While troubleshooting a Wordpress plugin earlier today I discovered a neat little trick with PHP.  This particular Wordpress plugin (Brians Threaded Comments) has several tiny images it uses.  Rather than distributing the images as seperate files, the author has written them directly into his script!  How’s he do it?

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I’ve been looking into DNSSEC since reading an article on Slashdot about irs.gov beginning to support the protocol.  Surfing around this morning I stumbled upon an excellent article over at the Matasano Security Blog.  Great reading!

Anyway, the blog uses a service called Disqus to let you log in and leave comments, so obviously, being a bit of a nut for blogs and blog related services, I signed up.  And let me tell you, they have one of the best designed signup pages/processes I’ve ever seen!  I just had to share it.

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Setting up a MySQL replication the other day, I came across a little gotcha with the config file on the slave.  Took me several minutes of Googling to find the answer, hopefully this helps someone find it a bit quicker.

The issue is with specifying which databases you want the slave to be replicating.  

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Tonight I was attempting a mysqldump on a production database I deal with, and got a weird error message.  The dump halted and gave me a message…

mysqldump: Got error: 144: Table ‘./DBNAME/TABLENAME’ is marked as crashed and last (automatic?) repair failed when using LOCK TABLES 

It’s an easy fix.  Here’s how I did it.

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If you’ve read through a few of my articles, or worked with Amazon EC2 a bit, you are probably getting a sense that a lot of the administrative tasks need to be performed via command line.  Well, Amazon does offer alternative interfaces to interact with their services… SOAP and REST interfaces are exposed.  One tool that takes great advantage of these to ease EC2 management is ElasticFox.

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