Blog Archive

Check out all blog posts in my blog archive. Click on a headline to read the teaser.

This recent Cronless update brings the following improvements to the log pages of cron jobs: Both free and premium members can now view all the logs without any restrictions. The export feature (available to premium members) now exports up to 100,000 records Read More ›

Cronless Bug Fixes & Tweaks

Todays updates include a few bug fixes and UI changes. Bug Fixes: The cron jobs user-agent field (available to Power and Pro members) now works as expected with all major web servers. Read More ›

Increased Cron Job Error Tolerance Count

The error tolerance of cron jobs in Cronless, the web-based cron job and port monitoring service, is now increased for all membership types. Error tolerance is the number of consecutive failures a cron job returns. Read More ›

Paging in MySQL Command-Line Client

By default MySQL command-line client wraps lines in a SELECT query result and has no paging. You can solve both these problems by using the less command available in Unix/Linux systems. Entering the following command Read More ›

Checking gzip Compressed tar Files

I wrote this very simple bash script to check the gzip compressed tar files generated by cPanel's backup. It attempts to extract each file individually to /dev/null and emails a list of the ones that. Read More ›

SnipsManager Is Now Free And Open Source

SnipsManager, the PHP script for sharing source code and plain text, is now free and open source. It is now published under the Revised BSD License and is available on GitHub. Read More ›

How to Get the Title of a Webpage in Windows Forms

I've been working on a Windows Forms application that needs to, among other things, get the title of a webpage. I thought I might share it here in case someone else needs it. Read More ›

Importing and Exporting MySQL Databases

Importing and exporting MySQL databases in a Unix/Linux environment can be done easily with a single command. You can even choose to export the database's structure or data only. Exporting is done using the mysqldump Read More ›

Navigating MySQL Databases and Tables

Here is a list of MySQL's command line client commands to navigate through the databases and their tables. First run the client program by entering the following at the command line: The -u option is Read More ›

List Drives and Folders in a TreeView Using C#

The .NET Framework makes it easy to read drive and folder details but it does not include a Windows Forms control to automatically list them other than the FolderBrowserDialog control. Here is a fast and Read More ›

New Ticketing and Knowledgebase System for Cronless

We released a new update for Cronless that will hopefully ease asking for support and help us keep up with the growing number of tickets. We've integrated with Zendesk to provide a ticketing system, knowledgebase Read More ›

60 Web-Based Lorem Ipsum Generators

When I considered writing a blog post listing web-based Lorem Ipsum generators I didn't know I'll find so many. So I listed all I found: RandomText, Cupcake Ipsum, HTML-Ipsum, Fillerama, Catnipsum, Lorem 2, PDX Ipsum, Read More ›

Shortcut Keys for Bash

A list of 30 Bash shortcut keys that will save you time. Bash is the default shell in most Linux distributions and the most popular. The shortcuts are divided into 3 sections (navigation, editing and Read More ›

A Simple Port Scanner in PHP

Here is a simple port scanner written in PHP. It checks if a port is accessible by trying to connect to it using PHP's fsockopen function. The first foreach loop goes through the port numbers Read More ›

Managing Application Settings in PHP

There are multiple ways to save application settings/configurations in PHP. You can save them in INI, XML or PHP files as well as a database table. I prefer a combination of the latter two; saving Read More ›

SnipsManager Version 2.3 Released

The new version of SnipsManager is available for download. We fixed some bugs and added a few more features: Fixed the text wrapping bug in snippets containing long strings of text without spaces. Improved snippet Read More ›

Cronless Now Supports 30 Second Cron Jobs

Today we released a new Cronless update that allows premium members to schedule cron jobs to run every 30 seconds (twice per minute).To make use of this feature create a new job or modify an Read More ›

Download And Search Multiple Pages Using PHP

Here is a simple way to loop through a list of URLs, download the page and search the contents for a string. The script starts by checking if the post variable $_POST['urls'] is set. If Read More ›

Minor Interface Tweaks to Cronless

We did some minor interface and settings tweaks this week to Cronless: Minimized the Server Load's refresh counter to 15 seconds to display a more accurate number. Reformatted the jobs and monitors log pages to Read More ›

Backup MySQL Databases to Amazon S3 Using PHP

With a few lines of PHP code and S3tool's s3cmd command-line tool you can backup your MySQL databases automatically to Amazon's S3. To use this script you'll need SSH access to your server. First download Read More ›

Uses of Netcat in Linux

Netcat is a networking program in UNIX-like systems for reading from and writing to network connections using TCP or UDP. Its man page says The nc utility is used for just about anything under the Read More ›