Tech on Ricky Moorhouse

Blog hosting wonderings...

Mon, 24 Jun 2013 19:46:28 +0000

A while back I had an e-mail from my web hosting company saying they were increasing the price for the package I was using. This got me thinking about whether the route I'd taken for hosting was the best option and if I'm getting my money's worth there. For reference I had a reseller hosting package, hosting a few sites for family members using not very much disk space or bandwidth - certainly not near the allowance on the package. So I started thinking about what I would do if it was just my site, and this is my thinking out loud/somewhere to document my ideas/findings:

Tweeting Google Calendar reminders with Postmark

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 12:41:09 +0000

A while back I wrote my original script to tweet event reminders from Google Calendar and it's been through a couple of iterations since and been broken for a while. Well finally I got round to update it to use OAuth to connect to twitter using the twitteroauth library and switched to using Postmark Inbound for handling the incoming e-mail.

What you will need

Web hosting with php
A Google calendar attached to a Gmail account

Get your advent calendars here

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 11:58:13 +0000

Yes I know it's now the 2nd December so this is a day late, but here's a list of the online advent calendars I've seen so far (and I'll probably keep adding to it!)

24 Ways - Web development tutorial every day till Christmas

DTS Advent Devotionals - A devotional each day on the names of Jesus

Adfont Calendar - A free webfont every day in advent

Prezzo - A competition to win vouchers each day

Firewall rules for Synergy in iptables

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 12:02:31 +0000

For a while I've been turning off iptables to let my secondary machine connect as synergy client to let me use one keyboard and mouse across both machines. Finally today I decided to set up the rules properly to do it, so here's how:

Create a new rule file in the iptables chain directory for incoming rules:

sudo vi /etc/iptables.d/filter/INPUT/53-custom-synergys.rule

with the following lines in it:

# Allows incoming flows for Synergy.
-A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 24800 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -p udp -m udp --dport 24800 -j ACCEPT

Restart iptables for the rules to take effect

Distraction free writing - Artsy Editor or Wordpress 3.2

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 12:10:47 +0000

For a while I've been following the updates on a new plugin for Wordpress - Artsy Editor which gives you a completely clean page in which to write your post with easy access to the formatting options through a popup which appears intelligently when you select text, as seen in the image above. You can also drag an image into the editor to upload and insert it where you are typing. All in all it works really smoothly.

Delete directories older than 90 days

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 10:25:16 +0000

find /var/log/hostdb/* -type d -mtime +90 -exec rm -rf {} ;

-type d only look at directories, f would be files -mtime +90 modified time greater than 90 days ago

Load CSV data into MySQL

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 11:20:58 +0000


    load data local infile 'export.csv' into table table_name
    fields terminated by ','
    enclosed by '"'
    lines terminated by 'n'
    (field_list)

Google Calendar to Twitter

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 12:14:20 +0000

For our Momentum men's events we have a Google Calendar that we use to manage the upcoming events, and this gets pulled into our website using the Wordpress plugin ICSCalendar. Recently I set up a twitter account as well, and decided that it would be useful to provide reminders of events on there, which people could then follow and receive SMS updates for.

Initially I had a look around to see what I could find, and came across Calendar Tweet, but that didn't do quite what I was looking for. Then I remembered smtp2web.com, which you can send e-mails to and it will post them to your website over http. So I set up our gmail account to forward the event reminders to my smtp2web e-mail address and built a PHP script to receive the content, parse it and send a nicely formatted message to twitter.

Sharing a printer from XP to Vista

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 20:19:01 +0000

After quite a while of not being able to print from our laptop to the shared printer on our XP desktop, I finally got it working last night thanks to my Dad.

Here's the instructions:

Make sure you can see the XP computer from Vista.

If you can't:

make sure the workgroup is the same (as the defaults are different)

In Vista, go to Computer, System Properties
make sure file and print sharing is allowed through the firewall - in our case we had to reset the firewall rules on our XP machine and re-add the ones we wanted for this to work:

Chop and chomp in perl

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 10:23:28 +0000

Just a reminder, so I remember the difference! - chomp is a safer version of "chop" removes any trailing string that matches what perl thinks is a new line)

` $string = "abcdef";
chop($string) # $s is now f, $string is now abcde
chomp($string) # $string is still now abcde

$string = "abcdefn";
chomp($string) # $string is now abcdef
`