Aaron Toponce has documented a way to overwrite sensitive data on a hard drive that is fast and gives you a running progress meter.
Monthly Archives: April 2011
How to Backup Placemarks in Google Maps
Google doesn’t give you a link to export placemarks that you add to a saved map, but you can change the ‘output’ parameter in the iframe URL from ’embed’ to ‘kml’ to download an XML file with all of the map details, including the placemarks and custom icons. I got an error when trying to […]
Software Bloat
“A Printer driver is a folder with one ‘.ini’ file, and a couple of ‘.dll’s and that’s it. It is not a 50 MB download. It is not an IE Toolbar, and Side Pane. It is not half-baked photo software. It is not a splash screen when your computer starts. It is not a tray icon.” – Kroc […]
Excessive SEO is Ruining Google Search
Sadly, I have to completly agree with Jeff Atwood’s assessment of the recent decline in the quality of Google search results:
People whose opinions I respect have all been echoing the same sentiment — Google, the once essential tool, is somehow losing its edge. The spammers, scrapers, and SEO’ed-to-the-hilt content farms are winning.
W3Schools Isn’t Official or Accurate
Divya Manian gave a presentation yesterday at WordCamp Seattle about generating proper markup when creating output from plugins, and she mentioned a site called W3Fools.com, which is basically a protest against W3Schools.com. I didn’t realize until I saw W3Fools, but W3Schools isn’t actually ran by the W3C, and it contains a lot of inaccurate information. […]
Choosing a Video Format for the Web
Nettuts+ has a good article detailing the current state of the various video codecs supported by desktop and mobile browsers. Basically, there’s still no single format with universal support; Flash is still the best option for the desktop, and H.264 is the only option for mobile devices. In the future browsers will natively support HTML5’s […]
Determining WordPress Paths and URLs
I often need to include a directory or URL path when writing a theme or plugin, but I can never find all of the different options in one place, so I’m pulling it together from various Codex pages and xref. Constants ABSPATH – /var/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs/ WP_CONTENT_DIR – /var/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs/wp-content WP_CONTENT_URL – http://www.example.com/wp-content WP_PLUGIN_DIR – /var/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs/wp-content/plugins WP_PLUGIN_URL – http://www.example.com/wp-content/plugins TEMPLATEPATH – /var/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs/wp-content/themes/parent-theme STYLESHEETPATH – /var/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs/wp-content/themes/child-theme […]
Using Chained Properties Inside $wpdb->prepare()
If you’re using $wpdb->prepare() to query a custom table, you can’t pass the table name in as an argument because it will be single-quoted, which would be a MySQL syntax error. Instead, you need to insert the variable directly into the double-quoted query string and let PHP parse it out. That creates a new problem, […]