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Recently, while working on a project, I ran into a warning telling me that my “data was truncated for” one of my columns when I was importing a CSV file into one of my SQL tables.
Concerned that I had done something wrong, I Googled for a solution. Unfortunately, I didn’t find any answers there, so I ended up having to find the source of this warning myself.
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One of the more complicated concepts that beginning programmers have trouble grasping is static variables. This is in part because static variables work in a way that is quite opposite to how classes and Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) work.
Since examples work wonders in explaining concepts, here’s a use-case in Java that will help to illustrate the concept. Don’t code in Java? No problem. OOP concepts are (mostly) the same across programming languages.
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In the previous part of this tutorial series, we set up a mail server that could accept connections from mail clients like Gmail. This allowed us to send out domain emails using a mail client, instead of having to implement a mailbox on our server.
With our mail server’s basic functionality properly set up, we can now turn our attention to another problem — email deliverability. Spam email is a really big problem online, so many email providers have some kind of system in place to assess whether an incoming email is spam and either flag it, or reject it. Hence, after setting up our mail server, one thing we need to do is to ensure that our mail server conforms to certain email security standards, policies and protocols. This goes a long way to help us communicate to other mail servers that we are trustworthy, so that our emails will be deliverable.
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In the first part of this series, we set up a basic virtual mail server with Postfix that received emails for our domain and forwarded it to a mailbox of our choice. To round off the basic set of features for our mail server, we will be setting up Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL) to work with Postfix, so that we can access our mail server with a mailbox client (like Gmail) and send out emails from our domain.
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If you own a domain, and are looking to set up email hosting for it, you have a couple of options. You can either:
The former option is cheap, but can be clunky to use and ineffective with blocking spam. The latter option — being specialised services — are generally much more accessible and effective with spam, but cost more.
There’s actually also a third option, and that is:
This means that you have to set up the server and maintain it, but it also means that you can have a cheap and effective mail server, instead of having to choose between one or the other.
In this series of articles, we are going to explore how we can set up a virtual mail server using a Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) called Postfix. This will be a fully-featured mail server, meaning that over the course of these articles, we will be building a mail server that can:
This article is a part of the series:
Creating a Farming RPG (like Harvest Moon) in Unity
Ever wanted to create a game like Harvest Moon in Unity? Check out Part 8 of our guide here, where we go through how to make crops that can be harvested multiple times, along with a system that allows for them to die. You can also find Part 7 of our guide here, where we went through how to grow and harvest crops.
A link to a package containing the project files up to Part 8 of this tutorial series can also be found at the end of this article, exclusive to Patreon supporters only.
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If you’ve got a player character in your game that derives its movement from a Rigidbody or Rigidbody2D component in Unity, and you write a script to make your camera follow it, you will likely see jittering in your camera movement.
Here’s an example:
Recently, I came across an error that was quite the head-scratcher while grading some Unity scripts. Here’s what the error says:
myAnim variable was set with myAnim = GetComponent<Animator>() earlier on. But SetBool() is a valid method in the Animator component from Unity, so what exactly is going on here?
CSV stands for Comma-Separated Values, and CSV files are text files that look something like this:
Username,Email,Address,Contact johndoe,john@example.com,"71 Pickering Street, Singapore, Singapore",+65-91234567 janedoe,jane@website.com,"24 Raffles Lane, Singapore, Singapore",+65-81234567 marysmith,mary@smith.com,"83 Riveting Road, Singapore, Singapore",+65-97654321 bobsmith,bob@smith.com,"84 Riveting Road, Singapore, Singapore",+65-87654321
Essentially, the CSV file format is meant to represent tabular data. The above CSV file represents the following table:
| Username | Address | Contact | |
|---|---|---|---|
| johndoe | john@example.com | 71 Pickering Street, Singapore, Singapore | +65-91234567 |
| janedoe | jane@website.com | 24 Raffles Lane, Singapore, Singapore | +65-81234567 |
| marysmith | mary@smith.com | 83 Riveting Road, Singapore, Singapore | +65-97654321 |
| bobsmith | bob@smith.com | 84 Riveting Road, Singapore, Singapore | +65-87654321 |
Due to their tabular nature, data in a CSV file can very easily be imported into and stored in an SQL table. The commands to do that, however, are not very well-documented online.
If a CSV file does not open as a text file on your computer, that’s because your computer is opening the file with a spreadsheet program such as Microsoft Excel. In such a case, to see the file as text, you will want to open these files on a text editing software such as Notepad.
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Are you looking to run Python as a server-side scripting language on your XAMPP installation? Here’s a guide on how to set it up.
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