Office 2007 MIME Types

I recently had to code a little web application that would interface with a MySQL database and display data on a webpage via PHP MySQL queries. The application had to support many international languages – the most difficult of which to deal with was Russian. Many forums suggested changing my character encoding to CP-1251, which is a standard Russian encoding in Windows. I needed support for all international languages, though, and using multiple character encodings wasn’t a headache I wanted to get myself into. It turns out that you can display all these characters using a UTF-8 encoding, provided you get the PHP and MySQL right.  Read on to find out how to display Russian and other languages with PHP and MySQL.

I recently had to export a database with over 50MM rows, and while I love using PHPMyAdmin for most database operations, the tool’s export functionality tends to crap out on larger data sets.  This article outlines how to export a large MySQL database (with compression to save space!).

I recently found myself with the need to connect to a Mongo DB instance from a PHP application running on Amazon EC2.  The PHP docs led me to this MongoDB extension, which seemed to be a good fit for my needs.  Still, the matter of installation was a little bit less clear, considering that the EC2 instance was pretty barebones and lacked a fair number of the “standard” libraries that would enable this single line installation to work.

After a bit of finagling, I got everything to work via the steps I’ve outlined below.