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    Category: tech


  1. Cream of the Crop (of editors)


    There’s a longer post in the pipeline somewhere about editors and IDEs and developments and stuff as we’ve just changed our setup at work and I’m completely thrown by trying to develop on windows! Anyway to cut a long story short, I’ve found a fabulous Vim …

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  2. Extending DokuWiki's Authentication Classes


    DokuWiki is a fine product, and its extensibility is a big element of that. I’ve known for a while that it has different authentication classes, and I’ve even used some of the different ones it comes with. Recently I had cause to write my own, to marry up …

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  3. Diet Oracle - working with Oracle eXpress Edition


    I’m a big oracle fan, which might seem a bit strange in a world dominated with the LAMP stack and its exclusive use of MySQL or, at a push, Postgresql. That’s not the entire world obviously, that’s my world and it is definitely MySQL-orientated. In the world …

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  4. Recursive Queries in Oracle


    I’ve come across a very neat trick in Oracle that I thought I’d share. Its useful for situations where you can have circular references in the data diagram, for example when the table includes a column which is a reference for another entry in the same table. Usually …

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  5. The Alt-Tab-while-you're-waiting Trap


    Today I’m working on a complicated database driven web page. I edit the source using vim on the main file server. In order to get the file onto the webserver, I then quit out of the file and a script checks my syntax and ftps the file into the …

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  6. Regular Expressions in Oracle


    I need to operate on a big table with lots of records, but only on rows where the primary key starts with a number. Because obviously its a good idea to differentiate types of records in this way …. only joking! Its just one of those little tasks that crops up …

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  7. Good Advice for Life at the Office


    I came across this when reading an article on Mike’s site yesterday:

    _“The best advice I ever received from a manager is that it is easier to get forgiveness than permission.”

    The article is at Top 3 Ways to Fight Bureaucratic Inertia in IT and it makes for …

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  8. Workplace Eating Arrangements


    Its a funny thing but the smallest details when you are looking for a job are actually the most important. I’ve never actually asked to see inside the ladies when I’ve been at a job interview but I’ve always wished I had once I got the job …

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  9. Lucene search functionality - following on from crawlers and spiders


    The search functionality works!!

    I have PHP 5.1.2 on a Windows XP machine (I know, I know, its my work desktop) and Zend Framework preview release 1.3. I’m using it to index the files in a local copy of DokuWiki – this is an easy starting point …

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  10. The Beauty of Vim


    I work with vim and its fabulous. Although I’ve been a casual linux shell user for some years, I’ve never had to get to grips with vim as my main editor which I’m using eight hours a day until now. And I love it.

    Cheat Sheets

    Its …

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  11. Opera's Favourite Icon


    I’ve been getting wound up recently by Opera spamming my apache logs with errors about missing favicon.ico files. So here’s some instructions for removing this annoying default behaviour:

    http://groups.google.co.uk/group/opera.general/browse_thread/thread/601683ed17b42762/ac5685ea6a310180?lnk=st&q=opera+favicon+request+error …

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  12. crawlers and spiders - take two


    I made some progress with getting Xapian set up, but not to the point where I was all ready to go. I’m not all that familiar with C++ and somehow I lost the will to live somewhere along the way this afternoon.

    PHPDig

    I should mention PHPDig here because …

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