- The most recent blog articles - mostly about PHP, Golang, databases or general website dev ops.
A MySql Backup Script (with Download Speeds & Hipchat Integration)
It’s a common problem we developers come across, we need to keep a backup of our databases so that if anything happens to our live database we still have a copy of the data. This is a quick script which uses the mysqldump command to grab a copy of a database and save it. It saves the file as a gzip file (because it saves a mega amount of space over time).How to: Install PHP 7 on Ubuntu 14.04 / 16.04
It’s release day! Or it was on the 3rd of December 2015 – the release date for the final version of PHP 7.0. There have been a whole host of improvements made to PHP but we won’t delve too deep into changes. This is a very quick guide on how to update to the latest release for those of you running a Ubuntu Linux system. It is very simple, thanks to ondrej managing a ppa repo for this release, like many of the previous releases.Enabling HTTP/2 Support on Apache2 and PHP
I’ve been a keen follower of the exciting changes to the HTTP specification over the past few years – with the release of the HTTP/2 standard in 2015 (after it evolved from the spdy project). If you’re unfamiliar with http/2 there are some great videos available which outline exactly what it is and how it is different from http 1.1 – which we’ve been so accustomed to over the years.HHVM, Laravel & Heroku – The Killer Combination
Laying the foundations to a new project recently, some new web technologies were considered for use, notable among these was the recent announcement of Facebook’s HHVM engine and HACK language, which is now gaining support and stability. The project itself was going to be run on Heroku, a cloud PaaS (Platform as a Service) which allows websites to scale dynamically as they grow. Aside from what the software was going to run on, the software itself was going to be written in PHP (or HACK maybe?) and built upon the Laravel Framework — choosen because of it’s online support, clean code base and large number of features (e.g. a full ORM, MVC structure, db migrations, etc.).Turtle Player v2
Just a short post to mention that Turtle Player, a fully fledged, open-source, music player for Android, is now in it’s second version. Downloadable at turtle-player.co.uk.Version Control with Git
This tutorial is written in the hope that it can give you an overview of Git, Github and version control in general – be it for web developement or software development purposes alike. It will hopefully outline why Git (and version control) is used, the advantages to it and it should give you a brief introduction to using it yourself.Open Source Android Music Player
Just a quick post to mention that I’ve just released an Android music player to the general public and horray! It’s open-source! Find it, and contribute to it, on Github.Gimp 2.8 Released
Last week, on the 3rd of May 2012 the GNU Image Manipulation Program, also known as the GIMP, released version 2.8 of their cross-platform software. It supports many new features, the most notable of which is the long awaited single-window mode as well as many other user interface tweaks which make this version more attractive and intuitive to use.Windows 8 Consumer Preview Review
As you may, or may not, already know on the 29th of February 2012, Microsoft released the Consumer Preview of its new operating system, Windows 8. It was available for anyone to try. Windows 8 harbours many new features and changes which will be looked at in this review.10 Useful Linux Terminal Commands
1. $ whoami Okay, I hear you, this might not be that useful, but shh! I enjoy it nonetheless. This command basically just prints out the name of the current user. After a long programming session I occasionally like being told my own name.