James McDonald

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Blog History

CakePHP 3 Database Migrations

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...

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Bali Nov-Dec 2017

Bali Nov-Dec 2017

This year we went to Bali. My observations: The Instagram brand building culture makes people pose for photos in increasingly awkward positions. It's entertaining to watch as beautiful people contort and genuflect to get the next morsel for their social media...

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Tips on Testing SMTP on Port 25 and 465

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...

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Why is my Business named Toggen?

Recently I renamed my IT Business to "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...

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Poor Mans Service Monitoring

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...

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