1. If you already have Xcode 4.3 installed, go into the Components tab of the Download preferences panel and make sure Command Line Tools are selected

OR

2. Download and install the command line tools as an independent package from either;

a. Apple (requires Apple ID)
b. GitHub

Once you have the command line tools installed, you are able to compile native binaries.

PHPMD – http://phpmd.org/

PHPMD (Mess Detector) scans your source code and computes various quality metrics such as cyclomatic and NPath complexity. These metrics can be used to assess which classes in your codebase need refactoring.

phpcpd – https://github.com/sebastianbergmann/phpcpd

phpcd (Copy Paste Detector) scans your source for code clones — identical fragments of code that are usually created by copying and pasting. Source code with high levels of clones may benefit from refactoring.

What are your favourite tools to help in your refactoring efforts?

A recent post on reddit/PHP asked an interesting question: how can you determine the extension requirements of your PHP application in a programmatic way? And could you add such a check to a continuous integration environment to validate dependencies?

I’ve come up with a relative simple solution, albeit with some caveats (see below). The process requires two distinct stages:

1. Gather a list of extensions and functions from a PHP environment
2. Scan PHP source code for function calls and flag up any that are not either a) available in the PHP environment or b) user defined.

I’ve posted some code to Github that demonstrates how this can be done. You can find the source code here: https://github.com/glenscott/php-dependencies.

For stage 1, you must determine the functions that are defined in your PHP environment. This is done by running get-env-functions.php either on the command line, or from within your document root. This will create a config file in the directory defined by CONFIG_PATH. This config file will be used by the second script, scan-dependencies.php.

scan-dependencies.php will scan through PHP source code defined by SOURCE_PATH and use the configuration file generated previously. After it finishes scanning, it will list all function calls made that are not defined in either PHP itself, or within the source directory.

Example Run

Getting details of your PHP environment

$ php get-env-functions.php
Found 1743 total functions in 61 extensions available in PHP.

Scanning source code for dependencies

$ php scan-dependencies.php
Found 3 function calls and 1 object instantiations in your script.
Function ps_setgray not defined.

In this example, the function ps_setgray was called in a script but not defined anywhere.

Caveats

• Your source code and its dependencies must lie under one directory — included/required files outside this directory are not scanned
• As it stands, only _function_ dependencies are found. This means that class dependencies are not checked.

Final thoughts

This is by no means a complete solution, but I hope it is of some use. Please feel free to comment, or suggest improvements.

In file included from /private/tmp/APC/apc.c:44:
/usr/include/php/ext/pcre/php_pcre.h:29:18: error: pcre.h: No such file or directory
In file included from /private/tmp/APC/apc.c:44:
/usr/include/php/ext/pcre/php_pcre.h:37: error: expected ‘=’, ‘,’, ‘;’, ‘asm’ or ‘__attribute__’ before ‘*’ token
/usr/include/php/ext/pcre/php_pcre.h:38: error: expected ‘=’, ‘,’, ‘;’, ‘asm’ or ‘__attribute__’ before ‘*’ token
/usr/include/php/ext/pcre/php_pcre.h:44: error: expected specifier-qualifier-list before ‘pcre’
/private/tmp/APC/apc.c:393: error: expected specifier-qualifier-list before ‘pcre’
/private/tmp/APC/apc.c: In function ‘apc_regex_compile_array’:
/private/tmp/APC/apc.c:454: error: ‘apc_regex’ has no member named ‘preg’
/private/tmp/APC/apc.c:454: error: ‘apc_regex’ has no member named ‘preg’
/private/tmp/APC/apc.c:455: error: ‘apc_regex’ has no member named ‘nreg’
/private/tmp/APC/apc.c:455: error: ‘apc_regex’ has no member named ‘nreg’
/private/tmp/APC/apc.c: In function ‘apc_regex_match_array’:
/private/tmp/APC/apc.c:487: error: ‘apc_regex’ has no member named ‘preg’
/private/tmp/APC/apc.c:487: error: ‘apc_regex’ has no member named ‘preg’
/private/tmp/APC/apc.c:488: error: ‘apc_regex’ has no member named ‘nreg’
/private/tmp/APC/apc.c:488: error: ‘apc_regex’ has no member named ‘nreg’
make: *** [apc.lo] Error 1
ERROR: `make' failed

Thankfully, the solution is simple. APC requires PCRE libraries and header files to be available, so we can download and install these from source:

• Download the latest PCRE from http://sourceforge.net/projects/pcre/files/latest/download?source=files
• Unzip the file
• cd into the unzipped pcre- directory and then type:

./configure
make
sudo make install

Next, we can install the APC extension using the normal PECL route:

sudo pecl install apc

Confirm that you have the following line in your php.ini file:

extension=apc.so

Restart Apache, if required:

sudo apachectl graceful

You should now have APC available, and you can confirm this by looking at your phpinfo output:

https://github.com/glenscott/simple-crypt

This is an OO wrapper around the most common mcrypt functions. An example of use:

require_once 'SimpleCrypt.php';

// show the algorithms available for use
print_r( SimpleCrypt::get_available_algorithms() );

// encrypt a string using Triple DES (CBC mode)
$crypt = new SimpleCrypt( 'tripledes', 'mysecretkey' );
$encrypted_data = $crypt->encrypt_data( 'stringtoencrypt' );
echo "Encrypted data: " . bin2hex( $encrypted_data ) . "\n";
echo "Decrypted data: " . $crypt->decrypt_data( $encrypted_data ) . "\n";

If you find it useful, please let me know!

map invoke failed: JS Error: TypeError: this.fieldname has no properties

fieldname in this case is a field that does not exist in all of the documents.

To prevent this error, you can pass the optional query parameter to the command to make sure that only documents with this field are queried. For example, in PHP, add the following to the command operation:

$db->command(
    'mapreduce' => 'collection',
    'map'       => $map,
    'reduce'    => $reduce,
    'out'       => array( 'inline' => 1 ),
    'query'     => array( "fieldname" => array( '$exists' => true, ) )
);

This makes sure that MapReduce operations are only run on a subset of the collection.

Yesterday, the 17th January 2012, Virgin Media broadband customers experienced partial or total loss of connectivity throughout the afternoon and evening. As one of those customers affected by the outage, I am making a formal complaint to the company. As I work from home and require internet connectivity at all times, this outage had a serious affect on my business.

For others that are considering complaining, here is how you can do it — it took me a fair bit of searching to find this, so I hope this is helpful to others.

Firstly, you may wish to read Virgin Media’s Code of Practice for complaints.

To submit a complaint, you can use the web form located here:

Virgin Media – Contact Us

1. Select General Enquiry
2. Choose I have cable services
3. Select Make a customer services complaint
4. Click the red Next button at the bottom of the page

This leads you to a contact form where you can submit your complaint. You will also need you Virgin Media account number and the password you use for logging into the site.

Good luck!

Photo credit: Gene Hunt

In Part 2, I mentioned how I used Google Docs as a way of managing business records. Although this turned out to be a reasonable solution, I soon found myself wanting something more bespoke.

Enter FreeAgent. I heard a few other freelancers recommending this service, so I signed up for a free 30 day trial to see what the fuss was about. FreeAgent provides a way of managing your client details, invoices and tax affairs. The interface is very slick and friendly, and means keeping on top of record keeping is now much less of a chore!

I’ve now been using the paid service for 2 months and I can heartily recommend it. If you want to give it a go, you can use this link to get 10% off the subscription price of FreeAgent.

(photo credit: www.seniorliving.org)

MongoDB comes with a useful tool, mongoexport, for exporting collections. However, you can also use it to export specific documents by utilising the query parameter. You can export a single document using it’s ObjectId using a command similar to the following:

mongoexport -h "host_name" -u "username" -d "database_name" -c "collection_name" -q '{"_id":ObjectId("4f045677a1ef264746000011")}' -o output.js -p

• Replace host_name, username, database_name and collection_name with the appropriate values.
• Replace 4f045677a1ef264746000011 with the ObjectID that you wish to export

You will be prompted for a password, and then the document will be written to output.js.

To export multiple documents, you can utilise an $in clause in the query parameter like this:

-q '{"_id":{"$in" :[ ObjectId("4f048dc6a1ef26da4b000008"),ObjectId("4ed8ee16a1ef26085600001a"),ObjectId("4efc46e0a1ef26b73d0007be")]}}'

To import these exported documents into another MongoDB server, you can use the mongoimport like so:

mongoimport -h "host_name" -u "username" -p -d "database_name" -c "collection_name" output.js