A day will eventually come when your need to find and replace a string of text in your database. You don’t know which row, or which column, or which table. Heck, you may not even know which database. Your options are: spend the rest of the summer hunting down the elusive table cells, or use the weap...

Heavy traffic, hungry SQL queries, leaky applications will eventually leave your server low on memory. Apache will go on a hunt for swap space and MySQL will start freezing in thoughtful contemplation. Your hard drives will start scratching like a pack of homeless dogs and suddenly everything will b...

Suppose you are working with a Web server and your task is to make sure that no files or directories have permissions “777″. It would be easy to just recursively change permissions for all files to something like 644, but this may cause unexpected problems. You only need to change those files and di...

As you may already know, Wget is a popular (particularly in the Unix world) command-line downloader and Web crawler application. You can read more about Wget in one of my earlier posts on the subject. One issue with Wget is that some sites block it from accessing their content. This is usually done ...

Bonnie++ is a benchmark utility designed to test performance of hard drives and filesystems by simulating various types of disk I/O. Bonnie++ may be used to test local disks as well as network-mounted filesystems. It is recommended that you reboot your server in single-user mode (with network suppor...

Many long-time iPhone users are familiar with the mystery of disappearing keyboard clicking sounds (among other sound effects). Here are a few things you can try before you take your fruity phone back to the store: 1. If you are a proud owner of iPhone 3G, make sure the silent switch was not engaged...

Oh quit your whining, you will say, they are just a couple bucks each, so no big loss if some iPhone apps turn out to be trash. True, but they are so addictive. My first iPhone store bill was $62.98. This was in just the first week since I bought the damn thing and on top of the hundreds of dollars ...

Sometimes, in the course of writing shell script, a need arises for some random input. Using the built-in $RANDOM shell variable will give you a random number from 0 to 32767 . Let’s take a look at a few examples making use of this shell variable in a number of handy ways. These examples are present...

Let’s say you downloaded a long list of Web proxy servers. Now you are stuck with the task of weeding out the proxies that are dead, slow, fake, or otherwise unusable. There are some applications out there that claim to validate proxy servers. The most common problem with these applications: they ar...

This is the second part of my review of iPhone apps unworthy of your ninety nine cents. You can read the first part here: http://www.krazyworks.com/bad-iphone-apps/ Certain applications are well-written and might have been quite useful, if only they weren’t designed to rip you off. Take Textfree for...