Tech4Him – Technology with Integrity

Phew. For someone who’s corporate OS deployment experience has purposefully not included Vista, Windows 7 poses some challenges and a need to re-learn some things. Recently, one of our users brought us their machine that they recently had the hard drive replaced by a helpful soul. Unfortunately, the helpful soul returned the machine with Windows 7 RC rather than Windows XP Professional and our user has been using it for several weeks already. (Yes, I know this is not really the type of work I do, but hey, when folks are out of the office in a small organization, everyone pitches in.)

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Popularity: 100% [?]

Previously I talked about our adventure moving to the Linode.com service. Now that the websites have been running spectacularly for a few a week, I noticed that emails were not being sent or received properly from some of the domains. Doh! See how we fixed it.

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Popularity: 7% [?]

Yup, I learned this week just how well Drupal can fly. Well, maybe not measured in feet above the earth but certainly in terms of response time. Come take a look at a new setup were are testing out.

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Popularity: 7% [?]

Admit it! Have you ever made a change to your my.cnf file, restarted mysqld only to have the restart fail because of an error in the configuration file? Come on, you don’t have to hide anything here.

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Popularity: 3% [?]

Yup, we did it. We used the automatic upgrade function in Wordpress to upgrade to Wordpress 2.8.3 and ended up with a white screen of death (WSOD) shortly after. Bummer.

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Popularity: 2% [?]

I was working on a Drupal site and decided that a “related content” block was needed. Since this site has already been up and running for some time, manually reference other nodes would be painstaking. What I needed was the ability to show related node based upon the content of the node. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 15% [?]

SQL Log Rescue – Undo for SQL Server.

Came across this product again today to help with a particular need. I’ve used Red Gate products before at another employer and loved them. However, I never realized the SQL LogRescue product. On top of that, it is a free tool. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 4% [?]

Photo by bas:ilSo, we have a website that displays images from an external source based upon a URL. For various reasons, sometimes the external source does not have a valid image for the request. In order not to show a broken image to the use, we need to validate that the image is valid.

Thanks to Google (NOT Bing. haha) we found a great little approach that was quickly placed into a Drupal template file.

if (@GetImageSize("http://www.testdomain.com/testimage.gif")) {
  echo "image exists";
} else {
  echo "image does not exist";
}

And according to the site, if you do not have GD installed you can try this code:

if (@fclose(@fopen("http://www.testdomain.com/testimage.gif", "r"))) {
  echo "image exists";
} else {
  echo "image does not exist";
}

We took the concept of the GetImageSize function to handily render web thumb shots from an external service, only if a valid image exists. This way we don’t show broken images to those Internet Explorer users.

via Developer Blog » Check if external image exists.

Popularity: 5% [?]