Helpful Coder

 So I've been using WSL (Windows System Linux) for well over a year ago. I started with WSL 1 and then moved WSL 2 recently. All in all it's been a pretty smooth ride. I decided to ditch my mac after well over a decade of using macs and move to Windows. I wasn't happy with the price of the hardware I was getting for that price. Windows is better than it used to be... but that's not really saying much. And I've always been firmly in the Linux world when it comes to web development and hosting. So what to do? WSL fills the bill perfectly. Right now I have Ubuntu installed - all I have to do is open a Windows terminal window and type 'wsl' and I'm in a nice comfy linux world. Start up apache and MySQL, open localhost in my browser and I'm working off my local environment, almost like I was using MAMP. I did consider setting up dual-boot Windows and Linux - but my laptop just doesn't have the disk space for that. Upgrade the disk is an option, but tr...

This is something I run into pretty often, so I thought I'd share how I handle it, in case it's helpful. Sometimes you have a list of image files, and you need to create the html formatting to make them into a gallery of some sort. Imagine each file has two versions, a full size and a thumbnail image. Pretty common scenario. The URL for the files will look like /images/gallery/full/[filename] and /images/gallery/thumb/[filename] There's lots of ways to do this, here's what works well for me. First I grab a list of the files from the command line, ending up with something like this ls -l -rwxrwxrwx 1 user group 388044 May 25 11:16 IMG_20161205_120541.jpg -rwxrwxrwx 1 user group 451788 May 25 11:16 IMG_20161215_114201.jpg -rwxrwxrwx 1 user group 298125 May 25 11:16 IMG_20161216_121618.jpg -rwxrwxrwx 1 user group 369981 May 25 11:16 IMG_20161216_125940.jpg -rwxrwxrwx 1 user group 479464 May 25 11:16 IMG_20161216_131010.jpg -rwxrwxrwx 1 user group 664528 May 25 11:16 IMG_20...

As I've mentioned before, I've been running WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) for roughly a year now. It's still a little mind-blowing to me - when I got started Microsoft was about as anti-linux as can be. Weird times! Anyways, I have a fairly simple setup right now that's been working well for me. I'm using an older version of WSL right now, and apparently the newer version is much faster - but this works well enough for my needs right now. This guide assumes you already have WSL set up and working, and can get a bash command line... Install Apache and MySQL This is easy, just run: sudo apt install apache2 and sudo apt install mysql-server and while you're at it, you can start them up: sudo service apache2 start sudo service mysql start You may run into some weird issues - I used this guide if you need any other info. Now you have the most basic bits set up, it's time to get your actual sites up and running locally! Setting up your projec...

I've been back on Windows now for awhile, and WSL has made it quite an easy adjustment. You still get the occasional "WTF Windows" moment, especially after a big update - but I'm pretty happy with it. At the time I just couldn't justify splashing out for a pricy macbook with no escape key and a stupid "hotbar" thing... Anyways, if you're used to working in the LAMP stack and haven't tried out the combo of WSL and windows terminal, give it a try! Or at least try WSL if you don't use command line much. WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) basically lets you run linux inside windows. I use it to then run MySQL and Apache/PHP - and I'm good to go. Most of my work happens inside a Windows Terminal window, which has become a pretty slick, configurable terminal. I have a 'projects' directory set up, in which each of my various projects reside. When I want to work on one, all I have to do is edit the apache config to use that particular ...

Was just working on some server cleanup for a client and thought that this might be a handy tip for anyone out there in a similar situation... Here's the problem, I have a directory on a server that has lots (i.e. thousands) of subdirectories. I need to copy those up to an S3 backup bucket - organized by year and month - and then delete them. The tricky bit is they're not organized by month/year right now. It's just a giant mess of subdirectories without much of a coherent naming strategy. So, here's what I've come up with so far. First, I generate a text file listing all the directories, filtering through grep for the year I'm interested in, i.e. ls -ltr | grep 2019 > list.txt This gives me a list of all directory entries that have '2019' in them, which should get them all since we're using 'ls -l' Next, I open that file in vim, and copy all the files for the month I'm backing up, and use a regex to remove the leading bi...

(ok, fine I know it doesn't rhyme. I'm a coder, not a poet!) If you're still screwing around uploading and downloading your code to your web server using FTP, it's time you gave the command line a try! Not only is it more efficient to edit your code directly on the server, you'll also find the that the command line tools on your average linux install are quite powerful when it comes to web development! 1. You're on the server - Think how much time you spend dragging/dropping files in FTP, connecting and reconnecting when the FTP connection dies, etc. With a command line you're more saving time already just by avoiding all of that! 2. vi/emacs - These are the two biggies, but there's many, many other text editors available to use on the command line. I'm a vi guy, and it's definitely more powerful than the various GUI-based text editors I've used in the past. The built-in regular expressions alone are great! Sure, there's more than a li...