It goes without saying that anybody who has ever done open source development has heard of phpMyAdmin – a tool that lets you manipulate MySQL databases through a web interface.
What may be less known is that phpMyAdmin comes with a variety of features that aren’t enabled by default.
Back in April, Twitter quietly released the Sign in with Twitter feature allowing account owners to log in to 3rd party websites. Even though Facebook has offered the same service (Facebook Connect) for well over a year, Twitter’s solution remains the easiest to implement.
If you are looking for a fast way to implement a membership system without the hassle of programming a registration and login module, Sign in with Twitter may be your best bet. Not only will you be saving development time, but in the long run you may actually get a lot more members than with a normal registration form.
A couple of days ago Chris needed a way to see how a particular client was interacting with a server. Obviously there are numerous ways to do this, but I was curious how easy it would be to implement something similar with a quick netcat command. Sure enough after a little bit of fiddling I was able to produce exactly what he needed.
nc -l -p 12345 < pipe | tee outgoing.log | nc server 12345 | tee pipe incoming.log
Now this may seem a little cryptic so I’m going to dissect each portion to explain how it works. Keep in mind the “pipe” references an actual pipe. You can make a FIFO pipe by running “mkfifo pipe” or “mknod pipe p” – the former is the most usual way. If you’re not familiar with named pipes I recommend reading up on them before continuing with this post as you may get a little confused.
nc -l -p 12345 < pipe
This portion simply has netcat listen on port 12345 and send anything from the pipe to the connected client. If you’re not familiar with the pipes think of it as a simple file with the word “hello” in it. When someone were to successfully connect to the netcat instance it would send the “hello” to the client.