Geoff Garbers

Preserving whitespace in bash variables

Geoff Garbers — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 08:24:43 +0000

I’ve been creating some bash scripts for an importer we are running at work. I was looking to do two things with this. Firstly, I wanted to brush up on my knowledge of bash scripting. Secondly, I wanted to improve the notifications sent out from the importer. I managed to get everything working fine. Except [...]

The lifecycle of a PHP script

Geoff Garbers — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 15:32:54 +0000

I was researching some libraries in PHP for the interaction of PHP and XMPP, and stumbled across an interesting article on the life cycle of a PHP script – from initialization to shutdown. It’s an old post (from 2008), but I would imagine the same principles still apply. It’s worth a read if you’re a [...]

Some useful CakePHP bootstrap functions

Geoff Garbers — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 15:00:47 +0000

CakePHP has an amazing ability to allow you to customise your application. One such way in which this is done, is through the use of a bootstrap file, that allows you to create functions, or include files application-wide. In this post, I’ll share with you some of the functions that I include in almost every [...]

Downgrading from PHP5.3 on Ubuntu 10.04

Geoff Garbers — Mon, 31 May 2010 20:31:30 +0000

I performed an upgrade on my work laptop, and upgraded from Ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04. With it came some welcome upgrades, such as Netbeans 6.8 (which is a super awesome IDE, I might add), and a slicker interface, as well as some not-so-welcome upgrades, such as PHP 5.3. Now, PHP 5.3 generates a huge number [...]

Useful JavaScript Bookmarklets

Geoff Garbers — Fri, 21 May 2010 11:36:40 +0000

I’ve often found, when developing front-end applications, that there are some useful little Javascript bookmarklets that make my life so much easier. In order to not have to keep tracking them down, I figured I’d create a little repository of these bookmarklets that I’ve found. The fact that it might help other developers is an [...]

Implementing an AppShell for CakePHP

Geoff Garbers — Sun, 02 May 2010 12:35:38 +0000

UPDATE: Since the release of the later versions of CakePHP (I think version 1.3.0 and onwards), there are the APP/libs libraries that we can now utilize. So, instead of having two separate app_shell.php files, you can now define APP/libs/app_shell.php, and call App::import('Lib', 'AppShell'); at the beginning of your shell files. If you’re like me, you [...]

Extracting images from a South African MMS

Geoff Garbers — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 05:58:28 +0000

Recently, one of the projects I worked on had a requirement where users of the site were allowed to submit articles, and submit images linked to these articles. These images were optional, and due to the fact that this was for a mobile site, we needed to keep this process as phone-agnostic as possible. Finally, [...]

Rawr! Moar space! Moar traffic!

Geoff Garbers — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 19:20:36 +0000

Wonderful news! I always knew that A Small Orange (the hosting company that this blog, and any other sites that I host are hosted with) was awesome, but they just got even more awesome! I’m used to working with Hetzner, the South African hosting company that I have to deal with every day at work. [...]

Aching legs and long distances…

Geoff Garbers — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 12:56:33 +0000

I recently finished running the Two Oceans’ half-marathon, held every over the Easter weekend in Cape Town. Oh. My. Word. WHAT an amazing race it is! As difficult as it is running a half-marathon (especially in my case, as rugby takes up the time I could spend training for long-distance running), it is the most [...]

Starting afresh…

Geoff Garbers — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 13:58:22 +0000

Okay. So, I made myself a pledge about 6 or 10 months in which I said I was going to be blogging regularly about all things development. Clearly that never happened. So, here I go again, making a fresh attempt at trying to keep a blog. So, what is different this time around? Well, I [...]