Setup a local configuration file in Codeigniter
After four years of development, I’m still a big CodeIgniter fan, although some other frameworks are starting to look mighty interesting. Despite the bugs in Version 2.0.2, however, CI is heading in the right direction.
One CI-related issue that has caused problems for my workplace in the past has been the ability to setup distributed development environments. Everybody has a different local setup, and some of the configuration directives inside of CI’s application/config folder must change from machine to machine.
Of course, we can’t just tell Mercurial to ignore that folder during commits, because there are some configuration directives that should remain the same across all environments, such as language, charset, enable_hooks, etc.
So, how to make some configuration settings consistent across different computers, and how to make some local settings?
Read more
My Mercurial Workflow
About a year ago, I wrote an article on this website about Version Control. In that article, I touted the glory of Subversion, and mentioned:
“I’ve since tried other VCS systems like Mercurial, Git, and Bazaar, but have not found any compelling reason to switch.”
Well, I’ve since found my compelling reasons to switch. SVN lost some of our files, and it was a pain to do all sorts of stuff (get setup, keep clean, branch, merge, etc). I won’t get into; there are enough rants about Subversion on the ‘net already. We use Mercurial now, and boy has our workflow improved.
Mercurial is my new favorite child, because it’s easy to setup, easy to use, easy to branch and merge, and easy to teach to my students. Oh, and it just works. Sometimes I think it runs off magic. Read more
How To Use SSH Tunnels with HeidiSQL and Plink
Do you love HeidiSQL as much as I do? It’s really the best MySQL front-end I’ve found so far for Windows. Sure, MySQL Workbench has all kinds of super-fancy features and GUI tools and what-not. But, in Workbench, I find that it takes sixteen mouse clicks to perform the same task that you can do in five with HeidiSQL.
I use HeidiSQL for nearly everything, and only have had one major beef with it. I could never get SSH Tunnels to work with it until today I figured it out! I’m super-stoked. If you’re having problems with Heidi and SSH too, I’ll provide a step-by-step below (keep reading).
If you want to skip the background junk, and go right to the procedure, be my guest!
Read more
Website Caching for n00bs
I finally installed a caching plugin for this site, because I know that I’m so awesome that any day now, millions of beautiful women will be clamoring to visit my website at the same time. Some things you are just sure of.
While I wait for that day, it makes sense to have a caching plugin anyway. Let’s count the reasons:
- It’s super easy, so time investment costs almost nothing,
- I’m on shared hosting, so every saved bit counts,
- Caching makes everything faster even when traffic is low, and
- I never know when I may actually write something useful, and thousands of denziens from the across the Internet will come and bring my poor little Dreamhost server to its knees.
So what is caching anyway?
I am an IT Professional in Tallahassee, Florida with a degree in Information Science.