The CodeUnit of Craig

How to Refresh a DataTable without Losing Your Current Page or Ordering

Craig Lotter — Mon, 28 May 2012 06:00:02 +0000

DataTables is a fantastic plug-in for the jQuery Javascript library that I use for pretty much all my web development projects. It is a highly flexible tool, based upon the foundations of progressive enhancement, which will add advanced interaction controls … Continue reading →

Banshee: Editing Track Information not Updating MP3 Files

Craig Lotter — Fri, 25 May 2012 06:00:25 +0000

Banshee isn’t a half bad a music centre for Ubuntu, and I do like it’s nifty interface for the easy updating of album and track information, more commonly referred to as ID3 tags if you’re coming from the MP3 world. … Continue reading →

MySQL: How to Select the First Word of a Sentence using SQL

Craig Lotter — Mon, 21 May 2012 06:00:33 +0000

Sometime it is useful to be able to extract the first word of a sentence contained in one of the columns of your table. Luckily for us, MySQL makes this a trivial operation thanks to its useful SUBSTRING_INDEX() function. From … Continue reading →

How to Install Nagios on an Ubuntu Server

Craig Lotter — Fri, 18 May 2012 06:00:28 +0000

Nagios is a popular open source computer system monitor, network monitoring and infrastructure monitoring software application. Nagios offers complete monitoring and alerting for servers, switches, applications, and services. Nagios, originally created under the name NetSaint, was written and is currently … Continue reading →

PHP: How to Add Days, Months or Years to a Date

Craig Lotter — Mon, 14 May 2012 06:00:37 +0000

Date work is always icky, but luckily PHP has some pretty nifty functions that can pretty much do all the heavy lifting for you. One of most commonly faced problems is how to add either a number of days, months … Continue reading →

PHP: How to Generate a Random String Containing Both Letters and Numbers

Craig Lotter — Fri, 11 May 2012 06:00:05 +0000

To generate a string containing a random selection of both letters and numbers (i.e. an alphanumeric string) using PHP is pretty trivial. Essentially what we want to do is define a string containing all the characters we wish to use … Continue reading →

CSS: How to Fill a Div with Gradient Background Color across most Browsers with CSS

Craig Lotter — Mon, 07 May 2012 06:00:00 +0000

Gradient colors are pretty awesome, pretty to look at and a nifty visual effect. Unfortunately for us though, CSS standards when it comes to handling gradients was pretty lacklustre over the years, resulting in all the major browsers pretty much … Continue reading →

How to create a Variable Length String of Random Characters using JavaScript

Craig Lotter — Fri, 04 May 2012 06:00:23 +0000

Generating random strings is always necessary when working with things like voucher or password generation, and so today’s quick JavaScript function looks at returning a specified length of string containing a a selection of randomly selected characters and numbers. The … Continue reading →

How to Locate which Ports You can Send out on via SMTP when using a GoDaddy E-mail Account

Craig Lotter — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 06:00:15 +0000

A port is just a port, and just because there is a standard one that is used by something, it doesn’t mean you always have to use the default port for doing that something. Enter sending out an e-mail message … Continue reading →

How to Rename a Table using phpMyAdmin

Craig Lotter — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 06:00:29 +0000

It is not immediately apparent how you go about changing the name of a MySQL database table via the phpMyAdmin interface, so I thought I would drop a quick note here to remind me how to do it in the … Continue reading →