the echothis blog

Recently I volunteered to port a website from ColdFusion/SQL Server to PHP and MySql. But rather than getting the database snapshot as a SQL script, which would have been easy to migrate, I was given the database in the form of a SQL Server backup, which has two parts: an LDF log fie and an… Continue reading How to restore a SQL Server database from a backup file

There are a number of guides for this on the web, all of varying accuracy. These are the minimal steps I followed to get it working for development on a stock WAMP server installation: Enable ssl_module in the Apache module list Create the self-signed certificate keys as per Section 3 of http://tud.at/programm/apache-ssl-win32-howto.php3: cd c:\path\to\wamp\bin\apache\Apache2.2.11\conf  … Continue reading Quick steps to configure SSL encryption on a WAMP server

The CentOS directions are pretty good – follow them to the letter. The directions in the installed /etc/httpd/conf.d/subversion.conf – less so. In particular, your <Location> node should look something like this, in order to work (ignore the rest): <Location /repos> DAV svn # path to your repo here SVNPath /var/www/svn/repos   AuthType Basic AuthName "Subversion… Continue reading Installing Subversion on CentOS – be careful what you read

Apple, and to a lesser extent, Microsoft, go out of their way to make sharing music painful – even in the simple case of sharing a playlist of songs with your buddy (which clearly falls under Fair Use!). For example, suppose you made a playlist for yourself (of music you own), put it on an… Continue reading Saving out a playlist to share it

It’s my firm belief that the bloated, horrible software that is iTunes will ultimately be the downfall of Apple’s music business. It’s really, really awful on a variety of fronts (performance, openness to outside developers, etc.), but is sadly the most reliable way I can get music onto my iPhone and iPod. Beyond that, I… Continue reading The best way to get a playlist onto an iPod or iPhone