The Niklas Lindblad Organisation

I should really re-install my terminal server…

Just added Twitter to my GoogleTalk contact list!

Reading up on personal budgets and other stuff I need to figure before moving in order to attend university.

185 pages into the seventh Harry Potter book…

Playing Zelda: Ocarina of Time on the Nintendo 64 with my lovely girlfriend Carro.

While developing database-driven applications or building a database with bogus information for testing purpose, the traditional interfaces for adding values to each table are often utterly complex or require too many mouse-clicks per entry. Wouldn’t it be nice to import a plain spreadsheet created in OpenOffice Calc or Excel straight into your database? This article will introduce a technique making it possible.

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Apparently my fellow blogger Lasse has tagged me in this popular (but childish) blog game called 8 random facts. The first rule of 8 random facts is not that you do no talk about 8 random facts, instead the first rule states that you should give away the rules:

• Players start with 8 random facts about themselves.
• Those who are tagged should post these rules and their 8 random facts.
• Players should tag eight other people and notify them that they have been tagged.

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For the past term I have been taking a specialized course in which the teacher was kind enough to combine a course called programming A and another one called database management. The idea was to use PHP together with MySQL to put together various assignments. After solving a couple of assignments I started out working on the main project, a webshop with basic features. With one week to go I think that I have learnt several things from the course so far:

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In this post I will summarize my own personal backup approach, which might give you some fresh ideas about backups, especially if you are a Linux user.

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Sometimes you know that there is an instance of an application running in a screen but you are not sure about the exact screen name and

screen -x

returns a tedious list. Maybe I still have no clue about how to use screen to the fullest, but here is a function I use in a script on my shell account to resume screens:

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Writing a sufficient password generator does not have to be hard nor overly complex. In this article a simple password generator technique will be presented and explained.

One of the simplest password generators could simply output the ASCII character represented by a series of random integers:

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The initial version of the Youtube command-line ripper appeared on Digg without ever reaching any sort of maturity. There was at most an hour between the beginning of the coding process and the massive public exposure. I am grateful for all the feedback I have received and, as promised I now announce a total rewrite in PHP that is confirmed working on Linux, Windows and OS X (just about any platform with PHP actually).

Version 0.40 is available for download.

• PHP5 is available for Windows as binaries from the PHP.net site
• Most Linux distributions have a package in their repositories
• There is a port of PHP5 available for OS X users

Considering going to bed after finishing http://tinyurl.com/2g8slh

When working with PHP in an web environment programmers are often used to the comfort of having the associative arrays $_GET and $_POST to hold the data to be passed on as arguments. During command line runtime however, there is only a numerated array called $argv holding each argument:

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Today I announce a minor release of my latest object oriented beauty. Inspired by the earlier mentioned caching method in PHP i decided to rewrite it as a reusable class.

SimpleCacher is a class written in PHP aimed at providing an object oriented caching method for (X)HTML-pages otherwise generated by querying a database-backend along with the execution of intense PHP applications. The idea is to provide a clean and extendable way to set up caching procedures for webpages.

• GZIP compressed cache (sends the GZIP compressed cache file directly to the client, if possible)
• Strips down the cache file to contain only a single line of (X)HTML
• Redundant error checking forces the original content to be displayed in case the cache method breaks