underblob

Client’s intranet is on an Apache / Windows box on the other side of the continent and we needed a quick way to synch up our development environment with theirs. Their database has been accumulating production data for over 36 months and the filesize of the export from phpMyAdmin reads 11.7MB. To avoid manual export from phpMyAdmin, we used the PHP system function to automate creation of the dump file as follows:

The resulting dump file from mysqldump is 15.4MB. We couldn’t use phpMyAdmin to import w/out suffering through several timeouts before the import was completed. What to do? We found this amazing script by Alexey Ozerov: BigDump

The BigDump script basically times itself out every 2 to 3 seconds (configurable) and restarts the dump where it left off from the previous import. It has a progress bar so you get visual status on the import.

Links

system: PHP function for CLI executable.
phpMyAdmin: PHP based MySQL administrative tools.
mysqldump: MySQL database backup program.
BigDump PHP script: awesome script that assists in huge dump file imports via http.
Notepad++: Windows text editor that preserves carriage return or line feed (CRLF, \r\n) format of the original document. Really helpful when editing a dump file created for use with BigDump.

Update 2010.07.09: wikiHow has a great article on clearing browser cache.

Internet Explorer 6:

Internet Explorer 7:

Firefox 2:

Firefox 3:

Safari:

For more information on web cache: wikipedia.org/Web_cache

Trying to figure out how to email a grocery list to our street team, we ran across this list of major US cell phone providers and how to format emails to send text messages:

Replace the {number} with the 10 digit phone number of our recipient and now we can hand down our directives to the street team without ever picking up the cellie. Booyah!

UPDATE 2010.05.31: GAX was found to harbor a Trojan in the latest release from Dolphiq.

We’ve been using the Microfox screen ruler and screen loupe for doing pixel-perfect web design work for the past few years. It is definitely a very handy tool. But what about when you need to sample a color from a web page? Use the old ALT + “Prnt Scrn” button, paste it into a new Photoshop document, use the Color Picker to sample the image and get our hex value. There’s got to be a better way, right? What if there was a tool that had a screen ruler, a screen loupe, a resizable screen capture and a color picker, all in one? Check out GAX Reloaded from Dophiq Software Development. After using the software for a couple months, we don’t know how we ever got by without it. The good news is that it’s free! The bad news is that it’s only for Windows.  :(

Bay’s Bluff, SRQ

Jacob in the banyan trees at the Ringling Estate, rockin’ his hesher style.

We recently needed to create an HTML page and dynamically hide/show an entire class of <div> tags that were interspersed throughout the page. Using the getElementsByTagName javascript method, we were able to iterate over all of the <div> elements in the document. Then check the CSS class by accessing the className DOM element:

Note that the getAttribute method does not work in IE since class is a reserved word for IE. Took us a little while to figure that one out.

Knock me down gently
Hearts are not light for floating
You don’t need a fool

W side hwy