This is a quick and very basic crash course for someone new to Linux administration. The following commands should get you through navigating files and simply finding your way around the operating system.

One option that might be useful if you are stuck is to follow a command with –help. This will display the help page for that command if you have the correct command.

It’ll show you any requirements when running that command, or show you extra options.

Linux Crash Course

thought that it would be useful to inform my visitors of a neat little program that you might find useful.

I like working on my computer with a movie or video in the background, but flicking between screens means that it’s a hassle to keep the movie windows on top.

 allows you to quickly keep a window on top with a simple shortcut.

This program requires no installation, it’s a simple .exe that runs straight away.

A very neat bit of program that allows you to keep your selected window on top while you flick between Explorer, your web browser and your email.

Windows 7 Keep On Top

Ok, so the title may not explain what this post is about, but hopefully it covers the basics.

Recently I have been rewriting a website, adding smarted code and classes. One of the new features I have added is 

. While this in itself is not new, it was new to this project.

One page contained a form with a collection of Checkboxes. They were converted to use the Jquery UI format, as shown in the code below:

Hopefully, you can understand the above, it’s not doing much, basically, it’s part of a PHP loop which is looping through some results and creating a checkbox for each one. 

 is a PHP variable which contains a unique name for each one.

Toggle Jquery UI Checkbox Array

A couple of times I have had to deal with images in my code. Recently I had a project that needed the user to upload an image, which then needed to be scaled down to fit an area. Below I detail the calculations that I used.

For this demonstration, we will be using an image with a pixel size of 300 x 320. We want to scale it down to an image size of 155 x 200. This size would allow us to scale an image for a regular passport image of 35mm x 45mm.

The first thing you need to do is work out which side will be scaled down the most. Use the following to work out the percentage of the scale.

Now we can see that the Height is bigger than the width percentage-wise.

Calculations To Scale An Image

Below is a script to allows you to run a precheck function in Javascript, preventing the form from being submitted if you detect a problem.

First, in a separate, external Javascript file, copy the below script:

The above code is checking a checkbox value in the sent form to see if it has been selected. If it has, then we are okay to submit the form, otherwise, it displays the message box.

Now we need to tell the form to run this function instead of the normal submit.

Pre Check Form Before Submit

Selecting a range from a table is easy in MYSQL. Say you want to bring back results that you are paginating. Bringing back thousands of results is inefficient and needless.

MS SQL there isn’t a simple way of doing this. The best way I have found, or my colleague Daniel has found, is to wrap a select statement inside another statement.

Above is our full statement returning all our results. First, we need to add a row number which will allow us to know the result's position.

Select a Range in MS SQL

Just a quick SQL tip that I have been using recently, and is aimed mainly at MS SQL, but I cant see any reason why this wouldn’t work on MY SQL, except for the fact the MY SQL has easier Backup facilities.

The background for this is that I was making changes to a table, but wanted a backup of the latest version. Microsoft makes it ridiculously complicated to back up individual tables and restore them, and I didn’t have time to read manuals or try out third-party software.

The script below simply takes the entire table selected and copies it under a new name, giving you both tables to compare and rename/restore with ease.

I have since used this script several times and seems an easy way of making sure you don’t ruin a perfectly good table!

Quick SQL Copy Table

I recently had a problem while creating a list of players for a project. I needed to list them in a certain order based on their position.

I knew there were only 4 possible positions, but wanted them returned in the order of GK, DEF, MID and STK.

I managed to find two ways of doing this which I will demonstrate below.

The first way was to use an Order by. The script below orders the table first by my Custom order, and then by the ID Number field.

SQL Custom Order

I recently reloaded my computer and had to figure out how to add Camera Raw to Photoshop CS3. This should help you with whatever version you are using.

Firstly, you will need to download the Camera Raw, and a list of versions can be found on the 

. For versions above CS3, I think you can just download the installer and it will do everything for you. If not, follow my instructions which I used for CS3.

I found out that the latest version to work with CS3 was 4.6. So I downloaded the DLL. You will need to check to see which dll will work with your version, may be a bit of trial and error. Photoshop will complain about the plugin if you have an incompatible version. The newer versions allow for newer cameras.

Make sure that Photoshop is closed, and then navigate to c:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Plug-Ins\CS3\File Formats. Rename the Camera Raw dll in this directory by adding .old to the end.

Now open up the zip file you downloaded from Adobe which contains the dll and copy this across to the folder that contained the original (the folder in the step above).

My programming musings that nobody else reads

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