Author: Abdullah Yahya

Recently, I needed to run php from the command line on Windows. I had php in my PATH but when I ran the command, an alert window popped up saying “php.exe is not a valid win32 application.”. In my terminal / command line, the response I got was “Access Denied.” Somehow, the php.exe file size become 0 bytes. To fix this, I just overwrote that file with the original php.exe file (60 KB) and reran the command and it worked.

If you get this error, check the file size of your exe.

When developing websites, sometimes (unfortunately), not all assets, such as images, are available. In this case, you can use placeholder images using a service at www.placehold.it. For example, to insert an 350 px wide by 150 px high image, you use the following code:

<img src=”http://placehold.it/350×150″>

Below is how the placeholder image looks

You can also change the color of the image and add text to it dynamically. More information at www.placehold.it

• PhoneGap
• Steroids.js
• Trigger.io

Recently I needed to have a script have access to a file but I kept getting a “permission denied” error. Windows permissions is confusing compared to Linux permissions but here’s one way to force a file folder be accessible by “Everyone”. Right click on the file/folder and click the Security tab and follow the screenshot below.

I’ve been looking for a good book on data center network design and infrastructure architecture which includes a thorough yet not boring explanation of load balancing, clusters, caching and proxy servers, firewalls, and SSL. I also want a book that includes, most importantly, diagrams to make it easy to see the flow of information and where things are relative to each other. After much research, I have found the book titled “Data Center Fundamentals” to be pretty much exactly what I’ve been looking for, even though it was published in 2003.

The book can be purchased from Amazon or you can Google “data center fundamentals PDF” and download a free PDF of the book.

As a developer, I spend most of my time writing HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP. But, every now and then, I need to SSH into a linux server and run commands on the command line. What I hate, though, is having to remember all of these commands which I just don’t use that often. Recently, I came across a web-based GUI for most Linux systems. It’s called Webmin and is an actively maintained projects. With it, you can perform Linux system administration from a website interface and your changes will update the actual files as if you updated them manually.

To learn more, go to http://www.webmin.com

Continue reading Webmin: GUI for Linux System Administration

Recently, I needed to take an Excel CSV file, read it using PHP, loop over each row, and insert each row into a MySQL database. The database was configured to support UTF-8 characters. Unfortunately, the Excel CSV file was not UTF-8-encoded. To figure to the file’s encoding, I opened it in Notepad++ which told me that it was encoded as UCS-2 Little Endian.

I then downloaded iconv which is available for both Unix and Windows and tried to convert the file’s encoding from UCS-2 to UTF-8 which seemed to work. The command I ran was Continue reading Converting Excel CSV File Encoding to UTF-8

When designing a website, the type of font you use can make a big difference in the readability and look of your site. While you can use Font Squirrel to generate web fonts to include in your CSS, you can also get web fonts from

• Google Webfonts (free)
• Adobe Typekit ($2 – $8 / month)

These fonts can be easily included in your website via Javascript.