Archive for 'Windows'
Free-Codecs.com
Posted on April 22, 2008, under Media, Tools and Services, Windows.
I personally find codecs extremely annoying. For something like music and video that is suppose to be entertaining, fussing with codecs for fifteen minutes before you are able to be entertained really is a mood killer. This is the unfortunate side of technology, when something that should just work doesn’t.
Free-Codecs is a site that has compiled just about every codec you will ever need, and they have done so in a easy to install packages. They also have codec packs where you can install packages of commonly used codecs.
The site has really save me time and frustration, and I am sure it will do the same for you.
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Eliminating the Need for Common Desktop Apps
Posted on March 6, 2008, under Adobe AIR, Browsers, Development, Software, Tools and Services, Windows.
As a desktop software developer, it is hard to admit that I have enjoyed moving my common applications to web services. Like many these days, I am not tied to just one computer. A desktop, laptop, and computer at work are just some. I eliminated the need for Outlook, as I use Google Apps for all of my mail, calendar, and most documents. The convenience of having access to your data from anywhere is huge. However, when I am at the desktop I want to use some of my web services like a desktop app.
For example Meebo. I have been using Meebo for my IM needs for some time, I love it. However having a full screen browser open all the time kind of sucks. There is a project called mebone written in Adobe Air, however it looks like it has since been abandoned. I ran into a version restriction of Air, an annoyance I have highlighted before about Air. I am not going to go and install a beta version of Air just to run a specific Air application.
I ran across a link to Prism, a project from the Mozilla folks. At it’s current state, Prism is little more than an isolated Firefox browser. You can install any URL as a "Web App" and run it stand alone. The road map looks really good for the project, and I can’t wait to see what comes. There is a lot of potential there. I like Prism for several reasons. The main reason is it allows me to run my mail, calendar, docs in a stand alone quick to launch browser that acts like a desktop application. This works great for Meebo, and my mail.
There are some applications that I personally would never see feasible to use as an online service. Photoshop, podcatchers, backup software, are some on my list. But the connection from the desktop to web services via applications like Prism are priceless.
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Easy MySQL Backups on a Windows Server
Posted on February 27, 2008, under Code Snippets, How To, IIS, Software, Windows.
During the re-launch of BlueCrestStudios we moved to a Windows server. It was part of our initiative to take things back to our roots, and make things simpler. Because we run a fair amount of PHP applications we went with MySQL as our database. MySQL comes with a great little application called "mysqldump" which simply enough dumps your data to a SQL file. This little tool, combined with the free and great 7Zip makes for simple and great database backups. It’s best to dump your database onto a separate drive then where the data is stored, offers a little redundancy.
Now before we get started, I know some of you are thinking there is no need for this if you hosting company does backups. True, yes any good hosting company should do regular backups of all your data. However, I find it good to have a dump of our databases for that oops situation, and not involve the hosting company if we need to recover a database or table or row. In addition, you can schedule dump every other hour, or more regularly then your hosting company does backups.
So here is our script, let’s see what we are doing here:
1: set ARCHIVE=E:\Backups\MySQL\%DATE%.zip
2: set FILE=E:\Backups\MySQL\Backup.sql
3: DEL %ARCHIVE% /f /q
4: "C:\Program Files\MySQL\bin\mysqldump.exe" –all-databases –user=YOURMYSQLUSER –password=YOURMYSQLPASS > %FILE%
5: "C:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe" a -tzip %ARCHIVE% %FILE%
6: DEL %FILE% /f /q
Basically we are dumping the database daily here, to an archive that holds the day of the week. The variable "ARCHIVE" holds to archive for today that will be created. The "FILE" variable holds the temporary dump file before we compress it, it is deleted after the compression just to clean up after ourselves.
- Line 3, we are deleting the current backup archive just incase.
- Line 4, we are doing the actual dump. You need to set your mysql user and password , a note do not use root!
- Line 5, we are doing the actual creating of the archive. SQL dump files compress very well, so this is a space saver step.
- Line 6, we are deleting the temporary backup file as mentioned above.
The tactics above can be enhanced greatly, as you can do dumps based on database, time, and get very elaborate on this. As an extra step I am using my Windows Home Server to download the dump nightly via FTP. Simple, elegant, fairly robust, and useful.
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