Mark Sanborn . net

Let’s say you are working on an important email, document, or a critical website bug and your computer suddenly crashes and wont boot up. You have to get this work done right away what do you do? With a live CD you can be up and running in two minutes with the tools you need (…)

Frameworks seem to be popping up all over the place for all sorts of languages. These frameworks all have one goal. They are looking to reduce development time. Time is money and when you are working on client’s sites frameworks can drastically reduce the development time. For this reason frameworks are not going away any (…)

Email addresses are one of trickiest input types to validate because there are multiple ways emails can be written according to the RFC2822 specification. You could have me@gmail.com, or me+spam@gmail.com, or “mark@server”@marksanborn.net, common on Linux/BSD systems. A lot of times people will use a regular expression like: (\w+@[a-zA-Z_]+?\.[a-zA-Z]{2,6}) This regular expression would work for almost (…)

Ever wonder how websites can tell you made a mistake entering your credit card number before you even submit it? Like most identification numbers credit cards have checksum digits built into them. Just like barcodes. If you ever look at a EAN-13 UPC barcode (on all retail products) you will notice there is a digit (…)

Well for the short answer all you have to do is ask your self this simple question. Would you give your mail, credit cards and other personal information to a complete stranger? Probably not. By connecting to someone else’s internet connection you are giving them complete control over the data that you send from your (…)

Flash doesn’t come with Ubuntu by default so we need to install if for all of our browsers if we want to view any sites that have flash. Adobe provides an easy deb installation file to install it for browsers like Firefox but not Opera. Although the package from Adobe doesn’t automatically install flash for (…)

When learning regular expressions it is helpful to be able to quickly test regular expression patterns. It doesn’t really matter which proramming language you use to build it but I will give you two examples, one in Perl and one in PHP. If you are new to regular expressions first check out, Learning Regular Expressions (…)

SVN is one of those things that you love once you know what and how it works. SVN is a version control system used by almost all major open source projects and is an absolute dream to work with. If you have ever worked with a team of developers you probably have had the experience (…)