I’m sitting here getting ready to write up a quick and dirty little regular expression for checking INET values, when it got me thinking. I’ve somehow turned my blog into a more technical blog then just some ramblings of mine. My technical posts out number general (or non-geeky) blog posts.

It’s not such a bad thing, in my mind, but that’s why I have another site. It’s not currently working due to the data loss suffered earlier in the month, and I haven’t gotten around to getting it back up and running yet. So what shall I do? I suppose I could just cross post them between the two and try to focus more on the generality of this blog.

It’ll probably straighten itself out in long run (once the other site is up and running), but until then - I guess you’ll be stuck with geeky entries here.

Posted in Javascript, Programming, Regular Express 2 Comments »

So I’ve been going through all kinds of stuff getting my blog back up and running. I spent a bunch of time today doing just that, though I did manage to get off to Village Inn for some breakfast and time with my parents. Yeah I got something greasy and nasty (Boulder Sausage Bratwurst Skillet). But it was a good time.

From there I wasted too much time tracking down some two stroke oil - I was really looking for something pre-mixed, but of course there isn’t any, so I settled for a super cool guy at Checker who explained how to mix it, and even let me know (since they didn’t have any) that Lowes carries it. So I made it over there and picked up some oil and a gas tank (1 gallon for easy mixing). This was all for the snowblower I’ve had for a few years but due to our little garage it’s been spending it’s time over at my father in laws house. Of course by this time, I probably won’t need it anymore (we’ve already had a few big storms). Oh well, I got it into some sort of running condition - I am really bad with this mixing thing!

Posted in Family 2 Comments »

Alright, I think I have it (I’m just waiting to make sure cron fires off and runs everything)! It’s very simple, and probably pretty dirty - but hey I’m not a whiz with shell scripting, nor cron so I think what I have is pretty sweet.

Because I’m lazy (I’m a programmer!) and I know I wouldn’t remember to run backups in an normal fashion, I wanted to make a system to run them automatically, think set it and forget it (wait wasn’t that an infomercial of some type?). So without further adieu…

The Shell script:

#!/bin/sh
export PATH=/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin
mysqldump --opt -uUsername -pPassword --all-databases >
~/db_backup_tmp/all-db-backup.sql &&
mv ~/db_backup_tmp/all-db-backup.sql ~/db_backup/all-db-backup.sql

The PHP script:

$file = "~/mysql_backup.sh";
exec($file);

Calm down, I’ll explain it…

So first we have the shell script.

#!/bin/sh

From Wiki

Posted in Bash, MySql, PHP, Programming No Comments »

Granted, I’m not trying to sound like a smarty pants here because I really know absolutely nothing about cron and how it works.

So let’s start from the beginning (moves hands to symbolize starting a flash back sequence)

From Wiki

In computing, cron is a time-based scheduling service in Unix-like computer operating systems. The name is derived from Greek chronos (??????), meaning time.

cron has been recreated several times in its history.

Say you want something to automatically run on your server (linux/unix) at certain timed intervals, and example would be, oh say a backup or other routines that need to be run at certain intervals. On a Drupal site I run, they have a built in script to update things using cron. It will update a list of rss feeds and other routine maintenance items. So I first started out with looking at the Drupal site for any documentation (shhhh, it’s not like I asked a guy for directions) on how to set it up. There were plenty of examples shown, but didn’t make a whole of sense to me.

Posted in Bash, Programming No Comments »

Yup, it’s true I lost everything.

That’s what happens when hardware fails and there aren’t any good backups. So I’m rebuilding.

Posted in General 4 Comments »