Geeklog Item Feed

Lucee task spooler

Thu, 18 Apr 2024 15:32:57 BST

Lucee/cfml based website got attacked by someone and they ended up triggering a few thousand emails. So as a note to self that may well break mail spooling, you can see the numbers in the the server admin under task spooler. This is where it shows up you have a problem you might not realise that emails are not being sent immediately. At the moment in Lucee 6.0.0.585 there doesn't seem to be a way of resending the emails or clearing them via the admin panel. You can go find the files and get rid of them or move them to another folder they live under:


/WEB-INF/lucee/remote-client/

There are two folders 'closed' and 'open', I think it probably moves them from one folder to another as they fail. In my circumstance I just moved the .tsx files into another folder to get rid. This updates the counts in cfadmin and clears out the emails it was trying to send. I was breaching the web hosts email sending quota per hour and because there were so many emails queued the quota wasn't ever clearing.

There is a maximum length on mailto: links on windows.

Mon, 08 May 2023 13:43:59 BST

There is a maximum length on mailto: links on Windows. It seems from testing to be around 2000 characters. Over that size clicking on a mailto: link does nothing. So if you do have a long body on your mailto link try it on Windows. Don't think because it works on a Mac it will work everywhere like I did. Oh and can I have that 2 hours of my life back please.

MariaDB / MySQL restricted words list

Thu, 29 Dec 2022 08:09:56 GMT

I accidentally updated my MariaDB installation on my Mac with homebrew and started getting odd messages along the lines of


You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds 
to your MariaDB server version for the right syntax to use near ' 
comment_content

Oddly there was only a column name there from a subquery. Turns out "row_number" had become a restricted. It turns out to be the name of a function https://mariadb.com/kb/en/row_number/ so its probably best to avoid it. ROWNUM is in MariaDB 10.6 under some circumstances https://mariadb.com/docs/server/ref/cs10.6/reserved-words/ but not ROW_NUMBER https://mariadb.com/kb/en/reserved-words/ It seems like ROW_NUMBER became reserved in Oracle MySQL in version 8.0.2 https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/keywords.html#keywords-8-0-detailed-R

Adding words to aspell dictionary command line

Fri, 14 Jan 2022 09:00:47 GMT

I have just added spell checking on a git commits to a repository using Aspell. So it stops my spelling mistakes in commit messages


git commit -m "Yarmouth"
   Possible spelling errors found in commit message:
Yarmouth

obviously Yarmouth exists and is a word. To prevent me googling again how to add a word to the Aspell dictionary I will add this note to the log.


echo "*Yarmouth\n#" | aspell -a
@(#) International Ispell Version 3.1.20 (but really Aspell 0.60.8)

This is on my Mac using OS X.

Copying ssl certificate from one server to another in plesk

Fri, 14 Jan 2022 09:00:47 GMT

Have an odd situation where two servers sit behind a load balancer and only one can renew its ssl certificates with lets encrypt. So I copy the certificate from one server to the other. Plesk is unhelpful for this because the certificates page only allows upload of a .crt file but the gives you a .pem file when you click download. The bit I have to remember is that you can upload the pem file you downloaded but you have to go to Websites and Domains > domain name > SSL/TLS Certificates and click unassign on the existing certificate first. Then you get the option to upload the pem file you downloaded from the other server. Hopefully in a couple of months time I will remember this when it happens again.

Clearing up code inserted after hack

Thu, 30 Jan 2020 16:02:57 GMT

Found some odd bits of code in an old website recently and thought I'd note down how I went about finding the additions. This one was fairly simple once you found the first file affected as they turned out that all the files were modified at the same date. Finding files modified between two dates find /messedup/ -newermt "2020-01-19" ! -newermt 2020-01-21 -ls Finding modified files in two directories when you know that you have a good copy

diff -br --exclude=".DS_Store" /messedup/ /good/copy/folder/ >
difference.diff

gives you a diff file and its child folders with all the differences ignoring whitespace changes if you just want the names of the files that don't match or where files only exist in directory or another. Ignoring OS X's .DS_store files.

diff -qbr --exclude=".DS_Store" /messedup/ /good/copy/folder/ >
difference-files.diff

Find files in a directory that aren't pictures where everything should be a picture e.g. badfile.php

find /messedup/images/ -type f -not -name "*.jpg" -not -name
"*.jpeg"  -not -name "*.JPG" -not -name "*.gif" -not -name "*.GIF" -not
-name "*.png"

Building extensions with multiple versions of PHP

Mon, 29 Apr 2019 10:26:45 BST

Recently had to manually build a php extension for server running cpanel with multiple versions of PHP. Did the regular

phpize, ./configure, make, make test, make
install

and then php wouldn't pick up the extension. I got errors like

PHP Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library ...
imagick.so: undefined symbol: spl_ce_Countable)

Nice people at CWCS (https://www.cwcs.co.uk/) pointed out that I should have been using the cpanel version of PHP. Turns out I hadn't noticed that it had built itself against a very old version of PHP on the server rather than the version running on the command line. The successful process looked like this


tar xzfv imagick-3.4.3.tgz
cd imagick-3.4.3
/opt/cpanel/ea-php72/root/usr/bin/phpize
./configure --with-php-config=/opt/cpanel/ea-php72/root/usr/bin/php-config
make
make test
make install

Processing Content Security Policy Logs

Tue, 25 Sep 2018 15:19:20 BST

I set up a content security policy and then set it to just report. So I can check its not inadvertently breaking some part or function on the site.


Header always set Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only "default-src ....

When the browsers log the contraventions then send a json request to your end point you specify. I'm logging it to a file like DateTime, remote Ip, JSON, http_user_agent which makes it a bit more awkward to get the JSON in the report out but gives me enough information to be able to work out if I have a few repeat offenders or issues in a few browsers. The JSON isn't really ordered consistently so you can't easily scan through the file visually, sometimes the blocked-uri is at the start sometimes at the end for example. Also because they include the contravened directive in the report it can get to be a big block of text. So I'm doing something like


awk -F, '{FS=", ";print $3}' csp.log > json-column.log

to get the json out into a separate file with just the JSON column on each row. Then I'm doing a bit of Python to process the json in each row to extract the information I need for a simple summary


import sys, json;
import os

fname="json-column.log"
with open(fname) as f:
   for lineNumber, line in enumerate(f):
   data = json.loads(line);
   print data['csp-report']['blocked-uri'], ', ', data['csp-report']["violated-directive"];

Which output to a file gives me two columns blocked uri, violated-directive e.g: https://cdn.joinhoney.com, font-src https://natureofgames.com, frame-src so you can gauge how big a problem is by the number of rows when its sorted.

Understanding the Log

Some of the results are a bit difficult to understand, you think er whats that and look through the site code and find the blocked-uri doesn't exist on the site at all. the honey example above I think is someone having a plugin in their browser, that is then adding code to the page, there are quite a few rows like that. There are also more confusingly people with what seems to be malware in their browser redirecting links to other end points, I guess blocking those urls is doing the user of the browser a favour. The more confusing part is the odd stuff that you can't work out so easily then your googling to find out what comes from some url like http://example.com/js/example.js If they have no viewable page there I'm assuming they are blockable and not worrying about them to much. Other entries are a bit more difficult to understand because the report json doesn't give you much of a clue where the blocked url is data or a blob or an extension data, img-src blob, script-src chrome-extension, font-src I know the site I'm looking at doesn't use data or blobs so I'm not that worried about blocking those, I'm just not sure at the moment if something is converting urls on the fly. When I look at the site in the browsers reporting the issues I don't see those violations in the browser console. Seems to be some debate about if CSP should affect extensions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Security_Policy#Browser_add-ons_and_extensions_exemption I guess people will shout when things stop working.

Magento only stores shipping address firstname on Paypal Express orders

Wed, 25 Jul 2018 08:21:50 BST

Magento and Paypal Express combine to have a difficulty with first and last names. So you end up with the shipping address only having the firstname filled in and the last name empty. I did some research and found most of the answer herehttps://magento.stackexchange.com/questions/99884/paypal-express-firstname-and-lastname-instead-of-shiptoname, so thanks to https://magento.stackexchange.com/users/5288/loeffel. It seems to be that Magento processes the response from Paypal the SHIPTONAME value being firstname lastname. In app/code/core/mage/Paypal/Model/Api/Nvp.php in the function _exportAddressses


$shippingAddress->addData(array(
     'firstname'  => $data['SHIPTONAME'],
));

Thats ok mostly but it causes some issues if your shipper requires lastname and firstname so can be a bit annoying. So you can change it if you need to.


$nameParts = $this->splitNameIntoFirstAndLast($data['SHIPTONAME']);
$shippingAddress->addData(array(
     'firstname'  => $nameParts['firstname'],
     'lastname'  => $nameParts['lastname']
));

I've added a function splitNameIntoFirstAndLast to that file to split the name eg Colin Smith to 'firstname' = Colin, 'lastname' = Smith. I can write a function given the customers of the store that had this problem ok working out about 98% of them. Probably because the customers mostly have European names. I think you would have to rethink this if your customers were from different places say Chinese or Vietnamese for example. The other file you have to change is app/code/core/mage/Paypal/Model/Express/Checkout.php which just comments out this line in the function returnFromPaypal which makes that lastname editable.


$shippingAddress->setLastname(null);

The function I wrote for splitting names looks like this. I think this is the bit you would want to change depending on your customers. I expect I'll tweak this over time.


function splitNameIntoFirstAndLast($originalName){

    $debug = true;
    /* if we have debug on we are testing and count failures
    * about 1.48% have empty last names in past 7308 with no last name in db
    */
    if($debug){
        global $count;
    }
    $titles = ['Dr','Dr.','Mrs','Mrs.','Mr','Mr.','Ms.', 'Ms', 'Miss.',
'Miss'];
   
    $name = trim($originalName);
    /* one bloke had name Colin Smith */
    $name = str_replace(' ',' ', $name);
    /* if the name begins with a . like '. colin smith' */;
    $name = preg_replace('/^\. /', '', $name);
    /* if the name ends with a . like 'colin smith.' */;
    $name = preg_replace('/\.$/', '', $name);
    /* replace multiple whitespaces with one people like
colin               smith */
    $name = preg_replace('/(\s){1,}/',' ', $name);
    if(strpos($name,',') !== false){
        /*
            if they enter their name with commas in then its probably
best to leave it,
            we could reverse it but its not always
            surname, firstname
        */
        //$name = trim(implode(' ', array_reverse(explode(',', $name))));
    }

    $foundTitle = $cofound = false;
    $nameParts = explode(' ', $name);

    /* colin smith C/O Some Company */
    if(stripos($name,'C/O') !== false){
        $nameParts = preg_split('/C\/O/i', $name);
        $nameParts[1] = substr($name, stripos($name,'C/O'),3).$nameParts[1];
        $cofound = true;
    }


    $currentNamePartIndex = 0;
    $firstName = $nameParts[$currentNamePartIndex];
    if(count($nameParts) > 2 && in_array($nameParts[0], $titles)){
        $foundTitle = true;
        $currentNamePartIndex = 2;
        $firstName = $nameParts[1];
    }else if(count($nameParts) > 2 &&
strlen($nameParts[$currentNamePartIndex]) == 1){
        $currentNamePartIndex = 0;
        $firstName = '';
        while(strlen($nameParts[$currentNamePartIndex]) == 1){
            $firstName .= $nameParts[$currentNamePartIndex].' ';
            $currentNamePartIndex++;
        }
        $currentNamePartIndex-1;
    }else{
        $currentNamePartIndex = $currentNamePartIndex+1;
    }

    $lastName = implode(' ',array_slice($nameParts,$currentNamePartIndex));

    /* odds and sods */
    /* camel case like ColinMcSomething */
    if($lastName == '' && mb_strtoupper($firstName, 'utf-8') != $firstName){
        $nameParts = preg_split('/(?=[A-Z])/', $firstName, -1,
PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);
        if(count($nameParts) > 1){
            $firstName = $nameParts[0];
            $lastName = implode('', array_slice($nameParts,1));
        }
    }

    /* colin@twit.com */
    if($lastName == '' && strpos($firstName,'@') !== false){
        $nameParts = explode('@', $firstName);
        $firstName = $nameParts[0];
        $lastName = implode('', array_slice($nameParts,1));
    }

    /* colin no last name */
    if($lastName == ''){
        $lastName = 'Empty';
        if($debug){
            $count++;
        }
    }

    $parts = array($originalName, $firstName, $lastName);

    return array('firstname' => $parts[1], 'lastname' => $parts[2]);
}

This is on Magento 1.9.3.4 The query I used to build a list of names from your database to test your name splitting function is


SELECT DISTINCT(CONCAT('"',prefix_sales_flat_order_address.firstname,'",'))
FROM prefix_sales_flat_order_address
JOIN prefix_sales_flat_order
on (prefix_sales_flat_order.shipping_address_id = prefix_sales_flat_order_address.entity_id AND prefix_sales_flat_order_address.address_type = 'shipping')
or (prefix_sales_flat_order.billing_address_id = prefix_sales_flat_order_address.entity_id AND
prefix_sales_flat_order_address.address_type = 'billing')
WHERE
prefix_sales_flat_order.created_at > '2017-01-01 00:00:00'
AND lastname is null
AND prefix_sales_flat_order_address.address_type = 'shipping';

I'm getting about 1.5% with 'Empty' as lastname.

Altering your hosts file

Wed, 25 Apr 2018 10:06:34 BST

To change your laptops DNS so it points somewhere different to the real DNS online. You might want to do this if you have a website on a new server and you want to check it before the rest of the worlds DNS switches over. The downside is you have to remember that your laptop may well be pointing at something different to people you talking to. In terminal first make a copy of the file in case you cock it up


sudo cp /etc/hosts /etc/hosts-pre-editing

then open the directory


open /etc/

if your happy in vi or have a text editing program set up in your terminal go straight to editing it sudo vi /etc/hosts Then you can right click and open with your chosen code editor. You want to be editing this in a text editing program TextWrangler, BBEdit, TextMate or Vi rather than something like Word which will make more changes than you can see. The file will look something like below. You don't want to be editing any existing lines.


##
# Host Database
#
# localhost is used to configure the loopback interface
# when the system is booting.=C2=A0 Do not change this entry.
##
127.0.0.1       localhost
255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
::1             localhost
fe80::1%lo0     localhost

At the bottom of the file add a line like so


1.2.3.4 example.com

Once you have made a change you probably want to refresh your DNS cache on the version of OS X I'm using (10.12) that is


|sudo dscacheutil -flushcache;sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder; |

Then when you restart your browser you should be seeing the example.com at 1.2.3.4 rather than where ever its set to be in DNS globally.

XML stylesheet transformations in browsers on IE 9

Mon, 15 Jan 2018 11:14:34 GMT

So if your ever possessed by mind controlling Zombies and need to make XML stylesheet transformations in browsers on IE 9 then 1) check your not a Zombie 2) check the http response application/xlst+xml doesn't work on IE 9 but text/xml does the other seems to work fine in ie8 and 11 and firefox/chrome

Generating database diagram from .dot file

Mon, 15 Jan 2018 10:53:54 GMT

Found this article on generating a MySQL database diagram from Sequel Pro for someone just to give someone an idea of what the structure of the database of the system they would be taking on. We used this as something to use as a starting point in discussions.


fdp -Tpng WordPress.dot > wordpress-database-diagram.png

The information came from here http://mattlangtree.com.au/2011/11/15/erd-diagrams-from-sequel-pro/ and you get something that looks like this from a WordPress database.

WebRTC is interesting

Fri, 13 Jan 2017 15:21:48 GMT

I've being doing some work on a WebRTC project to test feasibility of building a custom classroom system, with video and audio chat.

Strengths

WebRTC is quite powerful, in essence you can conduct something like a Skype chat between multiple people just using standard web browsers without any plugins or add ons. So it has the potential to be very widely usable. You don't have to install a program on the users computer so you can skip operating system issues and you don't need a IT administrator to be involved if the users are in a school or university where installing programmes is restricted. Installing something on a users computer before the can take part in a chat is at best an inconvenience and a source of friction. Your saved the work of supporting multiple operating systems and developers who build the programmes. Its also the future so more and more devices and browsers should support it.

Weaknesses

Fundamentally your restricted to the browser so integrating with the users computer outside of the browser box for something like screen sharing or sharing access to an application is cut off. You can create extensions or plugins to enable screen sharing. The user also has to allow their browser to share the video and sound from their system. You prompt them and they click to allow all or in some browsers just a single part sound or video. This shows another potential downside your restricted by browsers some what, you don't have to have the latest shiniest but you need something reasonably up to date. Google Chrome, Firefox work ok, and I think Edge. Unfortunately as you may have noticed those don't include Safari which restricts iPhone and iPad access. I've not found a why to this it just seems to be something Apple don't want to enable, yet. Some plugins exist that claim to enable WebRTC in the deficient browsers. whilst this seems negative I think more widespread support will emerge in the future. There is a browser support page here http://iswebrtcreadyyet.com/.
Mostly communication is peer to peer with some negotiation STUN (Session Traversal Utilities for NAT) server if that doesn't work because of network topology then your forced to use a TURN server. This is not so shiny as it means you using the TURN server to relay message between chat members, this is a potential source of delays and processing demand on the TURN server your running. In my testing though I was able to use just the STUN server, I guess the TURN server would be more likely to need to used when one of the chat members was inside a large organisation. Its worth while considering the peer to per nature of the communication if you want to record chats as the data may not go through a central point where you can push it to a file. Handling between browsers varies slightly so you may want to use a framework that abstracts that away somewhat I used Simple WebRTC (https://simplewebrtc.com/). there are also services that offer WebRTC or parts as a service that you can than integrate into a wider application, if you want to find out more about to about the JavaScript its worth looking at the work of Muaz Khan at https://www.webrtc-experiment.com/. Ultimately I build a demo system in order to demonstrate feasibility and then stopped as there wasn't the budget at that point. Perhaps at some point that project will happen but its always useful to know what is and isn't feasible and what the limits of a technology are to use in others.

Enabling DKIM to improve email delivery

Thu, 10 Nov 2016 15:40:01 GMT

Was experiencing some issues with emails sent from a customers server not being received. Sender Policy Framework records (SPF) seem not to make that much difference in this case. Eventually set up Domain Keys Identified Mail so that emails sent are signed by the server as a sort of proof of origin. Which seems to be helping so far. Its not immediately evident, in my email clients at least, that DKIM is setup you can read through the email headers and you get something like this


DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed;
 d=TPC456.onmicrosoft.com; s=selector1-colin-co-uk0k;
 h=From:Date:Subject:Message-ID:Content-Type:MIME-Version;
 bh=w1YgdzreonJQDEXp57tSVab6RFSioTYfF4Ow92Cy6Xc=;
 b=on3S3MeOvI3UHa93jIPUxt23KEpYZrBK5BX3CGHyJxEa1og8zoX4RDU+WauGsjbNRoSPj84qTZUsUj8m22P3mGSo6u1Udh87vL0yIBtXN3SKVMCp9BSKOXC0d2M3QrUUAqOf/mAPs7ieqQQCUnx79q38bPk5L5kuz8t+NnOP+F0=

but I found you can tell if an email is signed in gmail quite easily, if you look at a message then click the down arrow next to that shows you something like this


from:    Colin Example 
to:    Adam 
date:    2 November 2016 at 16:58
subject:    Re: wow is it really?
Signed by:    coldfusionisalive.com

The signed by bit indicates that the email is signed by the coldfusionisalive.com server so you can be somewhat reassured that the email does come from the right server rather than a spammer. Found that most of my email addresses have DKIM set up without me doing anything which is nice. If you find yourself setting up DKIM or want to check its not setup wrong on your mail server you can also send a test email using that account to check-auth@verifier.port25.com and they very nicely send you something back with a summary like this


==========================================================
Summary of Results
==========================================================
SPF check:          pass
DomainKeys check:   pass
DKIM check:         fail
SpamAssassin check: ham

and lots of details which was very useful. I was setting it up on a old server where it wasn't just a tick box and it took me many attempts before I got it all to hang to together and the signing to validate successfully. (Canonicalization was what the last thing I was tripping up over in my opendkim.conf) DMARC Once you have SPF and DKIM setup you can then go on to set DMARC which gives you some reporting on whatis happening when your emails reach bigger mail hosts like googlemail and outlook. It also provides a way of you instructing the receiving mail server to what to do if the mail sent to them fails to pass DKIM or SPF checks. There is quite a lot to a DMARC record the best explanation I found was this one https://support.google.com/a/answer/2466563?hl=en. I ended up with something like this:


_dmarc.example.com TXT v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:dmarc@example.com

so I'm not telling receiving servers to do anything other than report to an email address. After a while and as my understanding increases I'll probably instruct it to do more possibly breaking actions (quarantine, reject) None of this really improves the security of email its still at some point being sent in plain text but it does give a receiving mail server another method of verifying that the email its received is legitimately from who it says it is. So in the end is making it more difficult for someone to send emails pretending to be from you.

Converting flv files to mp3 on CLI

Mon, 15 Aug 2016 15:27:07 BST

Recently found myself needing to convert 2000+ .flv files to .mp3 files it took me a while to find a solution. I first tried a Japanese program iExtractMP3.app but it couldn't cope with some older .flv files I'm not sure why I think it must be something to do with how they were created. I eventually ended up using VLC on the command line. Then it took me a while to work out the right set of parameters to use as VLC seems to do a huge number of different things.


#!/bin/bash
# extract audio from flv files to mp3 files
# using vlc app
for file in /Directory/*.flv; do
/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC -I dummy $file
--sout="#transcode{vcodec=dummy,acodec=mp3,ab=128,channels=2,samplerate=44100,scodec=none}:standard{mux=raw,access=file{overwrite},dst=\"$(echo
"$file" | sed 's/\.[^\.]*$/.mp3/')\"}" vlc://quit; done;

You end up with the Directory full of the original then converted version. aardvark.flv aardvark.mp3 cartilage.flv cartilage.mp3 This post was very helpful in working out the basis. There are a lot of arguments and I'm not an expert but my combination seems to work for the files I was working with.

Add Word to hunspell dictionary

Tue, 26 Jul 2016 09:07:27 BST

If you have a spell check on your git commit using hunspell you may find that your commits get blocked by non dictionary words like organisation names, places, technical terms etc


git commit -m "Lowestoft is our most eastern port"
---------------------------------------------------------------------
It looks like you have spell checking errors in your commit message:
- You used =E2=80=9CLowestoft=E2=80=9D and hunspell suggested instead =E2=
=80=9CLowest oft,
Lowest-oft, Lowermost=E2=80=9D
---------------------------------------------------------------------

So say you want to add Lowestoft Check if the word exists


echo "Lowestoft" | hunspell -a
@(#) International Ispell Version 3.2.06 (but really Hunspell 1.5.0)
& Lowestoft 3 0: Lowest oft, Lowest-oft, Lowermost

So Lowestoft doesn't exist in dictionary, as a comparison Yarmouth does


echo "Yarmouth" | hunspell -a
@(#) International Ispell Version 3.2.06 (but really Hunspell 1.5.0)
*

So lets add in Lowestoft


echo -e "*Lowestoft\n#" | hunspell -a
@(#) International Ispell Version 3.2.06 (but really Hunspell 1.5.0)

Now check if it is there


echo "Lowestoft" | hunspell -a
@(#) International Ispell Version 3.2.06 (but really Hunspell 1.5.0)
*

Lowestoft is ok, even its not as famous as Yarmouth, and now its equally important in our dictionary. and now it gets suggested if you misspell it


echo "Lowiestoft" | hunspell -a
@(#) International Ispell Version 3.2.06 (but really Hunspell 1.5.0)
& Lowiestoft 2 0: Lowestoft, Loftiness

Humbug for Mutation Testing

Tue, 17 May 2016 14:20:51 BST

I was running 'Humbug' by Pádraic Brady for the first time I was interested in how good bad it would show my tests to be First off you need to be able to run your phpunit tests without parameters as


phpunit

rather than


phpunit Tests/

I had been running like that rather than specifying the test suite in my phpunit.xml


./Tests/

Before I added in the testsuite to the phpunit.xml I was getting the heading from humbug and then it was stopping and echoing out the help output from phpunit Then you need to check it runs ok and everything passes otherwise humbug stops


Ivor:tools Ivor$ phpunit
...............................................................  63 / 248 ( 25%)
..............S................................................ 126 / 248 ( 50%)
.................S................S............................ 189 / 248 ( 76%)
.............................................S.............     248 / 248 (100%)

Time: 34.08 seconds, Memory: 51.27Mb

OK, but incomplete, skipped, or risky tests!
Tests: 248, Assertions: 5606, Skipped: 4.

Now trying humbug it may take some time ... Humbug on the above set of tests took 1.43 hours and there was a lot of output that made understanding it difficult. The output was quite useful though in that it showed weaknesses in my tests the --incremental flag is designed to speed up the test somewhat although in my circumstances it didn't make a large difference. To be honest at least at first you probably want to try this out on something smaller with just a few tests at first the output is easier to understand when your doing it on a smaller set of tests. You get an output file with diffs so you can have a look through and see how Humbug has twisted your code about. The one produced for the unit tests above was about 6000 lines. Then your left viewing the issues do they matter or are they false warnings.


1) \Humbug\Mutator\ReturnValue\This
Diff on \adminLessonAccess::__construct() in /classes/adminLessonAccess.php:
--- Original
+++ New
@@ @@
         $this->db =3D dbConnection::get();
-        return $this;
+        return null;
     }

     function listLessonsForAdminAccess(){

So my tests did not cover the constructor returning null rather than $this.


2) \Humbug\Mutator\Boolean\TrueValue
Diff on \adminLessonAccess::deleteAllExpiredIds() in
/classes/adminLessonAccess.php:
--- Original
+++ New
@@ @@
         }
-        return True;
+        return false;
     }

Looking at the tests, my test covered that the things were deleted but not that the result should be true. Which isn't the end of the world but its a simple line to add an assertion that that should turn True; I think its a really useful tool in blowing a hole through how solid you thought your unit tests were according to code coverage stats and also in helping you improve existing unit tests and create better new ones.

Version

I was using Humbug version 1.0.0-alpha1-18-gd102496 as a phar my humbug.dist.json looks like this


{
    "source": {
        "directories": [
            "../classes"
        ],
        "excludes": [
            "../classes/PHPExcel"
        ]
    },
    "timeout": 10,
    "logs": {
        "text": "humbuglog.txt"
    }
}

Why do mutation testing at all

Pádraic probably answers that a lot better than I can in his article (currently down) if that link doesn't work try this. Put simply code coverage stats can be pretty overrated. They are good at showing how much of your code has tests but don't answer the other questions.

How good are those tests,
do they really test the code properly
are they just thin coverage filler written to achieve a coverage statistic.
are the tests strict or fluffy
are the tests redundant

These are some of the things you can get a better idea of with mutation testing.

Static analysis of PHP code base using Phan

Tue, 26 Apr 2016 08:27:49 BST

Ran phan over a php codebase to try it out see what it produces. First ran least stringent which didn't produce much (possibly my code base is a magical unicorn)


./phan -p --minimum-severity=10 --quick --ignore-undeclared -f files.txt -o out.txt

So then went to severest which produced noise


./phan -p --minimum-severity=0 --backward-compatibility-checks --dead-code-detection -f files.txt -o out.txt

So then dialed back to


./phan --progress-bar --minimum-severity=0 --backward-compatibility-checks --file-list files.txt --ignore-undeclared --output out.txt

There are possibly false warnings but it does give you an idea of places that might need consideration. Here I'm operating on a the result of a function that might return False on no results or an array of results on success.


$siblings = $this->getSiblingsForAssessment($siblingGroups,$problemSetId);
if($siblings){
	$siblings = implode(',', $siblings);
}else{

Which causes it to fuss as its thinking that $siblings is a (bool) ie True/False when it gets to $siblings = implode(',', $siblings);


/classes/assessment.php:210 PhanParamSpecial1 Argument 2 (pieces) is bool but \implode() takes array when argument 1 is string
/classes/assessment.php:210 PhanTypeMismatchArgumentInternal Argument 2 (glue) is bool but \implode() takes string

Perhaps in a more functional world we wouldn't want to do something where the type of a value changes but in a php world where variables are mutable and type is flexible perhaps its not so bad. it can produce you more straight forwardly useful things like /classes/bookingChange.php:311 PhanNoopVariable Unused variable which was a pointless line


$lessonStartDateTime;

and warning you about optional arguments that are followed by non optional arguments in function calls

PhanParamTooMany Call with 6 arg(s) to \className::functionName() which only takes 5 arg(s) so thats probably not intentional.

Its probably useful as a way of reviewing code occasionally for smells and possible issues. I wouldn't worry about running as often as unit tests. Perhaps it would be useful as a way of viewing other peoples code or new code. Seems like its aimed athelping move a code base forward and stop it slipping back into old ‘bad’ habits. They have a tutorial for analysing sloppy code base and installation instructions.

Block user by IP Apache

Tue, 26 Apr 2016 08:13:01 BST

Apache has the ability with the mod_authz_host module to block users to a site by ip and method. So if you wanted to block POST requests from a set or single IP you can do it like this in your .htaccess or httpd.conf




deny from 188.143.232.27

ErrorDocument 403 /forbidden.php

The Error document pushes them off to the 'your forbidden' page that can then display them a message, log the request for later debugging etc. You can also use partial address and ranges like


deny from 127.0.0.


deny from 127.0.0.2/32

If you want to block multiple methods you can list them

Getting WordPress to actually publish posts on schedule

Fri, 08 Apr 2016 15:11:40 BST

Getting WordPress to actually publish posts on schedule. Often I'm having scheduled posts fail to publish when they were told to, I think its due to the site being quite quiet in terms of traffic. I'm now runninga cron job every 10 minutes to poke it into action.


#!/bin/sh
timestamp=$(date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S');
curl=$(curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}, %{url_effective},
%{time_total}\n" http://yourblog.com/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron=true);
echo $timestamp", "$curl >> yourblog.com.cron.log

Finding unused css

Thu, 31 Mar 2016 09:12:46 BST

Over time as a site gets modified and adapted parts get removed parts get added and the CSS accumulates a bunch of old CSS rules that just aren't used any more. Its always easier to to leave some rule that you aren't sure does something just in case its active in some dark corner of the site you have forgotten about. It tends to look worse I you picked up the site from someone else and whatever thought was involved in creating the site originally has gone walk about. Been looking for tools to help identify the unused CSS recently found a browser plugin called Dust-Me Selectors (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dust-me-selectors/?src=userprofile) and a node tool called uncss (https://github.com/giakki/uncss) both of which you point at a site to get an idea of the amount of css that is dormant plus in case of uncss a lot more. I found the first helped me more on site was trying to analyse as I was doing it over multiple pages, however its only a starting point of places to look and helped me to reduce the un minified CSS from about 172 kb to 127 kb. I had around 1031 unused selectors and 983 selectors (yes the site is a mess) which was a bit of an exaggeration due to some pages not checked also there are some framework css selectors which might be used in the future but aren't currently. I managed to reduce the number of selectors by 270 ish at a first pass which is better than nothing. Its a dreary and uninteresting process but if you need to save on file size and I guess rendering time in the browser its probably necessary.

SRi - Sub Resource integrity

Thu, 31 Mar 2016 08:55:23 BST

Was being asked about the security of a site recently due to a false flag on an automated site security tester. One of the things that came up on the forum the query was placed on was that the site didn't use SRI. Amazing how everyone on forum knows everything, so whilst restraining myself from saying pointing out all the things they said that were wrong, started reading about SRI which turns out to be Subresource integrity. The site had recently moved to using a subdomain to serve the images and static stuff like css and js in order to speed up the site. Turns out that subresource integrity is a new W3C Candidate https://w3c.github.io/webappsec-subresource-integrity/. It is aimed at verifying that when a site is calling resources from a remote resource such as a CDN that the resources returned match that expected and the content have not been modified by some outside agent. For example the page example.com/index.html loads css from cdn.example.com/layout.css but has no idea if cdn.example.com/layout.css is what it expects or has been modified by some malicious agent so all the text is pink. (possibly by militant my little pony fan girls) SRI allows example.com/index.html link tag to include a hash of what the called resource should be With HASHM6kredJcxdsqkczBUjMLvqyHb1KHASH being a hash of layout.css. This integrity attribute can be used by the user agent in this case a browser to avoid executing malicious or substituted code. If you think that the remote resource could be a script and you really don't want some random javascript injected in your page. Mozilla have a good explanation at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Subresource_Integrity. Currently it seems only supported only in the browsers you would expect Chrome, Firefox and Opera (http://caniuse.com/#search=SRi)

Things I wish I'd known when I picked up this Magento shop...

Tue, 28 Jul 2015 15:26:33 BST

Earlier this year I ended up inheriting a Magento site that had been abandoned by its previous developers leaving its owner in the lurch. Not having used Magento before there was a bit of a learning cliff, so I thought I'd write this to help anyone else who finds themselves in a similar issue.
1) Surprisingly some features don't work well, newsletters is probably best left alone, for example.
There may be fairly simple errors, for example: I upgraded the shop to the latest greatest in the 1.9 line thinking that those issues would be resolved they weren't. Mine were kind of minor, if your bought something with paypal buy now button the name of the customer would be blank on the 5 most recent orders. If you looked at the status of the order it would spray out html code rather than the link to the verify id. These aren't that bad and you can fix, reasonably easily. More to say that don't think everything will work just because its so widely used.
2) You need a beefy machine, this isn't going to work to well on shared hosting and its worth checking out how far you can push the PHP version beyond what versions they officially support. Newer versions of PHP being faster, generally. I pushed to .1 down from latest greatest version with some tweaking of the invoice creation code. Not got it onto php 7 (yet) though. The database is going to be a big and get bigger still so check your MySQL setup.
3) Its never going to be very fast, it wasn't really built to PHPs strengths. You are going to be working on coping with the core design decisions they made. Your back end options include enabling caching on as much as possible, including additional caching levels, I added a full page caching plugin Lesti which seems to work ok and reduced the time taken to actually chuckout the html to under 100ms. You will have to checkout that you have excluded the blocks that are customer specific. Magento have written some whitepapers about performance which are perhaps worth whizzing through. Including some configs that might work as starting points in Varnish, Nginx, PHP-FPM
4) Caching is also the root of problems if things don't appear or don't change on your updates after you 'update cache' in admin. Try emptying the cache directory rm -rf var/cache/
5) Front end performance may not be that fantastic either, check if combining the many and various css and js files speed things up for you and things still work.
6) If you amend a css file, the file name of the combined css will not change to do that you have to change the names of the files or do something like add a blank css file named cssBuster-{monthName}-{dayName}.css and add that to the layout.xml that you upload simultaneously.
7) You can update on the command line checkout ./mage list-upgrades
8) You can do reindexing from the command line php shell/indexer.php help I found reindexing periodically whether it needed it or not worthwhile. Having it update on save or manually is dependent on your evaluation and how understanding the shop keeper is of messages that may get flashed up whilst the are waiting for update. If your indexing is slow out check this plugin out. Depending on your config it skips, non visible and hidden url indexing which can greatly improves the speed, in my case it went from 50 seconds to 8 seconds
9) Log cleaning on the command line, log cleaning does keep the database size down I went from a database archive of something around 600mb to 260mb initially as no one had done it previously.
10) You probably want to enable as much logging as you can System > Developer > Log Settings The logs are quite noisy by default but you can grep out the noise and show the exceptional stuff. I have a rough bash script to process the system log for example.
11) Repeated blocked calls to /app/etc/config.xml in your logs are actually calls from Magento itself checking that that file is hidden, not an attacker. Although people do attack so you want to check your configuration, specifically to Magento files like LICENSE.* and *.sample probably don't need to be there. You also need to consider if you want to have the downloader online.
12) Checkout get.php it may be set to display errors, you don't want it to. It may be worth putting a die() in if you don't want to use it/ disagree with the concept of get.php.
13) If you can't login to the admin on a test server checkout the cookie domain see if it looks right. You can do something like this to make it blank in sql

UPDATE prefix_core_config_data set value = '' where path = 
'web/cookie/cookie_domain';

14) You can serve your static files from a CDN (and then toggle that according to if you are on https or not).
15) You set the timezone here System > Configuration > General > Locale Options > Timezone but Magento doesn't do British Summer time so you get times in GMT which may confuse you. It seems you can fiddle with it.
I'm still not sure I would recommend Magento to anyone, but I guess it works.

Function (FunctionName) is not a valid method for this service

Thu, 09 Jul 2015 14:50:23 BST

I kept getting errors like this in soap ....


Fatal error: Uncaught SoapFault exception: [Client] Function (FunctionName) is not a valid method for this service in /file.php:118

Which was confusing me somewhat as when I did *__getFunctions* ( ) it would list out the function I was trying to use fine. It turned out that I had a soap wsdl cache enabled and that caused it to fail as once I'd switched that over in the php.ini to 0 it worked fine. In this instance I was using a local wsdl file so I didn't think to look at the caching for a long while. I'm guessing its an error cache writing/retrieval on the development machine so not typical. Just thought I'd post this here in case any body else has this mystery, and they can check this out as a possibility. The docs are at http://php.net/soap.wsdl-cache-enabled


soap.wsdl_cache_enabled=1

became


soap.wsdl_cache_enabled=0

I was using PHP 5.6.8 on OS X 10.8.5

Mac internet connection dies after about a minute

Thu, 16 Apr 2015 08:36:53 BST

My imac running OS X 10.6.8 would stop working and suffer spinning beach ball death after about 90 seconds of internet connection. Turns out what it needed was ipv6 disabled. Then it worked dandy.
Mines a 2007 imac so it may be an older mac issue and different for you. I had changed router at some point and I think after that it failed, which makes it seem obvious that was the issue but because I only used it seldomly and often offline I hadn't noticed.
I had discounted the router being the issue as the connection worked for so many seconds before it died. I looked at error logs (useless), load - nothing and pulled other stuff apart. Seems dumb now but with no error it was guess work. Resetting Pram, updating operating systems, viruses, screen rewrite frequency and repair disk were "solutions" I came across whilst googleing
So if you have something like that happen to you try disabling ipv6 and see if that helps first, before you try more complicated solutions and get more frustrated.

Generating .res files ICU version matters

Fri, 21 Nov 2014 11:05:02 GMT

I came across an odd issue generating res files, I could generate the res files fine but found when I uploaded them it just killed the site. Turns out versions matter when generating them. This was a php site. I found that when I did it on a mac with a newer version of ICU (52.1) it didn't work with the server online having an older version of ICU (4.2.1) I added an old version of ICU that matched on a windows box which solved the issue. You can see the current ICU version installed on a page displaying phpInfo(); To generate the res file on a mac genrb –encoding utf-8 root.txt To generate on windows c:\program files\icu\bin\genrb.exe –encoding utf-8 root.txt To check it in isolation in php


/* create resource bundle */
foreach (array("root") as $locale) {
     $r = ResourceBundle::create($locale, __DIR__);
     /* use a changed key to check it works */
     echo $r["key-you-know-exists-in-root-txt"], "\n";
}

ssh using keys on CentOS (SE Linux) issues

Thu, 27 Feb 2014 11:08:29 GMT

So you want to login to ssh without a password using a key file. You created the ~/.ssh folder uploaded your public key file to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys set the permissions 700 for .ssh and 600 for authorized_keys and it still doesn't work? If your on SE Linux you may want to check what the security context is ls -laZ ~/.ssh will show you. I found mine was set wrong, if so, you can do something like chcon -R --type=ssh_home_t ~/.ssh Before I got it working I found it quite frustrating, tailing /var/secure/log was giving me entries like can't access /home/user/.ssh/authorized_keys. Even when I set logging to debug via sshd_config which wasn't very illuminating This doesn't seem to be mentioned in many places so mentioning here in case it helps anybody else. You can read more about security context/ security labels.

Incredible shrinking textarea I love you.

Thu, 16 Jan 2014 10:39:05 GMT

Odd thing came up yesterday was getting reports that users of a web page were typing into a textarea and it was shrinking with every word they typed. Seemed an odd report and I was thinking it must be inadvertant hover over a textarea and resizing by dragging the corner. Turns out it wasn't though eventually I managed to reproduce it in Internet Explorer 8. Turns out it only happened when the browser had gone into or been switched into 'compatibility mode'. The textarea was marked up like so The way I resolved it was to add in the html tag to disable compatibility mode or you can add in a similar http header X-UA-Compatible: IE=edge Pretty strange thing to happen I guess no one ever intended a textarea to do that, its pretty disconcerting having it shrink as you type.

freshclam: connect(): Permission denied

Fri, 20 Dec 2013 11:56:54 GMT

Recently came across an odd error on a unix server that confused me got this message:


../cron.daily/freshclam:

connect(): Permission denied

So ssh'd on to the machine to run the script manually. First time the script ran same error, second time the script rang no error. Slightly confusing why would it not be able to get connect the first time and be fine after that? But then fail to connect the next day in the same way. After browsing the logs found out that it wasn't failing to connect to to download new virus definitions as I'd assumed. It was failing to tell Clamd that it had updated its virus definitions. Which explained it only failing the first time because the second or third time you ran the script it had already updated its definitions and so didn't need to to notify Clamd and therefore didn't fail. Once the Clamd was restarted the script ran without error. Guess it all goes to show as Tim says "assume makes and ass out of u and me".

Phar failed require caused by ioncube

Mon, 04 Nov 2013 08:23:58 GMT

Experienced an odd thing today. Made a phar file to use as a cli script. It ran fine on a couple of local machines and then when I tried it on remote server it died on a require(). Bit confusing turns after a bit of googling found potential issue with ioncube. Turned out it the server had ioncube installed on it.


php -m | grep ion

Once I disabled ioncube loader the phar ran just fine, on this server ioncube was loaded from from its own ini file


/etc/php.d/00-ioncube-loader.ini

Just in case anyone else has the same issue.

Why you want to avoid compatibility mode

Sat, 31 Aug 2013 15:14:45 BST

This is more of a tale than a codey thing but here is one of possibly many reasons why you want to avoid compatibility mode in Internet Explorer. Its a sneaky usually unnoticeable thing. I've had a couple of instances where its been inadvertantly switched on by a client recently. Both times things didn't happen as expected one site was using a shopping cart system where a rich text description field died and a second was using WordPress where they couldn't upload images. The second was a complete git because they were travelling in Mongolia so working out what was happening was er lets just say awkward. Its easily solved once you think of it (click in location bar) but ideally it just wouldn't be triggered. So to be cool like 'Yuri'* consider putting this in your sites header.

You can read more Microsoft compatibility mode gubbins. * I maintain that Yuri Gagarin was pretty cool especially when you consider his rentry

apostrophes and htmlentities

Wed, 08 May 2013 07:27:43 BST

Use & a p o s ; rather than & # 3 9 ; then move on this is dull. Pah & a p o s ; comes out as &apos in ie 7 and 8 stupid browser & # 3 9 ; is fine. I was pulling it in via ajax call which just complicates stuff, works fine when you get to Internet Explorer 9 I used & a p o s ; because it seemed more self documenting than & # 3 9; This old blog post explains more Apparently they are complying with a standard, if your really having trouble sleeping. I don't want to keep this stuff in my brain but hopefully this will be useful for someone else. So far today I've done html entities, 404 logs and pelmets: my thrilling life :)

FallbackResource Directive

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 14:37:55 BST

Came across a good blog post this morning by Joshua Thijssen. He suggests using FallbackResource /index.php or whatever your controller is called, rather than more complex mod-rewrite rules to redirect all non existant files to the front controller on apache server. Just trying it on a test project and its working here, perhaps best for simpler project there don't seem to be lots of options but I should think a bit less error prone. You can read more in the apache docs .

Wonder if you can write Ruby in Chinese

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 15:45:59 BST

Was wondering after recent ruby meetup if you could write ruby in Chinese. Seems you can only problem being you have to name Classes beginning with a Capital letter. So I ended up doing O? so that the name began with a capital.


"class name needs to begin with a CONSTANT so uppercase"
class O目
     def 时
         puts "模棱两可"+"夏天"
     end
end
a = O目.new
a.时

On a Mac at least you can name that file as "时". All those characters are just nonsense Pinyin characters. Google translates 模棱两可夏天 as "Ambiguous summer" :) , probably not entirely accurate but hopefully its not something too offensive. (http://www.meetup.com/Norwich-Ruby-User-Group-NRUG/)

Differences between MySQL Timestamp and Datetime columns

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 11:33:54 GMT

Whilst at first there seems not be a great deal of difference between DATETIME and TIMESTAMP columns. In practice there is a big difference that you could come a cropper by. In the MySQL manual it says: "MySQL converts |TIMESTAMP| values from the current time zone to UTC for storage, and back from UTC to the current time zone for retrieval. (This does not occur for other types such as |DATETIME|.) ... ... If you store a |TIMESTAMP| value, and then change the time zone and retrieve the value, the retrieved value is different from the value you stored." That last bit is very important should be in very big letters probably. So for example on my desktop if I store the current time with the computer set to the Australia Sydney Timezone and then set the time zone on the computer back to GMT I get a time out of the TIMESTAMP column that doesn't match what I put in. This is either really great because the values adjusted to the current time zone auto magically or really bad because your not getting back what your put in to your database. DATETIME keeps the same time regardless of the servers change in time zone. As a demonstration if I create this table


CREATE TABLE `test` (
   `id` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
   `ts` timestamp NULL DEFAULT NULL,
   `dt` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
   `desc` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
   PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=3 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

and enter


2013-03-03 03:03:03

In both the 'ts' and 'dt' of the columns whilst my computer is set to 'Australian Eastern Daylight Time'. When I reset my time zone to 'GMT' I get this back


ts = 2013-03-02 16:03:03
dt = 2013-03-03 03:03:03

This most probably would never be an issue unless your MySQL server changes its time zone unnoticed (perhaps after a restart) at some point and then you might be glad you had chosen DATETIME.

Using Selenium to simulate random users

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 11:13:33 GMT

Had an odd issue recently a form with 28 check boxes any number of which could be ticked in any combination. Behind the scenes when the form is submitted the check boxes all correspond to database column names across many different tables. So the query being built is very complicated. Its hard to check the possible combinations on something like that so I thought I'd give it a go in Selenium. I wrote a little ruby script that runs through all the possible combinations and stops on error. Using selenium-webdriver https://rubygems.org/gems/selenium-webdriver. I'd use watir before briefly but it seems that is a slightly higher level wrapper around web driver, its a alternative though. I'd not used selenium directly before so was interested to see what it could do. You use selectors to find elements by type, tag, name, class, link text then fill in the corresponding form elements, or click links etc. Record paths through programs and check things are returning what is expected then repeat back as many times as you like. Because your basically remote controlling a browser its a good addition to existing tests and makes some things easier, as your testing something closer to what the client sees. Seems like you can use it to drive a variety of different browsers, although I've only used Firefox so far. It was a bit fiddly to set up mainly because I didn't know the commands, there actually pretty simple once you find them, but once I had it written I could leave the script going all afternoon testing combinations in a small browser window on my machine. Provided myself with some reassurance that I had tested many, many more of the possible combinations. Hopefully finding any issues before a client does. Sure I'll use selenium more in the future now I've tasted it.

Add Wolfram Alpha as a search engine in Firefox

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 15:48:19 GMT

I wanted to add Wolfram Alpha as an alternative search engine in my firefox, I couldn't find anyone who had done that. Turns out you can add any search engine you like if you add a search engine. If you save the code from github here as wolframalpha.xml and save it in (on a mac) to /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/searchplugins/wolframalpha.xml Not sure quite where that file location is on Windows/Linux but guess its a similar path within the program.


Wolfram Alpha
Wolfram Alpha Search
UTF-8
http://www.wolframalpha.com/favicon_calculate.png


 

https://www.wolframalpha.com

Oddity with Javascript name in WordPress

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 15:33:56 GMT

Came across an oddity with using javascript file in a plain vanilla WordPress install. I was trying to bring in jquery file like so script src="/js/jquery-1.7.1.js" type="text/javascript" But all that happened was I got the wordpress 404 page instead I thought hmm quite a lot to myself then drank some more tea and tried script src="/js/jquery171.js" type="text/javascript Which works I think its the dots and dashes in the filename which makes the difference. Also tried with jquery-171.js and jquery17.1.js which didn't work either but jquery_171.js did work. Seems an odd one so just just writing this in case it helps someone else. I was using Wordpress 3.4

Convert measurements into newspaper speak

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 08:25:16 BST

Been learning some Python using the Flask framework it seems quite well thought out. Most of my issues were with setup and hosting and error handling. I was just doing something silly in Flask/Python to convert measurements into newspaper speak. That is 12 football pitches, or 35 buses style. Its online at http://convert-o-matic.adamwilson.info/ If your interested you can see the code at https://github.com/SpottedPaint/convert-o-matic

getting file permissions in octal on OS X

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 19:00:13 BST

If you want to get file permissions in octal (e.g 644, 777 etc) on OS X you can't use stat -c it doesn't seem to be supported but you can use the following stat -f '%A %a %N' * That works for me on OSX 10.5.8, but it does seem a little complex, I've just not found a simpler way yet.

installing node.js on OSX10.5.8

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 19:00:04 BST

I was interested to poke node.js just to see what it does, so I went to nodejs.org and downloaded the mac installer. Went install and it all ran OK then I went to terminal and went


Macintosh:~ Toby$ node

and got a big old error looking like so


dyld: unknown required load command 0x80000022
Trace/BPT trap

So then I thought I should go for the source code and do the .configure, make, make install thing. That didn't work either I ended up in the same place so then hit google. This guy was funny on OSX and actually some help although I thankfully I didn't need to go to the extremes he went to. Once I had downloaded the source code and changed into the expanded directory I just did this



export PATH=/Developer/usr/bin:$PATH
ISYSROOT="-isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.5.sdk"
export LINKFLAGS=$ISYSROOT CXXFLAGS=$ISYSROOT CFLAGS=$ISYSROOT
./configure --prefix=$HOME --without-ssl
make
make install

Now it seems to work dandy without ssl but this is just to try it out. I installed node-v0.6.15.

Trying out cloudflare

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 12:36:33 BST

This site is hosted on Dreamhost which is pretty neat hosting with just a minor problem for me. They are based in America, on the west coast this can make my ping times to server quite slow. I'm in Norfolk in the UK. It varies a bit but sometimes (on bad days when and when Americans are online) its been up to 1000 ms . Usually its better than that, at the moment its 175ms. Previously I added the pictures on my other site adamwilson.info to amazon S3 to bring them closer to the users. Each page on the site features quite a few images so using amazon to bring the images to a server near by speeded up the page load times quite a bit. Note: Since I wrote this I had some issues with this cloudflare losing their dns connection to dreamhost and the original site. So I've shifted it off cloudflare for a bit whilst I figure that out. So when I saw cloudflare I was quite interested to see how much difference it would make to the loading time of this site. I ran some simples tests before and after to see what difference it made along with a test of the same site on my local machine for comparison. I've bunged them in here if they are of any use to you.


------------------------------------------------------------------------
online at Dreamhost pre cloudfare
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Benchmarking geeklog.adamwilson.info (be patient).....done


Server Software:        Apache
Server Hostname:        geeklog.adamwilson.info
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /
Document Length:        12018 bytes

Concurrency Level:      10
Time taken for tests:   8.023 seconds
Complete requests:      100
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      1242420 bytes
HTML transferred:       1218627 bytes
Requests per second:    12.46 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       802.320 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       80.232 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          151.22 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
               min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:      174  182   4.7    181     202
Processing:   403  590 284.8    501    1608
Waiting:      216  346 289.9    263    1414
Total:        580  772 286.3    692    1792

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
   50%    692
   66%    779
   75%    792
   80%    799
   90%    848
   95%   1748
   98%   1779
   99%   1792
  100%   1792 (longest request)

this is the site on my testing server on localhost


-----------------------------------------------------------------------
On my mac Toby
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Macintosh:~ Toby$ ab -n 100 -c 10 http://geeklog.adamwilson.info.toby/
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking geeklog.adamwilson.info.toby (be patient).....done


Server Software:        Apache/2.2.21
Server Hostname:        geeklog.adamwilson.info.toby
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /
Document Length:        8655 bytes

Concurrency Level:      10
Time taken for tests:   1.633 seconds
Complete requests:      100
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      895700 bytes
HTML transferred:       865500 bytes
Requests per second:    61.23 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       163.327 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       16.333 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          535.55 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
               min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    0   1.8      0      13
Processing:    64  159  33.2    160     253
Waiting:       64  153  30.6    154     241
Total:         65  159  33.0    160     254

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
   50%    160
   66%    167
   75%    172
   80%    177
   90%    204
   95%    229
   98%    242
   99%    254
  100%    254 (longest request)

This the site once it was on cloudflare


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
On cloudflare
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Last login: Sun Apr  8 11:17:09 on console
Macintosh:~ Toby$ ab -n 100 -c 10 http://geeklog.adamwilson.info/
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking geeklog.adamwilson.info (be patient).....done


Server Software:        cloudflare-nginx
Server Hostname:        geeklog.adamwilson.info
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /
Document Length:        12020 bytes

Concurrency Level:      10
Time taken for tests:   6.619 seconds
Complete requests:      100
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      1265229 bytes
HTML transferred:       1214025 bytes
Requests per second:    15.11 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       661.933 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       66.193 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          186.66 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
               min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:       34   39   3.3     38      54
Processing:   255  604 519.0    349    2091
Waiting:      210  493 508.0    228    1973
Total:        293  643 520.2    390    2139

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
   50%    390
   66%    456
   75%    892
   80%   1019
   90%   1542
   95%   2075
   98%   2120
   99%   2139
  100%   2139 (longest request)

I also ran some ping tests


another site on same dreamhost hosting account no cloudflare
-----------------------------------------------------------
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 173.442/173.796/174.234/0.329 ms

this site with cloudflare
------------------------------------------------------------
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 31.984/33.248/34.279/0.721 ms

Conclusion: So my ping time is better because its coming off a server in the UK now. The site generally doesn't seem that much faster but it was pretty fast to start with. Sue it will affect other sites more dramatically. To be honest this is really excessive for this site, its really simple and I don't pay for bandwidth anyway but it seems better to try stuff out on your own site rather than on a clients. Its free though so no bother to try out and if your on dreamhost you don't even have to mess with dns, only tick a box and let them do it. Some cloudflare oddities : if you add a subdomain they say they have added the root domain so you do add geeklog.adamwilson.info, they say thankyou for adding adamwilson.info. Ignore this. Also they see themselves as a security layer for your site. I wasn't particularly interested in that, there aren't comments on this site and its not really something i'm worried about hackers on. By default they block certain ip's with a captcha challenge. That seemed a bit unfriendly to me so I turned it off you can tweak this how you want. You can turn it for your admin area or some other bit. They also do email obfuscation If your not already doing that. There are a lot of different features including analytics. Its quite neat.

Easing equations

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 19:00:15 BST

Was looking at some easing equations for animation effects this site lists a whole bunch in actionscript code snippets so you can see what kind of thing your aiming at and get a preview of the what each term means. Along with the math behind each one. Was useful for me anyway sure you could use in Javascript too with some adaptions.

deploy script

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 19:00:05 BST

Got a bit irritated with ftp/sftp last week so wrote a deploy bash script so can upload site to server from terminal. It uses rsync to transfer/update the files online over SSH seems a lot quicker and less painful than trying to remember what files have changed or listing a directory by date to find modified files. Will probably evolve this and add it into each project as I work on them. I guess I could integrate with tests so that it uploads if tests pass and possibly do some compression of CSS files or Javascript files on upload. Not exactly continuous build but hopefully a bit more automation in my day. Caution: I've only tried this on my mac running OS X 10.5.8. Also if you don't configure the deploy_directory correctly you could overwrite/delete something important so its a potentially dangerous thing :) I'm running the script from the root of the project i'm going to upload/sync.


#!/bin/sh
# you could put the things to --exclude in a separate text file if they 
# get to lengthy
#
application_name="shiny.thing";
deploy_server="example.com";
deploy_server_folder="example.com.folder/";
ssh_user="XXXXXX";
script_location="./";

echo "Deploying '$application_name' to '$deploy_server' in folder 
'$deploy_server_folder'"
echo "Reading source $script_location"

rsync -avuz --delete --stats ./ 
$ssh_user@$deploy_server:$deploy_server_folder --exclude '.git'  
--exclude 'sessions' --exclude 'deploy.sh' --exclude 'test.php'  
--exclude '.DS_Store'

echo "Deployment successful and so much speedier than ftp/sftp"

Guess I'll improve this quite a bit over next few weeks as I use it for a few more sites, perhaps also work out a way of not getting prompted for the SSH password each time too. Perhaps though prompting might be a good thing.

trying to figure out why wordpress doing so many database queries

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 19:00:20 BST

Was trying to figure out why a Wordpress site was doing so many database queries (22 - 28). Wondered if I was doing a query inside a loop or some such silliness. Found this plugin (very WordPress that: have problem apply more plugins) its actually quite good lists all the queries that your site is doing on each page. Sticks a debug box in the bottom with a list of queries and their content. Its at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/debug-queries/ Neatly, It wasn't a dumb mistake by me (yay!) so I'll fiddle with cachegrind see if anything could do with tweaking.

Grub boot loader bust

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 19:00:17 BST

My dads netbook has a dual boot set up with Windows 7 and Ubuntu. The other day it wouldn't boot at all. It just started up went to its 'Samsung boot screen' then flashing cursor then 'boot screen' meh meh meh. Yesterday I got round to looking at it and tried installing from a Ubuntu CD I was happy to loose the Ubuntu install it has nothing on it anyway, but it couldn't write to the boot loader. So I went to plan B which probably should have been plan A. I started from the Ubuntu CD in the preview mode. Once I managed to get it running from that. I installed this boot-repair program I found out about from my geek opinions. Once I'd and ran 'boot-repair' it ran fine went through stages and fixed the boot loader and now his netbook seems to be working fine. Which is nice because I'm only a beginner to Ubuntu.

Poking Google charts

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 20:00:54 GMT

Just stumbled on google charts seems very neat and pretty simples. You just bung the code in the src attribute of an image tag and get back an image, just beware once you start poking it eats time. Here are some random chart api results.


https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?chs=500x225&cht=gom&chd=t:80&chco=FF0000,FF8040,FFFF00,009900&chxt=x,y&chxl=0:|Woo!|1:|grr!|meh|shiny

https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=v&chs=200x100&chd=t:100,20,20,20,20,0,0&chdl=First|Second|Third&chco=ff0000,00ff00,0000ff

https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?chs=150x150&cht=qr&chl=Why%20does%20everyone%20love%20QR%20codes

https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?chst=d_fnote&chld=balloon|1|000000|l|magic+monkey|moo+woo

Getting your authorship on your sites google search results

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 20:00:08 GMT

Saw some other peoples sites coming up in search engines with their picture next to the result. Seems this is relatively easy. I did it on this site by adding a link to the bottom of this page to my google profile page at like so


Adam

just swap the '101603140027014722427' for whatever the number is in your profile url. I'm not sure how long it took but think I next looked a couple of weeks later and my google profile picture was appearing in the search results by then. Probably depends on how often you get crawled. Guess it would be good if you were guest blogging on a site. You can test that you have done it ok by visiting http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets and typing in your url.

Removing profiles from web images on a mac 10.5.8

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 20:00:03 GMT

I was having some issues saving images for web from illustrator/photoshop I was saving out .png images that had a background color of #8063CE and then putting them as a border on a div that had a style background-color:#8063CE; so they should match but they were coming out slightly different colors. I think because the browser is using the profile when display the image. Neatly my mac came with a script that lets me remove the profile but its hidden at /Library/Scripts/ColorSync

browser size by percentage of users

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 20:00:03 GMT

Google have made this browser size tool available giving an estimate of what percentage of viewers will be see what proportion of your site. It seems a simple way of viewing it. You can put in your own url and see what percentage of people are missing the extremities of your site. I guess its only as reliable as their figures are but its a start.

installing tree command on os x

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 20:00:03 GMT

I didn't have the unix tree command on my mac (10.5.8) and installed it after I read this guys blog post Which has now gone away, if you look on super user they have instructions From source like this

Behaviour Driven Development & Behat

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 20:00:07 GMT

Met Shashikant Jagtap he has setup a behat user group at here. I'm not sure if BDD will fit in with how I work at the moment but I'm adding http://behat.org/ and to my list of things to poke and find out more about and see if it works for me. Adam

Quick view of the technologies that a site is built with

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 20:00:52 GMT

If you want a quick view of the technologies that a site is built with this site is quite helpful. builtwith.com Gives you server, info about analytics, js, doctype, cms etc. Bit quicker than perusing the sites source.

jsconsole

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 20:00:04 GMT

Using an phonegap and android emulator to build mobile application wanted to console.log() but losing output. Used this http://jsconsole.com/ is quite neat. Guess you could use for an unfriendly browser IE something? as well. Gives you your output via remote site so you can console.log() away. Neat.

can't use 'name' as a form field in WordPress

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 20:00:03 GMT

Was building contact form in WordPress to submit to itself on same page kept getting 404 on submission. Random thing once changed name of form field to 'yourname' from 'name' it works fine. Confused me a little for a while.

reducing the number of post revisions in WordPress

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 20:00:03 GMT

If you want to reduce the number of post revisions kept in WordPress you can put this in your wp-config.php define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 3);

User Agent Style sheets

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 20:00:03 GMT

If you want to see the content of a range of user agent style sheets checkout this site http://www.iecss.com/ . The default style sheets your user agent e.g. internet explorer, firefox, opera applies before you get started writing your CSS. Hopefully a useful source I stumbled across.

jquery trim and ie 8

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 20:00:03 GMT

I was chaining a trim() to the end of a statement in js using jquery


this.value = this.value.trim();

Which worked fine in ff but pushed out error in IE8 its explained here because ie js String doesn't do String.trim So I swapped to this and


this.value = $.trim(this.value);

the docs for jquery trim are here http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.trim/

Hooray! my Firefox is up to date.

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 20:00:03 GMT

Hooray! Your Firefox is up to date. 9.0.1

Setting wordpress language

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 20:00:12 GMT

Wordpress seems to default to what it says is English. They seem to think English means American English 'en-US'. We is fine if your American but if your not you might want to change it 'en-GB' if your from Great Britain or 'en-AU' if your lucky enough to be Australian. Its quite simples you just edit your wp-config.php.


define('WPLANG', 'en-GB');

There is a list of language codes here http://tinyurl.com/yc2x2fk if your unsure of yours.

You want to change all file names containing ? to a

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 19:00:08 GMT

All the file names by one photographer 'Hannu Jannes' got mangled by one of elderly pc/httrack/coldfusion/iis Go to folder do this:


for filename in *.jpg; do newname=`echo $filename | sed -e 's/?/a/g'`; 
mv "$filename" "$newname"; done

How to access query execution time in cf

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 19:00:03 BST

This is weirdly complex


#queryName.getMetaData().getExtendedMetaData().executionTime#


      
#numberFormat(max(queryName.getMetaData().getExtendedMetaData().executionTime, 
1)/1000, "0.000")# seconds

more info

Changing hard drive on imac 7

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 19:00:03 BST

Bit awkward. Thanks to video it wasn't so bad but why did apple not just have panel on the back? Applestore 'genius' said the most awkward bit is the making sure there is no dust in between the glass and the screen. He is right I'm looking at the dust as I type. Apparently doesn't matter what type of drive you use just 3.5 but i ended up using 1TB seagate barracuda opened up mac and found old one was a 250gb seagate barracuda. Dandy

Creating an excel file from a query for non db people

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 19:00:18 BST

This creates a excel doc from any query in coldfusion in this one the query is named testimonials and i did it for Duncan ;)












#i#



#Testimonials[i][currentRow]#



background gradient css
Sun, 09 Oct 2011 19:00:08 BST
 Finding creating cross browser gradients to be a bit of a git hopefully
this will get simpler (in time) but
this provides a good starting point to start testing from
http://www.colorzilla.com/gradient-editor/

Wish code didn't end up like this (just an example)

background: #a90329; /* Old browsers */
background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, #a90329 0%, #ed04c2 13%, #04ccd3
40%, #0cba03 76%, #6d0019 100%); /* FF3.6+ */
background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom,
color-stop(0%,#a90329), color-stop(13%,#ed04c2),
color-stop(40%,#04ccd3), color-stop(76%,#0cba03),
color-stop(100%,#6d0019)); /* Chrome,Safari4+ */
background: -webkit-linear-gradient(top, #a90329 0%,#ed04c2 13%,#04ccd3
40%,#0cba03 76%,#6d0019 100%); /* Chrome10+,Safari5.1+ */
background: -o-linear-gradient(top, #a90329 0%,#ed04c2 13%,#04ccd3
40%,#0cba03 76%,#6d0019 100%); /* Opera11.10+ */
background: -ms-linear-gradient(top, #a90329 0%,#ed04c2 13%,#04ccd3
40%,#0cba03 76%,#6d0019 100%); /* IE10+ */
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(
startColorstr='#a90329', endColorstr='#6d0019',GradientType=0 ); /* IE6-9 */
background: linear-gradient(top, #a90329 0%,#ed04c2 13%,#04ccd3
40%,#0cba03 76%,#6d0019 100%); /* W3C */
 


coordinates for combined background images css
Sun, 09 Oct 2011 19:00:08 BST
 Putting all your background images in one file is ok but real pain to
get the right coordinates for each piece.  Tim sent me this link
http://www.spritecow.com could be pretty usefull saves me working out in
illustrator anyway. 


Glype as proxy
Sun, 11 Sep 2011 07:00:17 BST
 I've just installed glype http://www.glype.com. I'm wanting to test
sites that redirect based on geoip information. It was really easy to
install which is always good and it seems to work just great for what I
want to do.

So all round go them! 


ExpiresByType  mod_expires
Wed, 07 Sep 2011 19:00:03 BST
 I was poking some headers trying to get my friends blog to run smidgin
faster and came across alternative syntax for expires by time. I've
always done it like this until now

ExpiresByType image/gif A7776000

didn't realise you could do like this

ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 9 month"


its all here at http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/en/mod/mod_expires.html 


Making an submit element the right height in firefox
Wed, 24 Aug 2011 07:00:03 BST
 Firefox makes submit elements ever so slightly bigger which is really
annoying especially when your trying to line it up with another element

#submitElement::-moz-focus-inner {border:0;}


stack overflow
and
another 


htaccess info
Mon, 01 Aug 2011 07:00:11 BST
 http://perishablepress.com/press/2006/01/10/stupid-htaccess-tricks/

neato more arguments to fit in those square backets
|[T=MIME-type] and forbidden.html [F] and
gone.html [G] all are new to me. Found that after looking
into hardening wordpress here
http://codex.wordpress.org/Hardening_WordPress which has some usefull
stuff for the non wordpress site as well.


| 


Talk on regular expressions
Sun, 24 Jul 2011 19:00:10 BST
 Andrew Betts gave good talk on regular expressions at the PHP London
group in july and he has posted them on line at
http://trib.tv/presentations/regex-php/  There is some really good stuff
there its just a bit hard to swallow in one piece. 


Ternary operators in cf
Sun, 24 Jul 2011 19:00:10 BST
 Woo in one bound cf just got better first thing on monday i'm going to
be using these.
ternary operator


Go Ben! 


Javascript Graphs YUI
Sun, 03 Jul 2011 19:00:03 BST
 Yahoo graphs seems neat it all comes out as svg (wonder if that work in
ie: ooh http://caniuse.com/svg says not before ie 9)

Anyway the loading of the framework looks neat too. Definitely use that
next graph I do. 

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/3/charts/ 


See all files in OS X finder
Fri, 20 May 2011 19:00:15 BST
 OS X hides some files by default if this is inconvenient you can do this

Olv:~ adam$ defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

Olv:~ adam$ killall Finder


I was on Mac OS X 10.5.8 


Learning prolog
Sun, 15 May 2011 19:00:10 BST
 Found some resources for learning Prolog online
A prolog dictionary:www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~billw/prologdict.html
and Learn
Prolog Now Prologtastic 


When is abstraction to much abstraction
Sun, 15 May 2011 19:00:10 BST
 Been reading about LessCSS, SASS & CoffeeScript and
I'm wondering just generally if that is the way to go? When does
abstracting, make something simple more complicated. Should you be doing
things in the simplest way possible. Is it introducing more possible
points of failure?

If you introduce these steps are you also increasing the understanding
needed to edit something from just CSS to CSS + SASS?

Perhaps I'm just confused post getting geoffed on Friday. 


Stripping white space from file but preserving in code tags
Tue, 26 Apr 2011 07:00:08 BST
 Stripping white space from file but preserving in code tags.

Another thing i found difficult but this seems to work for now

/* strip out excess where not in code tags*/
/* all the white space with single space */
$data = preg_replace('/(?!(?:[^|[^>]+))(\s)/i'," ",
trim($data));
   /* all the double spaces */
$data = preg_replace("/(?!(?:[^|[^>]+))( ){2,}/"," ",$data);

/* all the > < spaces with >< */
$data = preg_replace("/(?!(?:[^|[^>]+))(> 

 


Division problems on 32bit OS
Mon, 18 Apr 2011 19:54:58 BST
 I was happily doing some prime number detection until I came across some
limits in my 32bit OSX 10.5

(7849431181 % 41) produces -1


which threw me then I read about it a little more if you want to tell if
your php is running under 32bit OS try this: 

echo PHP_INT_MAX; // I get 2147483647


If your 32bit you get:
2147483647
If your 64bit like dreamhost servers are you get
9223372036854775807

That really confused me. 


Moving your wordpress blog to a new domain name
Mon, 14 Mar 2011 07:00:09 GMT
 I'm uploading this myself so i can find it allways seems to take a while
to google it.
Or if you just want to upload your local development copy to your online
server.

Update your options

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = replace(option_value,
'http://www.old.com', 'http://www.new.com') WHERE option_name = 'home'
OR option_name = 'siteurl';



If its all new and has few plugins this is only one line but after a
while it can get repetitive in the options

Update your posts

UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = replace(guid,
'http://www.old.com','http://www.new.com');



Then you probably want to check the content of your posts for links and included image paths etc

SELECT * FROM wp_posts 
WHERE post_content like '%http://www.old.com%'


In an ideal world there won't be any hard coded url paths in post contents but unfortunately :)

Drink tea! 


Case sensitive fieldnames in cf
Thu, 10 Mar 2011 20:00:03 GMT
 Cf is annoying when it capitalises all your form fieldnames

Raymond Camden has solution go him
 


Learning awk
Sun, 30 Jan 2011 20:00:17 GMT
 Wow you can do functions in awk it is so mighty!

http://www.chemie.fu-berlin.de/chemnet/use/info/gawk/gawk_1.html 


cfabort in cfscript
Fri, 28 Jan 2011 20:00:04 GMT
 cfabort in cfscript tags is  abort; not 
cfabort(); or cfabort;  but you can also do 
exit; 


How to mess with web.config file properties
Thu, 27 Jan 2011 20:00:10 GMT
 If you have the misfortune to have to buld stuff in iis 7

You will want to get at the headers these people explain how to do some 
of the things you want
http://community.discountasp.net/showthread.php?t=5770 


Cfquery returns null in query result as [empty string] when you cf dump it
Thu, 13 Jan 2011 20:00:12 GMT
 So if you want to tell if something is null or what cf query cfdumps as [empty string] you can 
do this

asc(field) Eq '0' 

when field is your db field to tell if is null

or as craig says

len(field) Eq '0'
 


in Cf 9 you can do IsNull()
Thu, 13 Jan 2011 20:00:12 GMT
 says ben nadel 
working with NULL values.

but from a query you can't. 


SQL joins explained with pictures
Tue, 11 Jan 2011 20:00:09 GMT
 A visual explanation of SQL joins helped me find that my error wasn't 
anything to do with my joins ironically
 


CF_SQL_DECIMAL in cf
Tue, 04 Jan 2011 20:00:08 GMT
 is a bit odd if you don't specify a scale it rounds your number to a 
whole number so 39.60 becomes 40



so you need to do this



and then you get 39.60 which is what you wanted 


Find your Dad factor
Tue, 04 Jan 2011 14:48:43 GMT
 Just in case there is the remotest chance of anybody caring here is a prototype 
of a script to find your dadness.


#!/bin/sh
Child=100;
Grandchild=50;
GreatGrandchild=25;
Beard=30;
echo "Hello, But are you a Dad if so find out your Dadness";
echo - "Enter ChildCount (1,2 etc) ";
read ChildCount
echo - "Enter GrandChildCount (1,2 etc) ";
read GrandChildCount
echo - "Enter GreatGrandChildCount (1,2 etc) ";
read GreatGrandChildCount
echo - "Do you have Have Beard (1,0)";
read BeardCount

Dadness=$((( ( ($Child*$ChildCount)+($Grandchild*$GrandChildCount) )+( 
($GreatGrandchild*$GreatGrandChildCount) )+( ($Beard*$BeardCount) ) )));
echo - "Your Dadness is: "$Dadness;


Kept me quiet during wet lunchtime anyway. 


Renaming files based on their modification date in bash
Fri, 31 Dec 2010 14:05:07 GMT
 I wanted to rename all my photos to their modification dates cause Ikeep moving them from machine to machine OS to OS and losing the date info.
It turned out to be a bit awkward but this works on Mac OSX

#!/bin/sh
## 
# copies all files in folder to YYYYMMDD.extension from their modification time; 
#
# @param folder		where to look for files in and where the renamed files will end up
#
# @return 			renamed files in folder

folder="test/"
counter=0;
for i in $folder*
do
counter=$[counter+1];

mon=""
j=`stat -f %Sm "$i" | awk '{printf("%d-%s-%02d",$4,$1,$2)}'`
#echo "$j";
ext=`echo ${i:(-4)} | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'`;
#echo $ext;
case `echo ${j:5:3}` in
Jan)   mon=01 ;;
Feb)   mon=02 ;;
Mar)   mon=03 ;;
Apr)   mon=04 ;;
May)   mon=05 ;;
Jun)   mon=06 ;;
Jul)   mon=07 ;;
Aug)   mon=08 ;;
Sep)   mon=09 ;;
Oct)   mon=10 ;;
Nov)   mon=11 ;;
Dec)   mon=12 ;;
*)    mon=ERR
esac
j=${j:0:4}$mon${j:9:2}
echo "$i ->" $folder$j$ext;
mv "$i" $folder$j$ext;
done
echo $counter" files in \""$folder"\" renamed";
 


If you want to use location() in a cfscript tag in coldfusion
Fri, 24 Dec 2010 20:00:08 GMT
 You have to use location() inside cfscript tags use it like this location(url="page_to_relocate_to", addtoken="true|false", statuscode="404") rather than how it describes in cf documentation location(url="page_to_relocate_to", "true|false", "404") because that doesn't work. I couldn't comment on the cf docs because their form doesn't work for me 


Bash Scripting Tutorial
Sun, 12 Dec 2010 20:00:11 GMT
 I was getting a bit stuck with my if/elseif/else statements whilst writing a ram monitoring bash script found this helpful 


An approach to writing better js
Wed, 17 Nov 2010 08:00:17 GMT
 This guy (Aaron Newton) seems to have a good plan for developing his javascript programming to patterns 


Woo!
Sat, 09 Oct 2010 07:00:05 BST
 There are times when you just want to shout Woo , this is one. 


Starting with Git
Sun, 19 Sep 2010 17:22:58 BST
 I've just started looking at using Git for version/revision control and I found this quite helpful. 


Coldfusion variable names can't contain a - character
Wed, 18 Aug 2010 20:06:50 BST
 So you can't name a variable 'navigation-list'. Like I just did cf docs 
say "A variable name must begin with a letter, underscore, or Unicode 
currency symbol."

Coldfusion 
Variable Naming Rules 


Sqlite is the best thing thing since sliced bread
Sun, 15 Aug 2010 15:56:04 BST
 If your not using SQLite you should 
find out about it, it is really very neat.

It seems to me that many people use sledgehammer databases like SQL 
server which are inappropriate for often nutcracker situations. SQLite 
allows things to be kept simple.