Technology

If you run an application that includes a database, you want to be taking backups regularly. Your backup needs to include tables, views and triggers. It must also include any stored procedures / routines you are using. Otherwise, when you restore from backup, your procedures will be missing.

This article is not about Microsoft SQL Server. This concerns MySQL and its forks MariaDB and Percona.

I've found lots of people asking this question on the web, but not many of the posts I've found have a working answer.

Currently, my anti-virus software of choice is Bitdefender.

There's a file on a Windows computer called the "hosts file", that most people have no need to change. It lives at c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts. (Linux-based systems have a hosts file too, at /etc/hosts.) In fact, unless you have a need to change it, and know what you're doing, leave well alone.

This is one of those posts where I stick something on here to help me find it again, and because I won't be the only person trying to solve this.

The Problem: Size and Position of Individual Messages

Microsoft Outlook (msoutlook) is an email client, part of the Microsoft Office suite, and available as part of the Office 365 subscription. Do not confuse this with their online Outlook email service, which is the successor of Hotmail.

I was a longtime customer of PDF software made by a company called Docudesk. After they got bought by SodaPDF, who in turn got bought by Avanquest, the software I'd paid for stopped working. This post details the problem, and how they eventually fixed it for me.

“I think my Facebook account has been hacked. Sorry everyone.”

Anyone who uses Facebook, and has a decent number of Facebook friends, will see this message from time to time.

People get confused about exactly what’s happened, and therefore how to prevent this from happening and how to fix this if it does.

The key thing to understand is that there are two distinct things that can happen to you: Hacked, and cloned.

Facebook Hacked

This is when someone else is able to log in to your Facebook account.

Drupal no longer releases a new version of Core when an upstream dependency fixes a security vulnerability. It is the responsibility of site maintainers to keep track of security advisories for all such dependent libraries. That is no small task, and a way to automate this is needed. This post looks into how this can be done.

Drupal sites contain a settings.php file with site-specific settings, that is based off default.settings.php at the time the site is installed. As Drupal evolves, default.settings.php will change. Sometimes, it's worth incorporating those changes into the settings.php file for an already-installed site. This post runs through a low-friction way to keep on top of this house-keeping.

cPanel offers users a shared hosting environment which could be thought to exclude running NodeJS (and therefore Node driven theming tools like Gulp and Grunt). In fact, this is easily overcome, as I explain here.

The antivirus marketplace for protecting Windows computers is crowded. Go back 15 years, and there were two or three well established players whose products were becoming increasing bloated and slow, and then a handful of new providers that were leaner but with varied effectiveness.

I have recently solved a problem which may trouble others, so I share the problem and its solution with you here.

The world of the problem: OpenStack on RamNode

There are a number of web hosting providers I'm fond of (having tried many others I'd never touch again). One of those good ones is RamNode. They sell many kinds of hosting products, but I use them when I want low cost virtual private servers that I can rely upon.