don’t know why it just isn’t installed by default, but Open Office 2 didn’t install any dictionaries. What’s more depressing, is you go to do a spell check, and it simply states Spelling is Complete.

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FireFox’s Live Bookmarks

I’m just about to launch a new project I’ve been working on in the past week. It has a RSS feed, and I wanted to ensure that within FireFox, this could be picked up as a live bookmark.

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The 100 Best Products of 2005

I just created a seperate Gmail account for a new project I started yesterday. One of the default emails, points to Gmail being named the number 2 Best Product of 2005.

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Linux One Liner – Finding Stuff

Let’s say you created a file in your home directory but can’t work out which directory you put it in. <br /> $ find ~ -name somefile.txt<br /> You can replace ~ (tilda) with a directory e.

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Linux One Liner – Parsing long HTML urls

Ever wanted to look at a long HTML URL more easily, say to investigate a parameter. Here is a search from MapQuest. http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?formtype=address&addtohistory=&address=10%20Market%20St&city=San%20Francisco&state=CA&zipcode=94111%2d4801&country=US&geodiff=1 <br /> $ echo "[insert url here]" | | tr "&#038;?

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Linux One Liner – Security

Here are a few useful one liners for Linux Security. View current packet filtering rules. (i.e. what can and can’t access your computer. <br /> $ iptables -L<br /> On older distros, iptables may not be in place.

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Linux One Liner – Using the manual

For users of Linux regardless of the skill level, using the OS manual is invaluable. Frank gives an example using crontab at Viewing a specific version of a man page , but as with Linux there is always more then one way to skin a cat.

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Some of Mike’s Useful Sites

I haven’t seen any blogging in my normal readings from Mike lately, so taking a quick look directly at his blog. He has certainly been busy in other areas. Some great tibbits and websites.

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Linux One Liner – Calculating Used Diskspace

You can easily see the state of diskspace used with the command. <br /> $ df<br /> However, often you want to know where most of the diskspace is being taken.

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New Category – Linux One Liners

I came across Frank’s blog Programming – Powerful One liners – “What can a one liner do for you?” Great Idea, I often use one line Linux commands and in my current consulting role, I’m being asked more and more Linux questions, which often result in a one Line answer.

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MySQL Ideas

Seems I have over time, thought of many ideas, jotted some notes on some, and even done some work, but everybody knows that “home projects” can take a long time.

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Wrestling the Anaconda

I’ve decided to affectionally call the MySQL Workbench Product “The Anaconda”. It’s been a wrestle so far to get all the features and functionality I wanted in this product. Of course I’d much rather have seen this product at say version 0.

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How I work

My work life is really fragmented at present, so I’ve decided a split approach in answer to Dave Rosenberg’s How I Work–what I have learned so far . What is your role?

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