danneh.org

Compaq CQ60 Display Issues – The Unexpected Part 3

Dan — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 23:32:00 +0000

I recently had an unexpected part 3 to this tale the other day, when the display went. Again. But this time, different symptoms. This time, the backlight went. Oh sh*t, replacing LCD panels isn’t exactly cheap, and since the backlight diffusers and CCFL’s are fused to the back of the LCD panel itself, there was [...]

Get website-level configuration in Magento

Dan — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 13:38:08 +0000

I stumbled across this one a couple of times now, and it’s caught me out every time. With Magento, you have the method Mage::getStoreConfig() to get a store-level config, but nothing obvious to get a website-level configuration (such as a default URL for the website). So I used this; Mage::app()->getWebsite($websiteId)->getConfig('web/unsecure/base_url') It’s the same syntax as [...]

Bug in Magento 1.6.1.0/1.6.2.0 affecting development sites using base_url

Dan — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 19:01:04 +0000

I installed a copy of Magento 1.6.1.0 on a dev site I setup to do some testing with Varnish with (more on that later). However, in the requirement to be able to get to Magento using 2 different URL’s, I stumbled across this quite annoying bug. a:5:{i:0;s:67:"Illegal scheme supplied, only alphanumeric characters are permitted";i:1;s:729:"#0 /home/dan/workspace/magento1610/app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Store.php(712): [...]

Getting Configurable Product from Simple Product ID in Magento 1.5+

Dan — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 11:12:49 +0000

I recently stumbled across a hurdle which stopped some of my code from working. It was code that gets the configurable product associated with a given simple product. Many solutions out there call a “loadParentProductIds()” function within the Mage_Catalog_Model_Product class. However, as of Magento 1.4.2.0, they deprecated this method, simply by setting the data element [...]

Adding multiple products to the cart simultaneously in Magento (Part 2)

Dan — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 21:10:21 +0000

A while ago I wrote about adding multiple products to the shopping cart simultaneously. It turns out this seems to have stopped working from Magento 1.4 or so. Up until now, I’ve not really had the time to look in detail to figure out why. Finally, this evening, I got some time. So I dug [...]

Amazon EC2 Elastic Load Balancer limit

Dan — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 08:56:22 +0000

If, like us, you’re running a shared hosting platform on Amazon EC2, and have many clients requiring SSL certificates, you’ll probably be using Elastic Load Balancers to do the SSL termination for you, since you can’t have multiple Elastic IP’s associated with a single instance. However, when you reach either 5 or 10 ELB’s, you’ll [...]

Adding new attribute to Customer Account in Magento

Dan — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 10:37:56 +0000

I recently discovered that this is a right pig to get going. There’s plenty of “solutions” on the interwebs. Many seemingly either don’t work, don’t work as expected, or are complete hacks which makes your extension not modular (i.e; by executing the “addAttribute” function within a template, then removing it once it’s done). Here’s how [...]

Speeding Up Internet Access with Firefox

Dan — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 12:16:38 +0000

I stumbled across a post earlier today, and I thought it was far too rich and useful not to share. This post isn’t for the faint hearted, as a wrong click on a configuration key not mentioned here could impair Firefox’s performance, or worse, stop it working completely. By following these instructions, you agree I [...]

Amazon Web Services – A Guide to Implementation

Dan — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 11:08:06 +0000

I realise that I’ve been neglecting my blog for a while now, with my last post published at the end of March. Quite frankly, I’ve not had anything interesting to write about. However, career starting pastures new, I’m starting to have interesting things to write about again. Over the course of time, I’ll probably post [...]

Outlook 2010 not storing passwords

Dan — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 15:46:03 +0000

I recently came across a problem with Microsoft Office Outlook 2010 on Windows 7 whereby it didn’t seem to be saving passwords when connecting to Microsoft Exchange (2007, at least). Now, I’ve used Outlook 2010 on Windows 7 before, and it saved the passwords a treat. Some people seemed to suggest it was architecture related [...]