FractalizeR's WebSite

Getting rid of “error:: no video mode activated” when using full disk encryption in Ubuntu 12.04

FractalizeR — Thu, 10 May 2012 17:59:28 +0000

sudo cp usr/share/grub/*.pf2 /boot/grub sudo update-grub

One-liner to make gEdit 3 correctly autodetect russian encoding

FractalizeR — Wed, 09 May 2012 18:54:38 +0000

Recently I installed Ubuntu 12.04 and it’s gEdit doesn’t recognize cyrillic (Windows-1251) encoding correctly. I discovered one-liner to make it do the task: sudo gsettings set org.gnome.gedit.preferences.encodings auto-detected "['UTF-8', 'CURRENT', 'WINDOWS-1251', 'ISO-8859-15', 'UTF-16']"

84 PHP functions for disable_functions directive

FractalizeR — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 08:57:01 +0000

A list of php function functions, disabled on the servers I configured: apache_note apache_setenv chgrp closelog debugger_off debugger_on define_sys define_syslog_variables diskfreespace dl escapeshellarg escapeshellcmd exec getmypid getmyuid ini_restore leak listen openlog passthru pclose pcntl_alarm pcntl_exec pcntl_fork pcntl_getpriority pcntl_get_last_error pcntl_setpriority pcntl_signal pcntl_signal_dispatch pcntl_sigprocmask pcntl_sigtimedwait pcntl_sigwaitinfo pcntl_strerror pcntl_wait pcntl_waitpid pcntl_wexitstatus pcntl_wifexited pcntl_wifsignaled pcntl_wifstopped pcntl_wstopsig pcntl_wtermsig php_uname popen [...]

Autoloading PEAR incompatible classes, installed from PEAR packages

FractalizeR — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 08:42:01 +0000

I like PEAR distribution system. It’s simple to use and installed packages are globally available to all your server scripts (of course, this is an advantage only when you mean it to be). But to easily use packages, installed into PEAR, they should follow some conventions, which are rather old these days, when PSR-0 is [...]

Symfony2: how to redirect user to a previous page correctly (without using HTTP_REFERER)

FractalizeR — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 14:09:39 +0000

I was implementing simple menu, that would allow user to change site language. The site uses standard symfony2 localized urls like http://www.example.com/en/contact. The problem was to return user to a page, where he previously was, but rendered in a selected language. I didn’t like to do any find/replace on REFERER. Let me show you my [...]

phpSweetPDO on GitHub

FractalizeR — Sun, 01 May 2011 21:50:32 +0000

Some time ago I blogged about creating nice PDO wrapper. Recently I’ve created a repository for my small PDO wrapper on GitHub: https://github.com/FractalizeR/phpSweetPDO Library is released under Apache License. Feel free to use it!

Smarty extention for Silex framework

FractalizeR — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 18:56:07 +0000

I’ve just released a first version of Smarty extension for Silex framework. You can take it here Silex is a PHP microframework for PHP 5.3. It is built on the shoulders of Symfony2 and Pimple and also inspired by sinatra. A microframework provides the guts for building simple single-file apps.

vBTruth: the truth about VBulletin and Internet Brands

FractalizeR — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 08:37:45 +0000

Today I stumbled upon a good site – http://vbtruth.com/ If you want to know anything about Internet Brands suit against XenForo, you should definitely visit it and read some pages about so-called “idea stealing proofs” of IB. I enjoyed reading it really.

Joomla’s Slick RSS (mod_slick_rss) improved and reworked for Joomla 1.5 and PHP 5.3

FractalizeR — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 10:02:45 +0000

Hello. Recently I was upgrading my websites on Joomla and moved them to PHP 5.3. I noticed too many errors from mod_slick_rss extension coming to PHP log. I’ve fixed them and added some new options: Some new CSS classes to further style layoout Ability to sort feeds by date or by their original order in [...]

Splitting string at capitalized letters

FractalizeR — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 15:42:52 +0000

Recently I had a task to split a given string at capitalized characters, having those saved in PHP. I’ve invented the following solution: The result is: array(4) { [0]=> string(4) "Test" [1]=> string(2) "My" [2]=> string(4) "Func" [3]=> string(4) "Call" } I utilize regular expressions assertions here to avoid character loss.

Practising OOP in PHP5: emulating mixins (Ruby-like)

FractalizeR — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 20:25:23 +0000

Some evening I was implementing behavorial patterns in my framework’s ORM and I desperately needed something like Ruby mixin or C# extension method or like trait/graft in PHP6+. So I was curious to see how can I implement mixins in PHP. If you don’t know what mixin is, I will tell you at once. So, [...]

Munin: Pango-WARNING **: Invalid UTF-8 string passed to pango_layout_set_text()

FractalizeR — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 13:15:32 +0000

To fix this bug, you need to patch a file /usr/share/munin/munin-graph in the following way: After line add After line add Somehow this bug is still in place in latest CentOS repos as of 05.11.2010. Don’t know why.

Munin troubles: Fatal error: Could not open “/var/lib/munin/datafile” for writing

FractalizeR — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 12:09:08 +0000

Hello. Having installed Munin recently on my servers, I started to get emails from cron saying Fatal error: Could not open "/var/lib/munin/datafile" for writing: Permission denied at /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.8/Munin.pm line 727. (process:18039): Pango-WARNING **: Invalid UTF-8 string passed to pango_layout_set_text() I also got some errors about /var/log/munin/munin-update.log being inaccessible. Somehow these files does not belong to [...]

XenForo 1.0 Beta 1 Admin Control Panel in Pictures

FractalizeR — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 18:50:33 +0000

If you are going to make a decision about purchasing XenForo, I think, it will be useful for you to catch an image of XenForo admin area because it really reveals almost full XenForo potential. No text below. Just images. Have fun! Options BBCodes Smiles Applications Users Trophies Apperarance Tools

Internet Brands claims against Xenforo

FractalizeR — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 17:40:44 +0000

Today, at the very edge of XenForo sales starting day Internet Brands claimed against XenForo. Of course, this happened just before the sales day to impact panic on XenForo customers and prevent them from investing into potential VBulletin killer forum software. Internet brands representative, IBAdrian, among all other things says: Perhaps Kier and Mike think [...]

Regular expression for russian letters in UTF-8

FractalizeR — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 09:27:54 +0000

(\xD0[\x80-\xBF])|(\xD1[\x80-\xBF])

VBulletin 4.0.7: they rocked me again

FractalizeR — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 08:19:57 +0000

For some time I was deeply afraid of installing any new release of VBulletin to the forum I administer. But after 4.0.7 came out with several performance bugs fixed I though, that may be it’s time to install it and hoped that installation will go smooth. I closed the forum for 1 hour, blamed myself [...]

VBulletin QA Team Epic Fail #4.0.5: AAARGGHHH!

FractalizeR — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 18:34:08 +0000

VBulletin 4.0.5 is released. Among some bug fixes (about 50), we’ve got some new ones to laugh at. If you install this “maintenance pack”, you will happily look at your forum usernames now contain ARG:5 UNDEFINED message. Nice, eh? But again, as with the bugs in 4.0.4 nothing of this kind appeared on official VBulletin [...]

VBulletin 4: “This seems like a terrible place to put this, but I don’t know where else it should go.”

FractalizeR — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 08:26:44 +0000

class_taggablecontent.php of VBulletin 4.0.4 forum engine contains the following code: This small piece of code says, that the guy who wrote it doesn’t even know how VBulletin options work! Damn it, Internet Brands, who you hired??? Ask your devs at least not to communicate to each other via comments in VBulletin code. Please! They can [...]

VBulletin 4.0.4 PL1 out! “We will rock you!”

FractalizeR — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 06:51:25 +0000

VBulletin 4.0.1 PL 1 is now out. I was going to install it but… It does not fix any of the Known issues. Why? Who knows…