Tech Thought

Tech tips, hints, and general musings. PHP, Perl, Mysql, Javascript, AJAX, JSON, Linux, Mac OSX

Entries for June, 2008

3 Australia launch iPhone petition!

The 3 mobile network is trying to convince apple to let 3 sell the 3G iPhone in Australia.  They have launched a new website, three.com.au/iphone, which is now live and allows you to register your interest in the iPhone on 3. If you’re a 3 customer (like me) then head there and register your interest [...]

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How-To Fix: make: yacc: Command not found

I have been getting the following error when trying to compile monit for my CentOS server: make: *** [y.tab.c] Error 127 To resolve it, I simply installed bison: yum install bison Then run configure again: ./configure make && make install And that fixed the problem!  Hope that helps someone.

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Handy RPM Search Utility – rpm.pbone.net

If you are looking for an easy way to find RPMs for your favourite linux distribution, there are many options out there.  However none seem to have the easy of use and search capabilites of rpm.pbone.net.  The service is easy to use and covers all the major distributions and version.  Very handy.

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How-To: Configure Postfix to Relay based on Domain

We use Postfix as a dropin replacement for Sendmail on our servers.  We wanted to configure postfix to relay email via our internal mail server for internal email addresses, and send directly if the email address was external. To do this, follow these steps: Edit the /etc/postfix/transport file and add the following line: myinternaldomain.com smtp:[ipaddress]:25 [...]

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How-To: Download Flash Video from Webpage to Your Harddrive

I often want to capture a flash video and store it on my harddrive for later access.  This can be rather fiddly to get working, so I’ve enlisted the help of a handy Firefox plugin called Download Helper.  This great little plugin finds all the flash movies on a webpage and provides a right-click menu [...]

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How-To: Read an Excel (.xls) file with Perl

I’ve been working on a data import recently that required me to pull in the contents of a folder full of excel documents, all with the same structure containing data that needed to be collated into a single file.  There really isn’t an easy way to read Excel (xls files) in PHP so I’ve reverted [...]

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iPhone 3G – Includes GPS, retails for $199US

Steven Jobs announced today at the WWDC KeyNote presentation that the second generation of the iPhone will include 3G support, GPS and retail for $199US. I attended the KeyNote presentation and the announcement and the features of the iPhone are amazing, particularly when some of the games and 3rd party applications were demonstrated.

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WSP Online Solutions: Team Blogs Launched

WSP Online Solutions team members today launched a series of personal blogs aimed at providing an insight into their fields of interest: Green Design Basically Product Ecology What is out there? We look forward to the interesting and informative content of each!  More information on the WSP Online Solutions team can be found at their [...]

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How-to Fix: An invalid public movie atom was found in the movie.

Recently I’ve had a problem with Quicktime throwing up the following error when trying to play a video: “An invalid public movie atom was found in the movie.” I’ve searched everywhere for a solution, and couldn’t find one in forums or tech hint sites.  However I think i’ve just solved it – for me atleast.  [...]

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Animated Gifs for Mac OSX: GIFfun

I wanted a tool to create animated logos for Mac OS X.  After a little looking around on Google and various message boards, I settled on GIFFun.  Its a simple tool that allows you to plonk a whole heap of images into its window, and turn them into an animated GIF. You can control the [...]

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Centralized storage of prototype.js with Google AJAX Libraries API

Google has just announced that it now provides a free, hosted copy of a many common AJAX Javascript libraries through Google AJAX Libraries API.  This has huge implications for speed and caching for users hitting sites which utilise these libraries: Google automatically serves them up in Gzip format (if your browser supports this) Caching is [...]

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Testing Different IE Versions in the Same Window: IETester

Finally, a solution to every designer/developer nightmare – developing for different versions of IE.  DebugBar provides you with the rendering and javascript engines of IE8 beta 1, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Vista and XP, as well as your own version of IE in the same process! Check it out at here!

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MagpieRSS strange characters in feed problem

Recently we had a problem with our RSS feed appearing strangely on our homepage.  We were using MagpieRSS to read our RSS feed, however apostrophes and other characters appeared scrambled. After much reading and googling, it turned out that our page wasn’t using UTF-8 as its encoding method – and our feed was.  So the [...]

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How-To: Resyncronise a mysql replication slave

Recently we’ve been having some problems with our production server. Every now and then it just reboots – for no aparent reason. We’re still looking into the reason this occurs (looks like an overheating CPU) however when the reboot occurs, it causes our Mysql replication slaves to get out-of-sync with the master.

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