Al Priest’s Blog

Two tips I gave recently to a colleague just setting out with Disqus. Q. How do I make Disqus comments visible to Google? A. Use the Javascript code snippet Disqus provide as this fetches the comments asynchronously. On your server implement a background task to fetch and cache recent comments from Disqus using the Disqus [...]

I need this with alarming frequency, so here it is. Accessing a remote FTP site through a proxy. ftp://remoteuser%40remotehost:remotepassword@proxyhost/folder

UPDATED: 7/Feb/2011 with comments from Simon Smith. I’ve seen a few examples of people trying to mimic the Google Instant search with their own solution. Most of these have just made them “instant” searches by changing $("#searchButton").click(function(){ …perform actual search… }); to $("#searchButton").keyup(function(){ …perform actual search… }); My gripe is that Instant doesn’t need to [...]

Just been parsing logfiles from our site generated by Akamai with analog. We use COMBINED log format on the Akamai help page, but the default COMBINED log format from analog wasn’t able to parse. Based on info from the analog log format help page the following worked. LOGFORMAT (%s – - [%d/%M/%Y:%h:%n:%j %j] “%j %r [...]

Recently I was asked to investigate a site which wasn’t performing as well as expected. The initial reaction was to look at the code – perhaps our NHibernate mappings were eagerly fetching too much data, perhaps we’re not caching enough, etc. Then I stopped and remembered the database. I found that the table structure and [...]

public static class FileSizeExtensions { [DllImport("Shlwapi.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Auto)] public static extern long StrFormatByteSize(long fileSize, [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPTStr)] StringBuilder buffer, int bufferSize); public static string DisplayAsByteSize(this long filesize) { StringBuilder sbBuffer = new StringBuilder(20); StrFormatByteSize(filesize, sbBuffer, 20); return sbBuffer.ToString(); } }

In 2008 I started running with the BBC Running Club after the squash club at work closed. Late 2009 I found I had a place in the London Marathon, and the training started. Up until that point i’d been measuring my distance in kilometres, my maximum weekly distance was 12km and my longest single run [...]

Like a lot of people i’ve pondered the ‘killer app’ over a pint, but these days i’m coming to the conclusion that everything has been invented, duplicated, and cloned to death. So rather than inventing new apps, i’ve been pondering the idea of making the apps become location – or familiarity – sensitive. Combine this [...]

Or, how to convert a jagged result set into a CSV from within MS SQL server (2005+): CREATE FUNCTION dbo.GetKeywordList(@VideoModuleID uniqueidentifier) RETURNS VARCHAR(Max) AS BEGIN DECLARE @csv VARCHAR(MAX) SELECT @csv = COALESCE(@csv + ‘, ‘, ”) + Term FROM keyword k INNER JOIN VideoModuleKeyword vmk ON k.id = vmk.keywordid W HERE vmk.videomoduleid=@VideoModuleID RETURN @csv END [...]

The recent ‘Take 2′ Apple TV update has saved the small square box under my telly from EBay. 1080p output, rental HD movies, and now streaming internet radio have given it a real lease of life. Now I realise that it’s meant to be just a media extender, but as it’s just a Mac under [...]