Get your Cell C data sim cell number from phone

Just fire off *147*100# and you will get back some data which includes your cell number.

How do you bounce a server when your not behind your desk…?

I had this situation today… a staging server went wonky to the extent that I couldn’t ssh in. Luckily I have an iPhone so I could reboot the VPS via my hosting providers web based control panel, which I have to say has been rock solid. Over the last 3 years I had only 4 outages basically 99.99 uptime.

So my question is can’t we have an url to reboot the server that we can bookmark? Something that will authenticates me and kicks of the reboot same as if I did it via the control panel.

Let me know your thoughts I’m very curious.

Restore a MySQL backup directly from a gzipped archive

Sometimes it’s handy to restore a backup without first having to gunzip it.

gunzip < dump.sql.gz | mysql -u username --password=password databasename

Amend your last commit message in Git

Sometimes the fingers are ahead of the brain and you need amend your last git commit message.

git commit --amend -m "your new message"

Dump MySQL database to a file

The below will backup the database databasename on localhost

mysqldump --add-drop-table -u username -p databasename | gzip -c > archivename.sql.gz

Formatting dates in JasperReports

You can quickly format dates for use in JasperReports titles etc using an expression as follows

"Graph title expression " +
new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy/MM/dd").format($F{date_field})

Quick an dirty word count using sql

Here’s a quick and dirty way to get the word count of a column with space separated text. The below code counts the number of words in the description column of the article table.

select length(description) - length(replace(description, ' ', ''))+1
from article

Create MySQL database with UTF8 character set

CREATE DATABASE dbname CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;