bloggingIT

How to enable phpMyAdmin’s Designer in 3 steps

I recently discovered a neat feature in phpMyAdmin called designer. Designer is a great tool for viewing databases and managing the relationships between them.

I recently needed designer for another handy feature but the first thing I had to tackle, how do I get this to appear? If you have designer enabled, then when you open your database in phpMyAdmin, you should see something like this

If this isn’t visible, then you need to do some legwork. Read on to quickly enable this feature. Continue reading How to enable phpMyAdmin’s Designer in 3 steps

The ‘X’ of the day

My ‘X’ is done today. As I stood at the booth and looked at the list of candidates I froze up. Should I try to stave off Nigel Farage by putting a mark next to the Tory candidate?

Craig Mackinly seemed to have local interests at heart but I don’t like how the Conservatives have and will continue to surreptitiously privatise schools.

A vote for Al Murray is the ‘anti-establishment’ vote. A joke but a message of how the most ridiculous candidate seems a better option that the others (except for the candidate for the party of the planet Ogg or something).

Based on the effort Labour have made here, do they even care about this area? It’s definitely not 1997 anymore.

Lib Dems seem to only want to press ahead with their ‘red lines’ but the trust is gone for some. And again, where’s the campaigning?

When you have to consider your vote based on who you don’t want in, rather than what you believe in, you know that the political system is utterly broken. We’re expected to vote on what we don’t want rather than what we do.

I eventually cast my vote and left the polling station.

But now, as I reflect I feel more disillusioned now when I should feel patriotic. It just doesn’t work anymore, if it ever really did at all in our lifetime.

GREP a list of files for multiple strings on multiple lines

Grep is most definitely not the most exciting tool to talk about. One of the challenges that I recently faced was to list a bunch of text files only with a specific phrase.

For the sake of context, I was looking through emails of course bookings. Luckily, I know that the courses are prefixed with the word COURSE: and the names. After saving all of the files in a directory it was a case of running this command:

grep -l "COURSE: Course 1" *

Nice and simple. I could then find out which ones were booking Course 2:

grep -l "COURSE: Course 2" *

So far so good. The problem I now had was that I wanted to know exactly how many had booked BOTH courses. The courses aren’t on the same line so it’s not so straight forward but there’s a very simple way to find those pesky files.

grep -l "COURSE: Course 1" * | xargs grep -l "COURSE: Course 2"

By piping the file names from the first result into the argument of the next grep – it was easy to find the files that had both courses booked. You can chain this with the pipe as many times as you need to.

Finally, if you’re feeling really swish, then you might want to know how many matches there are rather than list the files:

grep -l "COURSE: Course 1" * | xargs grep -l "COURSE: Course 2" | wc -l

If you’re looking for some tricks to using grep to match (or not match!) strings, then you should check out this article over at The Geek Stuff.

Authorising WordPress Users From Another Script

Sometimes you might want to add additional pages or some extra functionality outside of WordPress. I needed to do this and only allow singed in users to access the page.

There’s a pretty straight forward way to check visitors to the page simply by including the WordPress header file and then checking for an appropriate permission.

Read on for the script. Continue reading Authorising WordPress Users From Another Script

Time To Say “When”

This last year or two has been a pretty crazy one in my life. Some of you know a bit more than others, but there have been a huge number of things going on. And until recently, I was blissfully unaware of the impact of them.

There comes a time when we have to look around and take stock of what we have, and responsibility for what we have and don’t have.

Vague? You betcha! But I’ll get to all that. First of all, I wanted to let you all know that I’m stepping down as Editor of BlackBerryOS and Gadgism this weekend. It’s a decision I’ve been wrestling with for some time and I hate to go out this way but I believe that it’s for the best.

If you care for the full story then read on.

Continue reading Time To Say “When”

My Hate/Hate Relationship With Arrows

When talking about design – in any sense – there are so many conventions that we take for granted and assume that everyone else understands.

Take the tick (✓) for example – that usually means “yes” or something is correct doesn’t it?

Well, no actually. The issue with the seemingly ubiquitous tick is that it isn’t recognised universally in that respect. As Separated by Common Language points out – there have been systems where a checkmark or tick can indicate a wrong answer. Continue reading My Hate/Hate Relationship With Arrows