James McDonald

Just discovered it's not just Credit Cards and Barcodes that have validity check digits and algorithms FIrstly an ABN (Australian Business Number) is formatted XX XXX XXX XXX e.g 84 008 812 322 The ABR website has the information on how to calculate the validity of an...

Information for React I found useful https://auth0.com/blog/secure-your-react-and-redux-app-with-jwt-authentication/ this had a sample project that showed how to setup redux and react and explains the redux ecosystem of store, actions, action creators, reducers etc....

You have a database with a heap of tables already running. You want to start from that base and then be able to migrate from that running database through the addition of new fields and then migrate those changes to your production database Here is how I believe you...

When testing your login using AUTH PLAIN if your passwords starts with a number you need to use a \000 instead of \0 other wise you will always get an error as the base64 encoded string will be wrong printf 'username\0username\0001234567pwd' | mmencode perl...

Recently I rebadged my IT Business as Toggen after trading as "James McDonald IT Services" or JMITS for short. It took a long time to find a name that wasn't being used, and also had some resonance for me personally. So why Toggen? After wracking my brain for a couple...

This script is run from windows task scheduler every X minutes (whatever you want to set it to). It looks for a running process, in this case Yokogawa FastTools rdcy.exe and if found checks for and deletes a file on disk named "skip". If it doesn't find rdcy.exe...

Just started looking at http://www.trumethods.com/ One thing I've noticed regarding the business of Information Technology is that you can be excellent technically but you will not have an opportunity to use the skills you have unless the organisation you work for can...

Back to Exetel after a couple of years with Tel$tra Unlimited and approx 30$ a month cheaper with a fixed IP  

I am moving my blog under my business domain toggen.com.au. For years I have blogged at jamesmcdonald.id.au but want to move everything under the one umbrella so to speak. I've had a couple of names for this blog The Telarah Times, The Shouthern IT Observer but now...

Q: How long does a Gmail to GSuite Email Migration Take? A: A very very long time. 5+ GB can take over a week Just moving 2.45GB of my email out of a free Google Apps account with a custom domain to a new G Suite account and 5.56GB of email from my wifes account. The...

This script run from cron will keep 7 days of backups in S3 overwriting as needed. Your cron entry will look like 22 18 * * * /path/to/the/script/backup.sh #!/bin/bash cd `dirname $0` DIR_ROOT=/var/www WEB_DIRS=`ls -1 $DIR_ROOT` DAY=`date +%a`...

Background: Created an EC2 instance with a 40GB hard drive, realized that I wouldn't need that size and seeing that the EBS pricing for my region is $0.12 per GB-month of provisioned storage I was paying for 32GB of unneeded space. So I thought to myself I should...

Fedora 26 comes with Postbooks 4.10.1 (Fedora 25 had 4.10.0) so you need to upgrade your Postbooks database when you move to F26. But the Updater application errors out with missing libraries. So the answer is to run it on Ubuntu 14.04 as a Virtual Box Guest Other...