Preventing MSN Messenger Spam in Pidgin
I use Pidgin as my instant messenger application. Mainly because it allows me to chat to clients and sub-contractors across Yahoo, Google, MSN etc all in one application, with the added bonus of not being full of spam and adverts to hurt my eyes.
Using SCP to copy files between Linux servers
SCP? SCP is a method of securely transferring files between a local and a remote host or between two remote hosts, using the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol.
Sounds confusing?
Permanently mount a Windows share in Linux
Sick of manually mounting a Windows share on Linux with "mount" for it to drop off randomly? Or not really knowing if it is mounted or not?
Then make a permanent mount in fstab.
SQLyog Query Profiler
MySQL has always lacked the sophisticated profiling tools shipped with proprietary databases like SQL Server, etc. MySQL developers have largely depended on EXPLAIN for tuning queries. The SHOW PROFILE patch by Jeremy Cole was introduced in the MySQL Community version 5.0.37 and it provided much more insight into where the query spends its time. However, to take advantage of this feature, MySQL developers were supposed to switch on profiling, run their queries and then filter the profiling data from a table that contained the profiling results of the last few profiled queries. A lot of manual book-keeping is required to take advantage of this powerful feature. In an ideal situation, the MySQL developer should execute the queries and the profiling info should be available along with the result-set. Unfortunately, none of the MySQL client tools (desktop or web-based) provide intrinsic support for this feature.
Watch the Screencast on Query Profiler.
Block Countries in Apache
Assuming you have mod_geoip installed in apache we can block certain countries in 6 lines of code.
I had a client who was experiencing an inhumane amount of spam on their phpBB forums, which are notorious for bot attacks. Luckily this forum was geographically specific - so we can block all the countries we aren't interested in.
Convert phpBB IP Addresses
phpBB stores its IP addresses in a funky format. They're useless to the human eye!
Convert them to normal IPs with the following code
SELECT CONCAT( CONV( substring( poster_ip, 1, 2 ) , 16, 10 ) , '.', CONV( substring( poster_ip, 3, 2 ) , 16, 10 ) , '.', CONV( substring( poster_ip, 5, 2 ) , 16, 10 ) , '.', CONV( substring( poster_ip, 7, 2 ) , 16, 10 ) ) AS IP
FROM phpbb_posts
WHERE `poster_id` = USERID
LIMIT 0 , 30
This code will convert all know IPs from a selected user (In my case 51).
Using WordPress header and footers externally
I needed to integrate a WordPress header (header.php) and footer (footer.php) into an external application.
There are quite a few ways round this, but none are really ideal. For example, if you want to include an external page in WordPress for whatever reason, you could use the Exec-PHP plugin. Simple, hey? No.
