Email validation in php

eregi("^[_a-z0-9-]+(\.[_a-z0-9-]+)*@[a-z0-9-]+(\.[a-z0-9-]+)*(\.[a-z]{2,3})$", $email)

low level formatting in linux

Source: http://tldp.org/LDP/LGNET/issue37/tag/38.html


dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda

... to wipe out the whole first IDE drive, or

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

... to wipe out the whole first SCSI drive.

Actually you could just blow away one sector on these drives using

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda count=1

It wouldn't make sense to do this to other drives (/dev/hdb, /dev/hdc, /dev/sdb, etc) since their boot sectors aren't referenced as code and you can reformat those drives with normal DOS or Linux commands to re-make your filesystems on them. However, you can issue this command for all of your drives if you like. In fact you should be able to do something like:

for i in a b c d; do
 dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hd$i
done

... to get four IDE drives or

for i in a b c d e f g ; do
 dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hd$i
done

... to wipe out all seven disks on a SCSI chain.

select maximum value from an auto increment field

$table_name = "jos_menu";
$resultset = mysql_query("desc $table_name");
while($a = mysql_fetch_assoc($resultset))
{
if($a["Extra"] == "auto_increment"){
$query = "SELECT max(".$a["Field"].") as auto from $table_name";
$resultset1 = mysql_query($query);
$answer = mysql_fetch_assoc($resultset1);
die($answer["auto"]);
break;
}
}

Note: It can be done just by subtracting 1 from the current Auto_increment value in a table. But, I never found this justifiable because what if the last row is deleted.

DGC Modem installation

I tried my internal modem in MSI VR420 Notebook. I could not do configure that goddam thing.

So, I burrowed an USB Fax Modem and installed it.

It was a DGC Modem type so, for my ubuntu pc of 2.6.24-16 Kernel Version
This was the Almighty http://www.linuxant.com/drivers/dgc/downloads-ubuntu-x86.php

Then very easy process.
Unzip the file
sudo dpkg -i dgcmodem_{version,etc}.deb
sudo /usr/sbin/dgcconfig

then dmesg produces good logs

and finally wvdial connects with modem /dev/modem

WOW

Flash for linux

Two tools I found available to use here for Linux.

Flasm
Haxe

Have not explored properly, will post more if found any more.

Sound in MSI VR 420 Laptop

After I bought my first laptop MSI VR 420 with genuine Vista installed, I installed Kubuntu 8.04 Hardy. Everything one fine except the sound was not working.

dmesg produced this error

hda_codec: Unknown model for ALC883, trying auto-probe from BIOS..

... ... ...
lots of headaches
... ... ....

And finally,
This was how I made it working.

modprobe -r snd_hda_intel
modprobe snd_hda_intel model=3stack-dig

And it worked.

The first thing I played was
http://www.meronepalma.com/song/425

Pass Sessions between subdomains in php

If needed to be able to pass session data between subdomains, add the following to the php.ini file.

session.cookie_domain = .mydomain.com

If unable to modify the the php.ini file, add the following before the session.start() function on any page which creates the session cookie.

ini_set("session.cookie_domain", ".mydomain.com")