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After a long time looking for an application that would allow me to manage the vast amounts of tasks I have to deal with every day, I never found one that suited my needs so well and offered me as much potential as Podio.

And I tried so far. From the first ones I looked at many years ago, like Egroupware, dotProject, ]project-open or Feng Office, to the much more powerful and evolved Redmine, Teambox, Confluence and Jira, Zyncro, Basecamp or Asana, there are many tools I squeezed in search of the ultimate solution to my needs in time, files and links management, information sharing, group communication and team collaboration.

Those who use the tool KeePassX (KeePass clone for Linux and Mac OS X) to safely save passwords and login details at one single place will have seen many times on the need for rapid access to their repository of passwords with a single click. However, by default when accessing KeePassX none repository is open, or one is open that does not correspond to the one we want to check, so often it’s necessary to browse the file system to locate and select the corresponding file. If in addition to a master password we use a key file to improve security, we have to repeat the same process over and over again to locate and select the key file.

I am looking for freelance PHP programmers with initiative and entrepreneurial spirit to help me, first, take on the surplus of projects that my clients request to me and I can’t accept due to lack of time. On the other hand, but not least important, I would like to find reliable people to form a strong team to undertake and develop some projects I have in mind and others that someone may propose.

Regarding the first scenario, I would like to establish a collaborative relationship in which I would be the interface to the customer and you would perform the analysis and programming tasks that I entrusted after reaching an agreement on the economic conditions of each job, although I ideally would establish a general fee of €X per hour reviewable if any particular case might arise. I’m also a programmer, so you will always have the help and support you need from me to carry out assigned projects. If collaboration in this first stage is successful, I will love to develop the second stage with you.

After subscribing a new VPS server from my hosting provider, I found that although I could access to Plesk control panel properly, I was unable to access MySQL with the same admin’s user and password as used in Plesk. As a result, I couldn’t do anything with the database from the command line or in any other way. So I decided to manually change the admin user’s password via the mysql shell. After making such change I could perfectly log in to MySQL, but nevertheless the Plesk control panel stopped working, throwing the following exception:

In certain versions of ImageMagick there is a problem (probably due to a bug) when trying to convert or manipulate an image either from the command line (convert command) or through one of the many API’s available (for example PHP). The CPU usage suddenly grows beyond 100% (because this problem occurs on multiprocessor systems) and the system becomes extremely slow. Apart from this high CPU load, the conversion process also gets blocked, never reaching to the end. This occurs even with small images of few kilobytes.

The simplest and shortest method to measure the number of processors present on a Linux box, which is also widely extended as it’s part of coreutils is:

Another way to get the same result which also allows us to obtain additional information from our processor are the lscpu command:

Or we can examine the cpuinfo file from /proc filesystem:

There are many additional details about these processors in /proc/cpuinfo file, including the CPU model and number of cores:

This post shows how to perform a partial or full backup of MySQL databases using only PHP code. This is very useful for example when a client doesn’t provide you with access data to the database of a web application and you only have an FTP connection available, or when you do have the connection data to the database but you can’t access it through the network (only available from localhost) and you can’t use tools like mysqldump to back up the information you need because you don’t have privileges for this, or simply because you have no access to a shell to which connect and run commands.

Google goes one step further with its Google Maps service and adds an aerial 3D view to the popular «Get directions» tool which indicates the best route between two or more geographic locations.

With this new view we can take a virtual tour from the air and watch our chosen path and the landforms that we will go through with an amazing level of detail that will allow us to view even the present buildings on our way.

Despite interacting with the Internet and the blogosphere since its inception, I never before decided to write my own blog.

I’ve been following lots of journals for many years and leaving my contributions in the form of comments or observations. Similarly I participate in numerous forums and debates offering and requesting help in many different disciplines. And of course I also contribute by writing occasional articles from time to time, as in the case of Gretur Viajes travel blog.