Ever purchase a 1TB hard drive and find yourself disappointed when it showed up under ‘My Computer’ as 931GiB? If so, you may not have really understood why and felt cheated by the manufacturer. However, there is a simple and innocent reason for this. Computers evaluate numbers on a different base than humans. As human […]
Author Archives: Nicholas Pier
MySQL DB Backup Script
The following is a bash shell script which I wrote to backup all databases on a MySQL server. It’s fairly simple to implement. First step is to fill in the necessary arguments in the commented region of the header. You will need: The name of a MySQL user account with sufficient privileges to perform a […]
Java Normal Probability Approximation Method
Recently, I’ve decided that I want to write my own statistics package in Java (I’m too bored for my own good). Originally, I wanted to write my own classes to handle the probability calculations under curves. However, this became a bit much when it came time to do f and student-T distributions. As such, I […]
Subnet Calculator and NetTrain.com
I was recently contacted by the owner the website, NetTrain.com, and asked to further develop my Subnet Calculator (mentioned in previous posts) from a WordPress template page to a full-blown plugin. NetTrain provides technical training to individuals seeking to acquire various Cisco Certifications. Thanks to their funding, I was able to allot time and convert the php code […]
Securing phpMyAdmin on Ubuntu 10.04
This will be the first in a number of tutorials which I plan to post regarding IT topics and solutions to problems which I run into both in a business environment and personal tinkering. I currently run a Linux home server for the purpose of website development and testing prior to making content available online. […]
Subnet Calculator
Recently, I’ve decided to begin working toward the CCNP certification and have required significant review of CCNA material. As such, in order to review some of the subnet math, I decided to write a subnet calculator in PHP. I’ve spent most of today working on it and hopefully it works well in all cases. However, […]
Steam XML Parser
As mentioned in a previous post, I’ve developed a WordPress plug-in to display a user’s Steam Stats as a widget. It’s available for download here. However, this does no good to anyone without a WordPress-based-site and I wanted to make the source freely available. As such, I’ve included it below. Valve provides Steam profiles as […]
Steam WordPress Plugin / Widget
Today I completed my very first WordPress Plugin to display a user’s Steam Gameplay Stats. To those unfamiliar with Steam, steam is a windows community application for video gaming. It allows users to store and purchase titles from many different publishers online and also offers an excellent community element to chat, browse the web and […]
Cisco CCNA Certified
Today I passed my Cisco CCNA exam with a score of 917 / 1000 which has left me incredibly content! The whole Cisco course has really taught me a lot about networking and I am pleased to have accepted it as a challenge. Furthermore, I did all of this a month before my goal of […]
Cisco CCENT Certified
I’m pleased to post that yesterday I passed the Cisco ICND1 exam with a score of 916 / 1000 ! This places me closer to my short term goal of obtaining the CCNA certification by Thanksgiving and in the meantime attributes me with the Cisco CCENT certification.