Writing

Howto's, snippets, and articles I've written over the years.

Speed testing your website performance with Siege: Part One

March 28th, 2012

Your website performance is crucial to your business and you need tools to measure the response times and number of requests your website can handle. Siege is perfect for this. A tool to test and report on website performance.

Test SMTP with a dummy server in Python

October 13th, 2011

Here's how to test SMTP with a dummy server in python

Viewing the PHP APC cache in Ubuntu 10.10

October 11th, 2011

APC is a great tool for caching in PHP and once installed it is very easy to use. However, what do you do about viewing the PHP APC cache in Ubuntu? Well, there is a fantastic PHP page provided by APC that allows you to inspect the cache via a web page.

Debugging your vimrc

August 12th, 2011

I made some changes to my ~/.vimrc file that didn't seem to work and so I needed to see what was happening when vim loaded my ~/.vimrc file.

Do PHP objects use getters and setters internally?

July 26th, 2011

I just came across something that made me wonder wether a PHP object uses the magic getter and setter methods inside the object itself.

10 Skills A Web Developer Needs To Have

June 14th, 2011

Knowing a programming language just isn't enough these days to be a full time Web Developer. Here are ten other skills a modern web developer needs to have.

10 Skills A Web Developer Needs To Have

June 14th, 2011

Knowing a programming language just isn't enough these days to be a full time Web Developer. Here are ten other skills required to 'do the job'.

How to: Disable php processing in wordpress upload folder.

May 18th, 2011

If you host a WordPress site and have enabled writeable permissions on any of the folders it is recommended that you disable php processingin those folders. Here's how to do this.

Howto: Get the IP address of a domain in a one liner

May 12th, 2011

Here's how to get the public IP address of a domain name with a simple one-line cli command.

Important cron gotcha: Cron not being updated.

May 12th, 2011

I was recently caught out by a crontab running even after I had edited the crontab and commented out the line. Here's why it happened.

Subversion TortoiseSVN menu in Ubuntu Nautilus

May 12th, 2011

Windows developers using Subversion generally use TortoiseSVN to administer their repositories and when moving to Ubuntu Linux they find using the CLI (Command Line, Terminal, black box - whatever your phrase) alien. However, there is a way to have a menu in the file manager for performing Subversion administration, just like with TortoiseSVN. Here's how to install it.

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