Coding: Implementing Alias for Mixpanel in WordPress

I had a bit of trouble implementing Mixpanel’s user tracking in WordPress – some of the functionality needed to be client-side, some server-side. Finally, figured out how to do it. Perhaps this will save you some headache 🙂

Giving SSH/Putty Access to your EC2 instance with AWS

Mayhaps I am slow, but this is how I was finally able to give access to my AWS server to another person:

How to spin up Wikimedia with EC2 and Elastic Storage on Amazon AMI instance

So, recently I spun up a Wikimedia instance on EC2.  More on that soon 🙂  In the meantime, just to leave a record for those also trying:

Spin up an EC2 instance and go to the console.  I spun up the Amazon AMI instance (default)

Use putty to connect (Amazon directions)

PlaceKitty… so brilliant…

www.placekitty.com..  So brilliant…

Relinking users after restore

After restoring, sometimes I found that I have a user in the database, but it’s not linked to a global user.  Found this to work:

sp_change_users_login ‘auto_fix’, ‘SOME_USER’

Oh yeah – I first created the user under the top-most Security folder and then ran this on the specific database.

Found it here.

Clear session data for Facebook server-side when doing FB.logout() on the client

If you log out of FB on the client side using JavaScript:

FB.logout();

And you are running a back-end, where you want to forget FB session (is there a better way?), then you can use the following:

$facebook = new Facebook($fb_config);
$facebook->destroySession();

Yeah…  I know…  stupid easy.  I kept wondering why, despite logging out, I was still pulling FB user id on the client side.

Update: used to do setSession( NULL ), which was wrong…  not sure how I didn’t notice that.  Anyway, destroySession works now.  My apologies.

Learning Ruby

Learning Ruby, using this tutorial (thanks Pascal).  Recently learned about SASS (Seriuosly Awesome StyleSheets).

How to See Who Logged In Using RDC/RDP

This morning something strange happened – I was unable to log onto our server (Windows 2003).  So I wanted to see a history of who logged on using the Remote Desktop Connection (RDC), also called Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP)…  or rather the first uses the latter, but whatever…

To do that, open up Event Viewer, go to the security tab, and filter by event for event ID 528.  Then you can check who logged on  – the logon-type would be 10.

Dev: PHP on IIS, Error 500, Editing PHP.ini

On Win7, dumb problem of being unable to php.ini to enable debugging. Solution: run text editor as administrator.

Dev: Remote SQL Server Access

How to set up access from SQL Server Management Studio to SQL Server 2008 on Winows 2008 with a software firewall?  Make sure to create a rule in the firewall that enables access to sqlservr.exe that is located in the Binn directory of your database.  See this MSFT article, look to “To access a program through the Windows firewall”.  No need to punch through holes for TCP or UDP.