I have been working on some projects and using my home server to complete some initial testing. I continually have issues connecting from my pc to the database. The remote IP on my VPN changes and I have the server pretty well locked down so need to add the current IP address to the access list.

The database name, user, remotehost ip address, and password are required to use the following command. One note, that you should probably not use the ‘root’ user or admin user when setting this command and insure that you do not leave the access on servers where there could be issues with security.

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES
ON database.*
TO 'user'@'remotehost'
IDENTIFIED BY 'password';

This command has made it possible to connect using DB Visualizer which makes accessing the database very easy.

I take the train to the city every day and I have been seeing my connection suddenly switch to ‘xfinitywifi’. This was getting very frustrating as I didn’t want to be on a public wifi and it was switching off of my hotspot or home network. It was not in the list of managed networks either. I found out that Comcast was automatically registering your Hardware MAC address and it would try to connect anytime it was in range.

The following steps helped to remove my Hardware MAC address from there system.

Login to Xfinity.com

1. Click “My Account”
2. Sign in — You must have access to billing to do this —
3. Click “My Services” tab
4. Click on “Xfinity Internet” on the subtab under “My Services & Equipment.”
5. Select the “Manage devices for hotspot access” option
6. Manage or remove the devices from your account by clicking “remove” next to each one you want to disconnect.

Tags: Wifi

I have been working to up my skills in the web development arena and have to say that The Odin Project is a great place to get started. The lesson plan directs you to not just learn the different languages required to create for the web, but also what is going on in the computer when you do things. It also gives you information about how to connect with other developers and how to progress your skills.

Some of the projects teach you to create images with a group of divs and pure CSS like this example of the Dancing Android character.

Also learning to re-create the basic display of the Google Home Page helps to learn styling techniques, using sprites and how to position objects.

Some of the best ways to learn HTML design are to take a web page that you like and try to re-create it without looking at the styling. Once you have a good approximation, see where you differed from the original.

So I had a colleague receive a list of cities to import to a database in an excel spreadsheet. It turned out that someone had placed an image of the data in the spreadsheet instead of the text. This was looking to be a long day of typing when I happened upon the following awesome site: Online OCR . I was able to convert the image to text in MS Word, MS Excel or plain text.

All you have to do is take the image and use Paint or any image software, copy it from the document and save it as a png or jpeg. Then Save the file and you have the text ready to go. I did have a few mis-recognized letters, but changing a few keystrokes was better than the hour I would have wasted typing out all the cities.

And all this without registration. When I registered it gave a few more options for output such as PDF, different versions of Excel and Word, and RTF. Also multi page support, convert to black and white and creating zips.

There is also multi-language support and even an email service to send in the your docs and receive an email with the converted doc. There is a limit to the amount of pages you are allowed with the login service and you can purchase sets of pages in chunks if you use the service regularly.

Great Service and I was able to convert the list in just a few minutes.

Thanks Online OCR!

I just found a way to create a settings folder in Windows 7. This God Mode folder can be created by:

1) Create a new Folder
2) Rename the folder to : GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

Then the folder will change its icon and give you access to the settings for your computer in one place.

I have a script that uploads a series of data into tables and occasionally I have an alternate table that is not part of my company template so I need to create the table at run time.  I do not want try to create the table if it exists already.  I also did not want to have to write a table check query and run that separately each time.

I looked into creating a function to do this but I found that with the release of Postgres 9.1 there was an addition of the “if exists” or in my case, “if not exists” that allowed me to run one query that would only create the table if the table does not exist already.

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS {schema}.{table_name}

(

sku character varying(100) not null,

product_image character_varying(300) not null

);

I had a project the other day that required me to shorten a description down to a certain length and add an elipsis. The problem I encountered was making sure that the truncation did not happen in the middle of a word.

So using a Postgres database, I used the following query to return the shortened description without ending in a partial word.

select 
    case when length(long_description)>= 100
    then reverse(substring(reverse(left(long_description,100)),position(' ' in reverse(left(long_description,100))))) || '...'
    else long_description
    end
    from data_feed

The steps involved were to

1.  Check if the field is over 100 characters,  if >100, then continue to step 2
2.  Use left function to get 100 characters of the string
3.  Reverse the string returned from left
4.  Get a substring of the reversed truncated string from the first space (‘ ‘) to the end of the reversed truncated string
5. Reverse the final string (So it is back to the correct direction of text)
6. Append the ellipsis to the string ( or add a link or leave off if no extra chars are required)

Tags: Postgres, SQL

I create cards in Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop on occasion and have had issues with getting my prints made at on-line or in-store photo services (such as Walgreens, Walmart or Target). I have received invalid JPEG errors.

You will need to make sure that your color mode is set to RGB for your files and not CMYK.

Ironically, even though most printers do better with CMYK, the RGB format is required for your JPEGS at these services.

The other day I was editing some code and as usual I was in Vi. It was python code and I had refactored some code and needed to indent a section of code. I did not relish the idea of trying to make sure that all the indents were done on several dozen lines of code so I looked into how to indent the code in VI.

Here is the sequence that let me indent blocks easily.

I used <shift>-V to select the entire line.

Then I selected multiple lines by using the arrow keys or j or k depending on which direction you need to select.

Then you use the ‘>’ key to indent to the right and the ‘<‘ key to decrease the indent to the left.

There are times that I have wanted to install some Python module on a system where I did not have access to do so.
When you do not have permission to write into the standard library directories you
may need to run the “python setup.py install” command with the additional option of

 --home=<Some other directory>

make sure that this base directory has a lib/python directory within it and that you have
exported the PYTHONPATH variable to contain this directory.

Then simply run the command “python setup.py install –home=<Some other directory>” and your libs will
be installed.

Then you will need to make sure that your PYTHONPATH environment variable is always available
to whatever runs your scripts.

As an alternative to the PYTHONPATH, you can use the following within your scripts to target a non-standard python module directory:

import sys
sys.path.append("/path/to/the/module/directory")
## import any modules you have in your own directory

Using the method in the script allows you to make the scripts available to other users that may not have the PYTHONPATH setup.

Tags: Python