Lazy Robot

Quick evaluation of complex properties in Xdebug within Vim

2012-01-31T11:03:00.001Z

For those of us who still use Vim for PHP development, getting Xdebug to work nicely with complex properties is a pain. Most of the time we end up evaluating print_r to get any sort of complex structure or deeply nested value. Not any more! Use this remapping:

nnoremap ,p :python debugger_watch_input("property_get")<cr>A

This is similar to ,e for quick evaluation, but lets you quickly get any given property. Press ,p and type the property you want or, if you prefer, use yank and ^R to copy/paste the property into the debugger window. It works for objects and array subscripts, so you can type complicated things like:

/*}}}1*/ => property_get: $this->someArray['mySubscript']

and get the value of the named property.

Bickerton Hill

2012-01-02T22:53:00.000Z

Bradfield in the cold

2011-12-18T16:51:00.000Z

Christmas Comes To Sheffield

2011-12-12T21:27:00.000Z

Dickensian Carollers

Merry Go Round

What a jolly horse

Orchard Square

This just made me laugh

Autumn Colours

2011-12-06T14:03:00.019Z

The last of the autumn colours are shining brightly in the face of the on-coming winter. There was snow on the ground, but the light made the reds and oranges of autumn glow.

Winter Gardens

2011-12-02T12:41:00.001Z

Winter Gardens, a photo by craigand on Flickr.

Crunch crunch crunch

2011-12-01T23:51:00.001Z

Crunch crunch crunch, a photo by craigand on Flickr.

Autumn is pretty much over, and all that's left is crunchy, leafy detritus.

City Lights

2011-12-01T08:56:00.003Z

City Lights, a photo by craigand on Flickr.

Walking

2011-11-30T16:15:00.001Z

Walking, a photo by craigand on Flickr.

Sheffield Gets Festive

2011-11-28T21:26:00.000Z

Welcome to this end of Division Street!

Welcome to the other end of Division Street!

Lights outside John Lewis


Bubble Tree in the Peace Gardens	Winter Gardens, rear entrance

Wintery bubble things

The Peace Gardens

Outdoor seating, for those foolish enough to want it

Furnival Gate

The Moor

Arundel Gate

Another outdoor seating area, also populated by nobody much

Can you tell what it is yet?

Outside the Globe

Path to the station

The Showroom, all lit up

Reflections in the water feature

Precarious stairs

Waterfalls outside the station

Closer look at the waterfalls

Wall o' waterfalls

Waiting by the taxi rank

Not much warmer inside the station

A view over the station waterworks

Illuminated fountain

The Winter Gardens. A bit blurry, but I like it anyway.

The Town Hall looking rather terrifying

Happy <insert holiday here>!

Lest we forget

2011-11-17T22:42:00.000Z

In remembrance

Fields of blood

Wreaths

Cenotaph

Around Sheffield

2011-11-14T12:00:00.000Z

Balloons

Stairs to the Job Centre

Secret garden

Creepers

View from Barkers Pool

Interesting street lamp

Magistrates Court

XSS Hacks For Fun And Profit

2011-11-07T22:41:00.002Z

Sometimes, just sometimes, I want to do something completely ludicrous with my web pages. For instance, just recently I wanted to embed dynamic, externally hosted content in a Blogger page, and I wanted to do it without having internal scroll bars. This meant sizing the iframe hosting the content to precisely fit the content within it, resizing it every time the content changed.

Told you it was ludicrous.

Anyway, I quickly ran into a few problems to do with cross-site scripting. Specifically, when a page is contained in an iframe within a page on a different domain, there are two things you can't do:

It's impossible to size an iframe to its contents from the containing page
It's impossible to size an iframe to its contents from inside the iframe

So how do I do it? Well, I use a mighty XSS hack! Give this a try:

Create a resizing widget

Create a blogger page called 'resize-widget' that contains the following code:

<script type="text/javascript">
<!-- 
      /**
       * This iframe gets load by the first iframe. This one
       * will communicate with the main page telling it to
       * resize the iframe that has content in it. It will
       * get the height from the URL that was used to
       * link to this page, e.g. iframe-resize.html?height=456
       */
        var params = window.location.search.substring( 1 ).split( '&' );
        var height;
        for( var i = 0, l = params.length; i < l; ++i ) {
          var parts = params[i].split( '=' );
          switch( parts[0] ) {
          case 'height':
            height = parseInt( parts[1] );
            break;
          }
        }
        if( typeof( height ) == 'number' ) {
          window.top.updateIFrame( height );
        }
//-->
</script>

What does it do? Not a lot. It pulls the request URL apart, finds a parameter named "height", and then calls a Javascript function on the topmost frame, passing the value of the height parameter as an argument.

Of course, it assumes that it is allowed to call functions on the topmost frame (i.e. it's on the same domain), and that the updateIFrame function exists. But assuming that is true, all is well.

Create the containing page

Next, create a page to contain your iframe to be resized. I will call mine iframe-resize-demo, although of course you can call it anything you like. Put this code in it:

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
      /**
       * This function must be available on the main outer page.
       * When called with a height it will update the size of the
       * iframe to match that height.
       */
      function updateIFrame( height ) {

        var iframe = document.getElementById( 'myiframe' );
        var sidebar = document.getElementById( 'sidebar-wrapper' );
        iframe.setAttribute( 'height', Math.max(height, sidebar.scrollHeight) );

        var content = document.getElementById( 'content-wrapper' );
        document.body.scrollTop = Math.min(document.body.scrollTop, content.offsetTop);
      }
//-->
</script>

<iframe frameborder="0" height="150px" id="myiframe" scrolling="NO" src="http://my-nested-domain.com" width="100%"></iframe>

Aha! There's that updateIFrame function that takes a height as its parameter! What does it do? It updates the height of the iframe to match the height parameter. Actually it does a little more - it resizes it to the maximum of either the height parameter or the scrollHeight of the Blogger sidebar. It does this to ensure the Blogger template flows properly.

Create the dynamic, externally-hosted content

Of course, the external content can contain anything you like. But put this in it:

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
/**
 * This function will update the URL on the inner iframe,
 * i.e. the iframe within an iframe.
 */
function resizeThisFrame() {
    var iframe = document.getElementById( 'inneriframe' );
    var wrapper = document.getElementById( 'wrapper' );
    var height = Math.max( document.body.offsetHeight, document.body.scrollHeigh
t );
    iframe.src = 'http://myblog.blogspot.com/p/resize-widget.html?height
='+height;
}
//-->
</script>

<body onload="resizeThisFrame()">
<iframe height="1px" width="1px" id="inneriframe" style="display: none;"></iframe>

What does it do? When the document body loads, it calculates the total height of the document, adds it to the URL of the resize-widget page we created a while back, and loads that URL into the iframe. This sets of a chain of events that culminates with the height parameter calculated here being passed into the updateIFrame function, and the iframe containing the page we've just written being expanded to fit!

Don't you feel dirty now?

Inspiration from Blog What I Made, and modified to work with Blogger.

Skip

2011-11-07T12:00:00.000Z

Street Force

2011-11-06T12:00:00.000Z

Who ya gonna call?

Puddle

2011-11-05T12:00:00.000Z

This is what I was parked in. Thankfully I had decent boots on so I didn't get wet.

Security by Elevation

2011-11-04T12:00:00.000Z

I'm seeing this technique more and more frequently these days. Most peculiar seeing a row of bikes all hanging off a fence at different heights.

Wintry Church

2011-11-03T22:16:00.001Z

Church, a photo by craigand on Flickr.

Clock

2011-10-26T12:00:00.000+01:00

Mack

2011-10-25T12:00:00.000+01:00

I assume that's his name ...

Railings

2011-10-24T23:00:00.001+01:00

IMG_0496, a photo by craigand on Flickr.

I thought these looked quite cool.

Autumn encroaches

2011-10-24T22:50:00.001+01:00

IMG_0490, a photo by craigand on Flickr.

Caught this tree mid-turn.

Castleton

2011-10-24T12:00:00.000+01:00

Jack

2011-10-23T18:06:00.003+01:00

Jack, a photo by craigand on Flickr.

First jack-o-lantern pumpkin face person thing I've made in many, many years. As designed by Aimee, age 4.

Jack, a photo by craigand on Flickr.

Town Ditch

2011-10-23T11:01:00.001+01:00

IMG_0431, a photo by craigand on Flickr.