Paul – Page 7 – PHP Developer

View a single column definition in MySQL

By Paul August 26, 2021MariaDB, MySQL

Most MySQL developers will be familiar with the DESCRIBE statements, which shows the definition of all the columns in a table: > DESCRIBE contacts; +------------+---------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+ | Field | Type |…

Set JavaScript variables based on hostname

By Paul February 9, 2021JavaScript

Most of the websites I work on have at least two environments: staging (for testing) and production (the live site). Each environment has a different configuration, e.g. staging will typically…

2020 review of the year

By Paul December 31, 2020Annual Review, Business

Despite the general chaos, I've been luckier than most in that my business hasn't been badly affected in 2020. I've had chance to learn some new skills, improve my admin,…

Sympl migration and management services

By Paul December 18, 2020Business, Sympl

This year I've been paying close attention to Sympl, a project which makes it easier to manage website and email hosting by providing sensible default configurations and automating some of…

Advent of Code: 2015 – Day 02

By Paul November 30, 20202015, Advent of Code

Part 1 Problem: Calculate the surface area of a list of boxes, including slack (the area of the smallest side). Solution: Read in each line of the input file and…

Advent of Code: 2015 – Day 01

By Paul November 27, 20202015, Advent of Code

Part 1 Problem: Starting at zero, move up one floor for every '(' and down one floor for every ')'. Solution: Read in the input one character at a time…

Changing the timezone in Debian Buster

By Paul November 4, 2020Debian

I recently spun up a couple of virtual servers with the Mythic Beasts provisioner, which didn't give me the option of selecting my timezone. As a result the servers were…

osTicket and Vagrant

By Paul August 28, 2020Ansible, Business, Vagrant

osTicket is a self-hosted and open source ticketing system written in PHP. I wanted to give it a try as one option for a client's support needs, but with a…

Project Euler: Problem 8

By Paul July 22, 2020Project Euler

Problem: Find the largest product of any 13 adjacent digits in a 1000 digit number. Solution: Move through the 1000 digit number with a sliding window of 13 digits. For…

Pretty print XML in PHP

By Paul July 15, 2020PHP, XML2 Comments

As part of my freelance work I send data to APIs, often using XML for data transfer. I log the XML sent and received for debugging and auditing, however the…