Archive for October, 2005
Validating Web forms with Perl
Posted by Mark Stosberg on October 25th, 2005One of the most frequent uses of Perl in my job is to validate web-based forms. Here’s some explanation and sample code to how I do that efficiently and effectively.
Reporting on disk space usage for PostgreSQL and MySQL databases
Posted by Mark Stosberg on October 25th, 2005I was recently tasked with finding out how much each disk space each of our PostgreSQL and MySQL databases was taking up.
The job was considerably easier for PostgreSQL, which ships with tools in contrib/dbsize to do just this. After following the simple instructions there, all that was necessary for easy reporting was to create a simple view. Here’s the one I used:
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Flock: Building a Better Bookmark
Posted by Mark Stosberg on October 23rd, 2005Today I downloaded and tried the view preview release of Flock, a new web browser based on Firefox.
I went into the experience cynical, having used many browsers in my experience as a professional website developer. What else could they possibly add that I would really want?
I found one feature in Flock that by itself makes it worth considering the browser.
Flock has built a better bookmark.
Reduce remote (ab)use of your website images
Posted by Chris Hardie on October 18th, 2005It’s a pretty common problem: you have an image on your website that’s attractive or useful to someone else - a logo, a photo, a cool piece of art. They build a web page hosted somewhere out there that makes a reference to your image. Now every time a user visits that person’s site, the user’s web browser loads up the image from your site, using up your bandwidth and, in many cases, displaying it for purposes you hadn’t really intended - sometimes called “hotlinking”. The other day I found someone who was using a 6MB image from my personal site as a background image for theirs - and they were apparently pretty popular, so it created a lot of large requests on our webserver. Recently one of our hosting clients and longtime friend of Summersault, Justin Simoni, was having this happen so much that he was regularly exceeding his bandwidth quota and incurring all sorts of hassle. So, we tackled the problem head-on, and even though there are lots of references around the net on how to limit this problem, none quite seemed to document the particular method we used. I’ll do that here in case anyone else finds it useful.
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