Category: tech


  1. Girls and Gadgets Don't Mix


    My partner asked me the other day if I would like a new watch for Christmas. Actually I would really like a new watch for Christmas and I’m touched that he had thought of such a gift. He asked that I choose, so that he could be sure of …

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  2. Accidental E-Self-Discovery


    Something wierd just happened …. I was trying to do something on the PHP Community Book Site (more about them another day), to get dokuwiki to hyperlink to sections. I was confused about the syntax so I googled for it.

    Can you guess what happened next?

    My own website was one …

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  3. 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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  4. 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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  5. 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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  6. 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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  7. 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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  8. 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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  9. 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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  10. 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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  11. A shell script to set an environment variable


    I'm having a problem with a program that I run at work. It does a bunch of stuff, and then runs vim to edit the file I specified when I ran the thing. The problem is that it doesn't run my vim, it runs the system version.

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  12. 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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