Welcome to My Blog
IT related tech tips since 2006Format Of and Verify an ABN – Ouh a secret puzzle
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...
Tips to using CakePHP 3.x as a ReactJS API backend
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....
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...
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...
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...
Why Toggen?
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...
So if you have been using Google Authenticator to provide your 2 factor login codes. Another, and I believe better option is Authy.com This allows you to install on your phone, and for me my macbook and it backs up to the cloud, allowing restoring and transfer between...
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...
Have I been Pwned
This site https://haveibeenpwned.com/ checks your email address against known data leaks. Just checking some of my older email addresses and both [email protected] and [email protected] are the subjects of pwnage due to me using them to register on a number of...