Virtual Desktops on Windows 10
Windows 10 comes with a nice virtual desktop system which, until recently, I had never really had cause to use. That changed when I needed to do an extended period…
Author Archives: stephen
Using Get-ChildItem Results in PowerShell
A colleague had a problem using Get-ChildItem in PowerShell. It would return results just fine but there was some confusion over what *exactly* was being returned. The issue arose because…
Logrotate Woes
Logrotate is a fabulous tool and is in no way the source of my woe – that’s all me, I am afraid! In my youthful exurberance, I had made a…
Using PHPStorm’s Live Templates
Saving keystrokes is not to be sniffed at when your fingertips and time are so precious. Fortunately, PHPStorm has a lovely feature which will allow you to use abbreviations for common code…
Making Fast Successive Web Requests in PowerShell
I’ve been working with Fail2Ban, playing with it’s configuration files in an attempt to get it to recognise when someone is making lots of fast successive web requests. Much like…
Extracting the Source of Apache Web Requests
I had a query come in recently from one of our users that told me our website was running slowly. We have quite a beefy cloud-based VM so I knew…
A Small Twitter Project
I was on my way home tonight when I saw this on Twitter. Is it possible, though? Definitely! But what exactly did the tweeter mean by their request? My interpretation…
TIS-100 is Alive
A colleague at work told me about a game he had been playing on Steam called TIS-100 which he had been particularly enjoying and using as a basis for competing…
Some Useful PHP Command Line Options
When you use a tool day in, day out, you take a lot of things for granted. Sometimes there are some really useful things available but because you don’t look,…
Guzzling HaveIBeenPwned with PHP
System and account breaches are happening all the time but fortunately there are services such as HaveIBeenPwned that scoop up the data that is released and provide a mechanism for people…
Which PHP Functions Should you Learn?
Most people know that PHP has a lot of functions but how many do you think there are? I spent a little while trying to work this out and after some judicious Googling,…
Using Editor Config to Help Maintain PSRs in PHP
There are two PHP-FIG PSRs (PHP Standards Recommendations) named PSR-1 and PSR-2 which make suggestions as to how you should present your PHP code. I won’t be going into why you should…
Udemy Votes
I recently bought a course from Udemy which marks a milestone for me. My regular blog reader will know that I am partial to Pluralsight, but single, individual courses? Nope….
Don’t be a Faker – Use fzaninotto/faker
I recently wanted to create a CSV file of user data: names, ids, some geospatial data etc, that kind of thing. That’s not a huge deal when the size of data…
Checking for Vulnerabilities with Composer
Composer is a brilliant tool and coupled with the thousands and thousands of packages you can install with it, it reduces how much work we have to do to develop…