Tim Groeneveld

Recently, I had the fun experience of converting a CSV file that contained the names of a bunch of cities inside Australia. The CSV file contained four columns: City name Latitude (in DMS) Longitude (in DMS) There were more than 5,000 rows in the CSV file. I wanted to pull a list of all the […]

My attempts to get the perfect video out of an Apple MacBook to the Dell S2721QS finally is a success! It’s all thanks to Dell. I guess it makes sense. Dell makes the monitor, so I suppose having the Dell DA310 USB-C companion adaptor is the right thing to do. That said, I did expect […]

Dell is notorious for not really supporting Apple’s operating system very well. It’s not just their monitors, but other accessories like their USB-C docks. It’s a shame. I think that Dell has pretty high quality gear. I recently acquired a Dell S2721QS, and wanted to extract the files that are provided in their Windows driver […]

Creating a new WordPress user when you don’t have access to WordPress but do have access to the hosting control panel is rather simple. Creating a new WordPress admin account can be done with the following MySQL query Click To Tweet Simply replace the strings in the first INSERT query that are wrapped around square […]

You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. Wayne Gretzky

With updates going on in the last couple of months for various packages, such as OpenSSL and GLibC which have fixed a number of important security vulnerabilities, I thought I might share a one liner that might save you one day. sudo lsof -n | grep -v \#prelink\# | grep -e ‘\.so’ | grep -e […]

I promised myself never to release Laravel until I had great documentation, and I never release a new version until the documentation is totally up to date. Any PHP programmer can pick up Laravel and start using it in a matter of minutes. The expressiveness of the code itself and the great documentation truly make coding enjoyable. http://taylorotwell.tumblr.com/post/21038245018/why-laravel

It seems that Google has been on a relentless campaign to get Google+ to work. From only allowing YouTube users to comment with a Google+ account to their desperate attempts to integrate it into Google’s own search results (which seem to be all but gone now…) it all seems to be very pointless on Google’s […]

Last week I spoke at SydPHP, which was hilariously horrible due to my lack of public speaking skills. During my Introduction to Laravel & Composer there was a very interesting question posted asking about an issue that he came across while developing a cron that was running on his server. The process was set to […]

If you have never used it before, supervisor is an application that runs on your server to monitor a number of different applications. With supervisord, you get all of the benefits of turning long-running applications into daemons without all the extra code required to make that happen natively. The configuration for supervisord is extremely flexible, […]

I am currently working on a project that takes screenshots of websites, and needed a quick way to get the most common fonts installed on the screenshot server. This worked wonders (although, it still needs a bit of tuning, I will work on that later. yum install google-\*-fonts wine-fonts dejavu-\*-fonts

In this day and age, I can’t believe that people are still using Internet Explorer. Because I am a good net citizen, I decided to help my uneducated users out. if (preg_match(‘/MSIE [456]/i’, $_SERVER[‘HTTP_USER_AGENT’])) { require ‘templates/blank_development/ie6.php’; exit; }

I am writing this blog article to you on the new WordPress 3.5. The updates since 3.4 are really nice. I am especially enjoying the new media manager, with it’s easy to use ‘Drop files anywhere to upload’ screen.  According to their Trac install, there is only six issues left to fix before they release […]

The whois server for the .ing top level domain is now live. You will be able to see when domains were first registered with register.ing. The server has been written in nodejs, which is an event-driven I/O server-side JavaScript environment based on V8 (the fastest Javascript engine, written by Google and included with Chrome). whios.js listens […]

Ever written a web application, wondering what will happen months down the track when a client (or even *gasp* you) need to install your web application? I am working on a new installer skeleton (if you will) which will allow you to very simply create a fully functional installer for your slightly complicated web applications. […]

I know I might bag out CentOS at the best of times, but Karanbir Singh – our fearless leader of all CentOS developers has announced the immediate availability of CentOS-5.7 for i386 and x86_64 Architectures. Well, what are you waiting for? yum upgrade.

I got an email today from Scott Heiferman, one of the founders of the site ‘Meetup’. A lot of people were thinking that maybe 9/11 could bring people together in a lasting way. So the idea for Meetup was born: Could we use the internet to get off the internet — and grow local communities? […]

Yesterday I posted about having an existing ssh-agent load on all new shells. Here are two more handy snippets of code from my .bash_profile The first code snippet is a follow on from yesterday, were I can type ‘lock’ or ‘unlock’ into my shell and the ssh-agent will follow on accordingly. When your ssh-agent is […]

I love ssh-agent, but always found that running source ~/.ssh.agent annoyed me! That was before I wrote this code, which I absolutely love: source ~/.ssh.agent PID=$SSH_AGENT_PID if [ -f /proc/$SSH_AGENT_PID/cmdline ]; then CMD=`cat /proc/$SSH_AGENT_PID/cmdline`; if [ “$CMD” != “ssh-agent” ] ; then PID=0 fi else PID=0 fi; if [ “$PID” -eq 0 ]; then ssh-agent […]

Having problems with your (older) Magento install on your (newer) PHP? Some versions of Magento have been using the ‘current‘ function incorrectly. If you experience the following error: Strict Notice: Only variables should be passed by reference in ..lib/Zend/Db/Select.php on line 216 A simpler fix may just be to change two files: File One: lib/Zend/Db/Select.php […]

I love RedHat Linux. I think it is a beautiful piece of engineering. Hundreds of thousands of man hours spent ensuring systems that have packages installed keep running. Continuously. One thing however that I have found is that my favorite RHEL clone for years, CentOS has been slacking. Bad. For example, RedHat Enterprise Linux 6 […]