An accessible introduction to PHP optimization
2009-09-08 01:09 by Ian
This was a ticket that I had from a customer who wanted us to increase the upper-limit on PHP script execution because his crappy script wouldn’t finish in time before our server-wide limit shut down his PHP process.
I’m posting it with the hope that it will be of help to someone new to PHP trying to write a cleaner script.
Cloning CompactFlash Cards using WinHex
2009-07-05 15:16 by Ian
A procedure for making byte-for-byte copies of CF cards. Written while working at a camera repair shop that needed this capability, but it’s also useful for lifting partitions from a development system using a conventional hard drive and dropping them onto a CF card for operation in a finished condition (after appropriate edits).
Hand Replacement of large non-BGA surface-mount IC's
2009-07-05 15:12 by Ian
This is another procedure I wrote while doing camera repair. Occasionally, there was an identifiable chip that would go bad, but which replacement was considered impossible at our small shop. The alternative was replacing the entire PCB that it was mounted on, which would be an order of magnitude more expensive.
My first custom MediaServer
2009-05-16 03:04 by Ian
This was the first serious media server I built. I built it into a home-made acrylic case.
Recovering data from a damaged hard drive
2008-12-30 05:32 by Ian
Recovering data from a damaged hard drive is like rebuilding shattered glassware without knowing what it originally looked like.
Mounting a MySQL database from a ram drive in slackware
2008-12-27 22:49 by Ian
My little 1GHz VIA EPIA board now runs a DB that will saturate the NIC. By running the database from files located in a RAM drive, hard drive speed is no longer a limiting factor in database performance.