The future of this blog

I know I haven't been blogging lately, but due to time constraints I can't find enough time for long post. That's why I've been trying out Twitter lately and I must say I like it. You can follow me on Twitter under the nickname planetsizebrain.

However this blog isn't exactly dead. Whenever I encounter something interesting in the future that's worth blogging about and that can't be expressed in a tweet, I'll be posting it here on the blog.

Authenticated downloads using WGET

Today I needed to download an Adobe Livecyle ES 2 trial version directly to a headless Amazon EC2 instance. So I wanted to use wget and for most downloads, direct downloads this is pretty easy: wget http://www.somesite.com/download.zip. The problem I had, was that you need to be logged into the Adobe site to be able to download the trial. The login basically means that cookies are created and because wget supports cookies I just needed a way to capture the cookies in the correct format to some file on disk.

This can be easily done using the Firefox Cookie Exporter add-on. I just needed to open the Adobe site in Firefox, log in and click Tools > Export Cookies... . This will save all the current cookies to a file on disk. This file can then be used together with the --load-cookies switch present in wget to submit all the cookies present in the file when doing a web request.

Find and replace in MySQL

This week I needed to do some find and replace on a column value in a MySQL table. I had a table that contained a column of the form name (id) and I needed to replace the id part with a fixed value.

When I started looking into a solution I found that MySQL supports regular expressions, but sadly enough they aren't supported in the replace statement. Since I hadn't got a lot of time I had to do it quick and dirty by looking up the positions of the parentheses and then use those positions in combination with the substring function. That resulted in the following query:

UPDATE table SET column = REPLACE(column, SUBSTRING(column, LOCATE('(', column), LOCATE(')', column) - LOCATE('(', column) + 1), 'newvalue')

Just replace table, column and newvalue with the correct values and you're good to go. It also might be a good idea to try the query first in the following form just to be safe, as this won't change anything yet:

SELECT column, REPLACE(column, SUBSTRING(column, LOCATE('(', column), LOCATE(')', column) - LOCATE('(', column) + 1), 'newvalue') FROM table