Strav's blog

On my work PC, Cygwin was taking a significant time (minutes) to start programs. The fix for me was to ensure the cygserver process was running.

On occasion, I need to replace strings in entire database columns. 

Here is how to do it in MySQL (reference link1 link2):

UPDATE
    table_name
SET
    column_name = REPLACE(column_name, 'text to find', 'text to replace with')
WHERE
    column_name LIKE '%text to find%';

Here is how to do it in SQL Server (reference link):

update my_table
set path = replace(path, 'oldstring', 'newstring')

While editing a file in vi, in order to paste the contents of another file at the current location type:

:r filename_to_paste

There are several ways to open files in Perl and it seems that there are many opinions on the best way to do so. I've looked into it a bit and I believe that I'm going to use the three-argument version of open going forward.

open (my $filename_fh, '<', $filename);

As stated in the linked page, benefits include:

• Perl will open files even if they contain file operation (< > |) characters
• The scalar file handle ends in _fh so it should be obvious it is a file handle everywhere
• The file handle should be meaningful
• The file handle will be cleaned up automatically if it goes out of scope

Since I got my first Sonos device, I wanted to be able to play music from my Plex server. Unfortunately, due to the way Sonos issues the network requests, it didn't work properly. I use pfSense for my router and tried a number of workarounds but the one that finally worked was this one:

In the pfSense Plex NAT firewall rule (pfSense->Firewall->NAT->Port Forward->Edit) change the NAT reflection setting to "Enable (NAT + Proxy).