Friends

How many Mark Blaszczyk’s are there?

This is crazy, I have just done a google search for my name, Mark Blaszczyk, and found a few of them, some work in IT, others were in Beverly Hills Cop movies, one does Marathon runs, and I’ve found a few on facebook also. I remember in Primary school and high school thinking that my last name is quite unique, people always struggling to pronounce it etc.

This may be a long shot, but if your name is Mark Blaszczyk or Marek Blaszczyk and you have just googled your name, get in contact and we should make some sort of Mark Blaszczyk’s world domination or something.

If you have found this page by searching for, i guess, “our” last name, feel free to join I created on facebook group named Blaszczyk, so far at the time of writing this it has 28 members in it.

You know if your last name is Blaszczyk when….

1. You’re asked how to pronounce your last name every time you spell it..
2. When spelling the name over the phone or to someone else they always muddle up the SZ and the CZ.
3. You have 5 different variations of your last name come to the same letter box.
4. Telemarketers pause when they get up to the s.
5. You abbreviate your last name to Blah.
6. You’re asked what nationality that last name is from.
7. You get annoyed when people try to pronounce your last name and get it completely incorrect even after you tell them.
8. You run out of room when writing your last name on forms.
9. people are amazed that it’s 9 letters long and only one vowel.

Filed under: random - No Pointless Response

PHP Round number to Nearest X

I did a few google searches on rounding numbers using PHP, unfortunately the only thing I could find is the round() function that doesn’t allow you to round to the nearest specified number.

Enjoy.

Filed under: code - 4 Pointless Responses

Regular Expressions made easy

one thing I can definately say I hate, is regular expression syntax, I do however like what Regular Expressions can do. In a quest to search for an easier better way of assembling regular expressions syntax I’ve stumbled across an awesome website named http://www.txt2re.com/

At first glimpse this website looks a bit complicated, but say we have an example string <a href=”foo.com/whatever”>blah</a>, and we want to extract the domain name, it’s as easy as entering the string, clicking Show Matches, and using the color coded chart to find the FDQN (full qualified domain name).

The beauty of this website is that it also generates the code required for you, they have a selection of a wide range of snippets including Perl, PHP, Python, Java, Javascript, ColdFusion, C, C++, Ruby, VB, VBScript, J#.net, C#.net ,C++.net, VB.net .. Nice.  At the end of the day I can just get on with my programming.

Filed under: code - No Pointless Response

Solaris locked user

I came across a problem under solaris with mysql+PAM authentication where when creating a user via useradd, it locks them out by adding *LK* in /etc/shadow, shadow entries with NP worked fine.

once the user is created, type passwd -N username_here

you will now notice that /etc/shadow will have NP insted of *LK*.

Filed under: Solaris - No Pointless Response

Internet, not Innernet, you crazy Americans!

Is it just me or do all Americans pronounce the Internet innernet. I hear it over the radio/TV/youtube everywhere, am I missing something here? is the T silent? this upsets me because at times I wonder if there is another Internet named Innernet, are there two different giant networks? one that I’ve never visited before? is the internet as I know it just a layer in a multiverse like multinet?

It would be great if someone could clear this up for me.

Filed under: I don't get it. - No Pointless Response

I guess I should introduce myself to the internet.

well, hello, my name is Mark and like many people who blog I work in the IT industry. My earliest memory of operating a computer would of been the Atari with the strange function keys, I can remember sitting in my brothers room while he was either programming or playing random games, it wasn’t long after that when my brother got the Amiga 500, this is where I familiarized myself with computers and got given a copy of AMOS to learn how to program with..

The first bootable application I wrote was to test joysticks and make sure all the directions and buttons worked, lame, yeah maybe, but I was in the 4th-5th grade when I done this and was rather proud of myself at the time. I also picked up on how to use the action replay card on the Amigas, which basically intercepted the CPU and we could directly access the memory space, this was fantastic for finding the memory location where your lives are kept in games, this sort of reverse engineering had fascinated me.

I first accessed the internet back around 1994-95 using an amiga 4000, with netscape navigator to surf yahoo.com. Damn, if only I registered a few domains back in those days, I could retire now just by holding on to them, i wonder what google would of been called if that was already taken.

Anyway, life moves on slowly but surely, I may one day fill in the gaps between then and the present, but to sum up till today, I’ve now been programming/sysadmin/networking and security as a profession which keeps things interesting, and I am hoping to use this blog to capture bits and peices that inspire me to keep going in IT, and jot down anything else that’s on my mind.

Filed under: Uncategorized - No Pointless Response

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Filed under: Uncategorized - 1 Pointless Response