Greetings folks, I’d like to take a moment to share with you something that I found a while back and have been using since I found it.  What I found was a service, a source code hosting service fully integrated with Subversion.  Now, I had already been using Subversion, I had it setup and running on my own servers in my lab.  I had even looked at the idea of commercial Internet based Subversion hosting since it would put my source code archive off-site and accessible from outside my lab, but the providers and plans I found were either expensive, feature light, or just didn’t seam to be a quality service provider.  Usually more than one of those things.  Besides, I am very picky about where I put my source code.  Call me paranoid, but I don’t toss code around anywhere, I have to be comfortable that it’s in a safe and secure place.

So, now enter Code Spaces, the best hosted Subversion I have ever seen, even over hosting it myself.  The service is superb and the features included go way beyond simple Subversion hosting.  In the end, between the ease of use and the extra goodies that they include with the service, not to mention the reasonable price, I believe in the long run I am saving money over hassling with doing it myself.  Not to mention my code is now safely archived off site, which is great for disaster recovery.

Now, what all do they provide other than great Subversion hosting?  Take a look:

• SSL Encryption
• Real Time Backups
• Project Management Tools
• Bug Tacking Tools
• Project Milestones and Task Setup
• A 45 Day FREE Trial
• A Money Back Guarantee

There’s more to it than that, but you really have to go check out their site to get a handle on all that they offer.  Frankly, if this type of service is something that you want or need, I’d give them a shot for the 45 day free trial.  That’s what I did and I was blown away by how good their service is.  Check them out at http://www.codespaces.com today!  By the way, if anyone is interested, this is not a paid endorsement.  I don’t get any kickbacks or consignments if you sign up and they didn’t pay me or give me a credit/discount for this post, I just like the service that much that I wanted to share it with all my visitors.  Enjoy!

Hi there, how about a close cousin to yesterdays Visual Basic function?  In a previous post we showed you a function that will tell you whether or not a file does indeed exist.  Well, here is another similar function, but it tells you whether or not a directory exists.  This is another handy tool for all you code monkeys out there.  It works much the same way, check it out below:

Read the rest of this entry »

Here is a handy little tip (and function) for all you Visual Basic developers out there.  I use this quite often, it’s useful to see if whatever file you are working with or looking for exists before you start trying to access it.  So, here we have a nice little function you can drop into a module and call from anywhere when you need it.

(Need to do the same for a directory? That function is here!)

Check it out:

Read the rest of this entry »

Here we go folks, I thought I would share a handy little script with you that I use to backup all of the databases on a particular Linux/UNIX server.  I do this by getting a list of the databases, and then using mysqldump to dump them all to a text file.  This seems to be the best way (short of replication) to get good clean backups of the data.  Toss it into a cron job and you can have it done automagically.  There isn’t anything yet to rotate files, but I might add that later.  Also, I am going to try and rewrite this in PERL so our Windows (and other OS’s that don’t have a shell like Bash) brethren can run this script as well.  For now though, it’s written for Bash but almost any shell would work I think.

OK, onto the script.  Read the rest of this entry »

Mr. Thierry H. was kind enough to post a comment with a nice little mod to the PERL round function I posted a while back. With his addition, you can now specify how many digits to show on the right of the decimal. Pretty neat, check it out.

Recently I was working on a script for log reporting.  You know, one of those handy little guys that send you some info every day helping to make sure you keep up with whatever it is that you don’t want to forget about.  Well, some of the data was in a plain old text file, and there is nothing wrong with that.  It’s easy to simply cat the file and pipe it through mailx or mutt, no fuss, no muss.

Read the rest of this entry »