Archive for the ‘Computers’ Category
Accidentally truncated yout kaltura.entry table?
Fear not!, for you can rebuild it with this SQL statement:
INSERT INTO kaltura.entry (id, kshow_id, kuser_id, name, type, media_type, data,
thumbnail, views, votes, comments, favorites, total_rank, rank, tags, anonymous,
status, source, source_id, source_link, license_type, credit, length_in_msecs,
partner_id, group_id, int_id, subp_id, display_in_search, puser_id, plays,
permissions, partner_data, access_control_id, conversion_profile_id, categories,
categories_ids, created_at) SELECT de.entry_id, de.kshow_id, de.kuser_id, de.entry_name,
de.entry_type_id, de.entry_media_type_id, de.data, de.thumbnail, de.views, de.votes,
de.comments, [...]
Radians
No, I’m not talking about the alien-worshipping religion (which is the Raelians anyway); I’m referring to the world’s most pointless rotation / angle measurement.
Everyone on the planet knows about degrees: 360 degrees in a perfect circle; 90 degrees is a quarter; 120 degrees is a third, so on and so forth. Standard mathematical measurement for [...]
VAT and foreign websites
A lot of people reading this blog will be aware that the EU has a tax on non-essential items which, in the UK, is called Value-Added Tax, or VAT. The annoyance of VAT itself aside, it is a legal requirement for sites to support it when selling things for VAT-registered entities based in the EU. [...]
Bureaucracy
Today I found out that our delivery driver had been fined by his employer because of a rounding error on a dispatch label.
We sent out a 10g - yes, 10 gramme - item through their site, printed off all the correct labels, etc, and dispatched it in one of their small item envelopes - lets [...]
Flash! (Ah-ah!) ActionScript 3 varDump function
So, recently I’ve been doing a fair amount of work with ActionScript 3 in Flash, and its complete lack of a useful variable dumping function has really started to get on my nerves. So, after a lot of toing-and-froing, I eventually found some examples which partially did what I wanted them to do.
Most of the [...]
Tickyboom thing
I just found the most bizarre code comment ever in one of the files on the site I’m currently working on.
/*Not sure what this does but if you comment it out the little tickyboom thing stops ticking and goes boom.*/
I honestly have absolutely no idea what that’s supposed to mean, or what it’s referring to. [...]
Insecurity features
I’m surprised I haven’t written about this before, actually, since it’s something that really bugs me and I see it happening more and more.
The amount of sites out there which insist on checking that passwords match /^[a-zA-Z0-9]$/ and exclude all other characters astounds me. There’s no better way to make passwords easily crackable than limiting [...]
Behold! the bad programming being hidden by lazy programming
Someone just pointed me at Aliant’s search facility, which produces this error when you try to search for anything containing an apostrophe, < or >.
Now, this sort of thing really annoys me, because it tells me several things about their developers:
They don’t believe their underlying code is secure, because they’re displaying errors for completely harmless [...]
Using PuTTY as a proxy for Firefox
If, like me, you’re a UK tax- and TV license-payer with a UK-based Linux server who travels a lot and can’t live without their iPlayer fix, you’ll want to know how you can watch HIGNFY or listen to The News Quiz whilst you’re abroad.
For this experiment, you’ll need two things: PuTTY and Firefox.
PuTTY is a [...]
Beckon forth the Brave New World
When it seems like you can’t get any more tired of Blighty’s incompetent incumbent Government, they go and do this.
Now, I find this particular move highly offensive. I value my privacy, and I don’t appreciate being snooped on by a bunch of power-mad control freaks, hence this post.
Since we seem to be swiftly moving in [...]