Thingy Ma Jig: A Blog of Drupal, Technology and General Bloginess

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Back in November last year, I wrote a script which handled backing up a drupal database. There were quite a few comments and I've taken some on board and developed the script on a little further to be more "generic"...

This morning I updated a site to the latest release of Drupal 5.16. Nothing special there at all. I've done that many times as has (hopefully) mabye other drupal devs… However, I'm a bit of a newbie when it comes to SVN. Didn't I mention this drupal site was in an SVN repository...

My friend over at Kasha Music has just released a REALLY nice free wallpaper. It's based on a starfield background with Kasha's face screened over the top. It's really effectiv

The first test is a valid email address test. The second test is if an account exists for that email address. The third is if the username, generated by the "user" part of the email address, exists. If there are any issues, the "error" is logged into and array and printed at the end...

I am a bit of a "neat geek" when it comes to coding. Things should be indented neatly and should have well laid out comments! Why? Well… It's easy to do and in 6 months time when you look at your code you will appreciate it...

I just needed to find the largest files in a folder (in an attempt to find out why it was so bloody huge!) and have ended up with the following handy combination of commands… find /path/to/folder -size +1M -print0 | xargs -0 du -h | sort -nr read mo

The new Dr Who appears to be Matt Smith! Whoa! He is so young! Almost depressingly, he is only 11 days younger than ME. Yes… The new Dr Who is younger than me.read mo

As many readers might know, I use Lighttpd a lot. I really like it for many reasons...

After about 4 days of using OpenSUSE 11.0, I'm not overly impressed with it in comparison to RedHat Enterprise 3/4/5, CentOS 5, Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8.x (other distro's I've used). OpenSUSE has some annoying habits and default/unusual configurations… read mo

As part of my RSS reading, Smashing Magazine is rapidly becoming something I look forward to reading. Every month they do a roundup of desktop wallpapers which include a calendar and are, in some way, seasonal. This month is no exception...

I was just dumping a database using mysqldump and I noticed that tables such as cache (and its cousins cache_page, cache_menu, etc), sessions and watchdog can be pretty big and are also not often essential for backing up...

Last night I was trying to configure SVN on a server. The setup was that the SVN Repo was on "srv2" and the frontend and code I wanted to import was on "srv1". I created an NFS share on srv2 and mounted it on srv1 in /mnt/svnroot...

Today I needed to list all of the services which were enabled on boot-up for one of the servers I maintain. Obviously, my first port of call was to use the nifty tool ChkConfig like so… read mo

Something I thought I'd post up quickly which caused me a little trouble just now… I tried to upgrade my Netgear DG834PN (an ADSL WiFi router, EXCELLENT piece of kit incidentally) from the stock 1.3.30 firmware to the latest (as of writing) 1.3.39...

Have you ever wanted to generate a random string in MySQL, say for assigning a random password to a list of users? Well here is a usefull tip!read more

My mate and Kasha have done a REALLY nice remix of the fairly recent song American Boy by Estelle. You can hear it on KashaMusic.co.uk…read mo

I treated myself to a nice new iPhone last week and am LOVING it! My phone is jailbroken and unlocked now (using PwnageTool). This means I can run all kinda of funky apps and games. I decided recently to design my own theme to make my phone feel more like "mine". Here are some screenshots...