Get back Acer 3820TG eRecovery / D2D / Alt + F10

The first thing I did after unpacking my Acer laptop, was to wipe it and install a clean version of Windows. Little did I think of creating any restore DVDs; when would I ever need those?

Well, now I did. And after lots of searching I almost succumbed to Acer and order their rescue pack. Good thing I didn't though, since I've now found a solution.

Disclaimer: I do not take responsibility for any data loss or damage that may happen to your devices.

Note: You should first verify that you have the restore partition intact before you proceed. Fire up some partition manager and look for a partition that is ~13 GB, and invisible in Windows Explorer.

1 Sep 2011

Setup logcheck on Ubuntu 10.10

Logcheck is a nifty tool that reads all system and application logs for you, and then send e-mails with reports of anomalies. It makes maintaining a server easier, and therefore increases security.

I couldn't find a guide for installing and setting up on Ubuntu, so I decided to share my notes.

logcheck
13 Feb 2011

Trim unicode/UTF-8 whitespace in PHP

preg_replace('/^[\pZ\pC]+|[\pZ\pC]+$/u', '', $string);

This will effectively remove any weird whitespace characters, control characters and even those pesky Apple logos.

Have a look at the page below for more information on the Unicode characters and regular expressions.

nadeausoftware.com

12 Nov 2010

"2006 - MySQL server has gone away" error when importing with SQLyog

Get this annoying error when importing a database with SQLyog? "There was an error executing the query. [...]". When you click "Open error file..." the real MySQL error is presented: "Error Code: 2006 - MySQL server has gone away".

8 Nov 2010

PHP: Get filename extension with native PHP function

The extension part of the filename, is what typically tells us what type of file it is. A JPEG image may have the filename "image.jpg", where "jpg" is the extension.

Click through to learn how easy it is to extract this with PHP.

13 Sep 2010