roadha.us

My daughter deserves better

haliphax — Sat, 22 May 2021 00:00:00 -0500

I'll be honest--I don't want to write this post, and for a multitude of reasons. Namely, I don't want to write this post because writing this post crystallizes the fact that this post needs to be written. I also feel just so wholly inadequate to put text on a screen …

Track change events for YouTube with MutationObserver

haliphax — Tue, 20 Apr 2021 00:00:00 -0500

Have you ever wanted to react to events taking place on a web page, but they aren't capital-e Events that you can catch and handle? I was in this situation recently, where I wanted to grab the current video and chapter titles to display on my Twitch stream. YouTube isn't …

Rate limiting with Flask-SocketIO

haliphax — Mon, 15 Mar 2021 00:00:00 -0500

I've been transitioning the API for a Flask project I'm working on away from REST and toward Socket.IO. In doing so, I came to the abrupt and depressing realization that the rate-limiter I had been using for the REST endpoints (flask-limiter) was unable to apply to Socket.IO endpoints …

Aethersprite: a Discord bot framework

haliphax — Thu, 04 Mar 2021 00:00:00 -0600

For some months, I had been tinkering with the discord.py library and slowly building up a bot for use in Nexus Clash faction servers. The more I added to it, the more I began to realize that what I was really building was a bot framework, and that framework …

Vue.js long-press directive

haliphax — Wed, 06 Jan 2021 00:00:00 -0600

I was looking for an easy way to incorporate the "long press" event so popular in mobile UI into a web project of mine. In my searching, I came a cross a Vue directive that claimed to do the trick. Well, it certainly did, but I had a few reservations …

Halfmoon CSS framework

haliphax — Tue, 20 Oct 2020 00:00:00 -0500

I've been using a CSS microframework, Shoelace, for a little while now in one of my hobby projects. Recently, they began releasing beta versions of their new version and I discovered that they are moving from a CSS microframework to a full-blown web component library. I wish them luck, but …

Minifying Javascript using ESBuild with Flask-Assets

haliphax — Tue, 22 Sep 2020 00:00:00 -0500

I've been using Flask and its Flask-Assets package (which is a wrapper around the webassets package) for quite some time now without issue, but recently, I've been scratching an itch for ES2016 and beyond. One of my favorite features of ES2016+ is that modules (and importing them) are part of …

Nexus Clash Dev Team

haliphax — Fri, 11 Sep 2020 00:00:00 -0500

Well, as happens perpetually, I have neglected my blog. This time, at least, I do have good reasons: I've been coding! Primarily, I have been developing quality-of-life features and refactoring legacy code for Nexus Clash, as I have recently joined the development team. Huzzah! It is a rewarding experience working …

Nexus Clash UserScripts

haliphax — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 00:00:00 -0500

Carrying on my rich tradition of shoehorning quality-of-life improvements into PBBGs, I've created a couple of UserScripts for the Nexus Clash browser game.

The first is an improvement to the Pets management panel which color-codes pets whose AP is running low and shows their decay time in both GMT and …

Tail for browser windows

haliphax — Thu, 13 Feb 2020 00:00:00 -0600

Have you ever been watching log output via a web application, and you just want your browser window to jump to the bottom of the document whenever new output shows up? Well, stranger, let me tell you, I certainly have. That's why I wrote a bookmarklet that does just that …

Browser access keys

haliphax — Thu, 06 Feb 2020 00:00:00 -0600

Thanks to the Nexus Clash PBBG, I have (somewhat) recently been exposed to web browser access keys. I think if it had not been a web app, such as the game, but rather a web site, such as someone's blog, I would not have seen them for the useful tool …

UserScripts for Urban Dead

haliphax — Fri, 31 Jan 2020 00:00:00 -0600

Several years ago, I wrote a series of UserScripts for a persistent, browser-based game (PBBG) called Urban Dead. These scripts tidy up the user interface a bit and add some new features to the game that make quality-of-life improvements to the experience (in my opinion). I abandoned them--and the game--for …

Using ASP.NET connection strings in PowerShell scripts

haliphax — Thu, 30 Jan 2020 00:00:00 -0600

I found a trick for loading ASP.NET connectionString elements from configuration files for use in PowerShell scripts, and I figured I would share it with the class. They are, as should have been obvious to me much sooner, simply XML nodes in an XML document. This comes in pretty …

The Sound of Silence

haliphax — Sun, 08 Dec 2019 00:00:00 -0600

I really haven't been giving this blog the tender love and care that it so truly deserves. I hope to change that in the near future. Then again, I know I've said that before oh-so-many times. What's different about this time?

Placeholder post is forlorn with an air of mystery …

Playing with Dungeon Painter Studio

haliphax — Wed, 01 Aug 2018 00:00:00 -0500

As many nerds do, I play Dungeons & Dragons--specifically, 5th Edition. I've mostly been a player the entire time, but I am the DM (Dungeon Master) of a play-by-post campaign, and recently, tried my hand at a live-play campaign that will serve as a palate cleanser for our regularly-scheduled games. In …

More FlaskBB development

haliphax — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 00:00:00 -0500

The train keeps rolling. I've been busying myself with more FlaskBB development lately. I took the Docker image and expanded it into a docker-compose example. I've also built a plugin for managing email and RSS notifications and another for adding a dice-rolling macro to the forum. The dicebot plugin is …

FlaskBB development

haliphax — Mon, 25 Dec 2017 00:00:00 -0600

Lately, I've been getting involved with some Python-based forum software, FlaskBB. I had been running phpBB for one of my web games' forums, and it became overrun with bots. Given my attraction to Python over the last few years, I began searching for a new solution written in Python. FlaskBB …

Jumping on the static site generator bandwagon with Pelican

haliphax — Mon, 05 Jun 2017 00:00:00 -0500

I've decided to abandon WordPress for my blog and switch to a static site generator. Given my recent interest in Python, I decided to look for a Python-based solution. I've settled on Pelican. I'm already resting easier knowing that my blog isn't a potential attack vector, and I'm experimenting with …

Hosting my own git repositories

haliphax — Thu, 06 Oct 2016 00:00:00 -0500

I've run my own personal git service for several years now. Previously, it was with cgit on nginx and gitolite. I then modded cgit with some password maintenance features. After a while, I tried using several more "modern" git repo hosting solutions, and I've finally settled on gogs, the Go …

repo2site: Make a web site out of a git repo's MarkDown files

haliphax — Wed, 05 Oct 2016 00:00:00 -0500

I've just finished the initial work on a script that will make a full-HTML website, driven by AJAX, out of the MarkDown (*.md) files in a git repository. It's currently geared toward GitHub, but could easily be adapted to other repository hosting services.

Check it out!

The problem I was …

ASP.NET/C# image resizer for responsive layouts

haliphax — Tue, 27 Sep 2016 00:00:00 -0500

I will probably elaborate on this a bit further when I find some more time, but for now, this post is going to be mostly code. What I have here is a relatively simple way to generate images that are resized server-side based on the screen dimensions (note: not window …

A quick shell script for wine prefixes

haliphax — Thu, 16 Jun 2016 00:00:00 -0500

Wine, the Windows emulator-that's-not-an-emulator for Linux distributions, has a way of maintaining separate Windows systems using the WINEPREFIX and WINEARCH environment variables. While it's a powerful mechanism, it's not so handy to type it all in on the command line over and over. To that end, I have whipped up …

Lower-case specific query string keys with IIS URL Rewrite

haliphax — Wed, 11 May 2016 00:00:00 -0500

We're going through some normalization of URLs at my day job, which has necessitated some interesting rewrite rules for lower-casing specific query string keys. Essentially, we need to turn site=CampusName into site=campusname. After quite a bit of tinkering with IIS URL Rewrite rules, I managed to pull it …

jQuery visibility pseudo-selectors

haliphax — Wed, 20 Apr 2016 00:00:00 -0500

To help me with a project at work, I've written two jQuery pseudo-selectors which will help determine if an element is currently in the viewport or if it has been reached during scroll. This can be incredibly powerful if you're looking to only display certain items (like a "back to …

My text editor configuration

haliphax — Sat, 09 Apr 2016 00:00:00 -0500

I've been a Vim (and gVim) user for several years now, so naturally, I've amassed a byzantine maze of configuration settings and blessed plugins. This evening, I decided to publicize my configuration. Check it out!

There are many neat features like autocompletion, highlighting the 80th column, a tag bar, quick …

Twitter 'Acro' bot

haliphax — Sat, 30 Jan 2016 00:00:00 -0600

It's been a while since I actually wrote it, but I realized this evening that I never posted about it on my blog. What I'm referring to is the 'Acro' bot for Twitter I wrote in Python. An acronym is chosen at random by the bot, and then participants have …

Dynamic GridView rows in ASP.NET

haliphax — Wed, 23 Dec 2015 00:00:00 -0600

Here's a simple proof-of-concept for dynamically adding and removing rows in an ASP.NET GridView control while maintaining the existing data. The ViewState is used to maintain the information between postbacks. The rehydrate_table function takes advantage of this to rebuild the table anew whenever an event takes place.

Default.aspx …

Circumvent Get-ADGroupMember limit in PowerShell

haliphax — Sat, 26 Sep 2015 00:00:00 -0500

If you've ever tried to pull the members list of a large AD group with the Get-ADGroupMember PowerShell cmdlet, you will undoubtedly have run up against an error message telling you that the limit has been exceeded. There is, however, a way to work around this limitation: Using Get-ADGroup and …

Validating file uploads in Sitecore WFFM

haliphax — Mon, 17 Nov 2014 00:00:00 -0600

Our Sitecore installation was in dire need of a way to lock down file uploads on forms built with the Web Forms for Marketers (WFFM) module; out of the box, it doesn't do any checking at all, which can lead to some risky situations. I tacked on a simple whitelist …

Disable SSLv3 to avoid POODLE attack in web.py

haliphax — Wed, 15 Oct 2014 00:00:00 -0500

An open source application that I contribute to uses web.py to provide a web server platform for its services alongside the other platforms available. I recently updated it to use a sane set of default ciphers and to disable the SSLv3 protocol in order to avoid the POODLE attack …

SVG polyfill in pure Javascript

haliphax — Mon, 13 Jan 2014 00:00:00 -0600

A designer at work pointed out this SVG polyfill as a candidate for our new production site. While I like the elegance of it, I was a bit disappointed that the author felt the need to include jQuery as a dependency simply to use its selector engine and each function …

Give-Me-Coins.com Condensed UserScript

haliphax — Thu, 05 Dec 2013 00:00:00 -0600

Lately, my interest has been piqued by cryptocurrency. After discovering that my ATI card could produce a decent hash rate without seriously spiking my electricity bill, I got specifically interested in Litecoin. Long story short, I joined a Litecoin mining pool (Give-Me-Coins.com) and decided that I could do without …

Tribute: An Homage to My ASCII Heroes

haliphax — Wed, 13 Nov 2013 00:00:00 -0600

I don't generally write anything on here that isn't about code; I don't like to use this as any kind of a soapbox. To me, this site is about sharing tricks and solutions I've created or come across in software development. That being said, I am so incredibly proud of …

Mozilla's TogetherJS in a bookmarklet

haliphax — Thu, 17 Oct 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Mozilla recently introduced TogetherJS, a succession of their TowTruck service. Being that it is so similar to TowTruck, I went ahead and made a bookmarklet for it.

Drag the bookmarklet below onto your bookmarks bar, and tell your collaborators to do the same. When you're on a page you want …

Bulk rename Subversion files with PowerShell

haliphax — Fri, 13 Sep 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Scenario: We're upgrading our reporting software at work, and the way that it used to integrate with SVN (through a terrible SCC bridge) involved arbitrarily placing "app_" at the head of the file names. Of course, in the new version, they no longer do this, and so all of our …

Truck It!: Mozilla TowTruck in a bookmarklet

haliphax — Thu, 11 Jul 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Mozilla Labs has this really nifty, Javascript-based collaboration utility, ~~TowTruck~~, which allows real-time web editing collaboration in the browser. It's got a lot of nifty features I won't get into in this post; sufficed to say, it's pretty frickin' sweet. What I did not find to be as frickin' sweet …

Browsercache.php: A simple browser-cache-handling library for CodeIgniter

haliphax — Wed, 08 May 2013 00:00:00 -0500

While CodeIgniter provides a disk caching mechanism, it lacks a browser caching mechanism. Without a lengthy introduction, here's one.

Browsercache.php

<?php if(! defined('BASEPATH')) exit …

ascii.js: A font-based rendering engine for ASCII artwork

haliphax — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0500

A long-standing and thoroughly-enjoyed hobby of mine is creating and consuming ASCII artwork (though not the kind of watered-down crap you would see in, say, an e-mail signature or a chain letter). I recently went on a wild tear after stumbling across a faithful recreation of the Amiga's Topaz 500 …

scrollFollow: An auto-scrolling extender for knockout.js

haliphax — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0500

With the following knockout.js extender, you can tie an observable array to a scrollable HTML element. When the array is updated, the element will keep scrolling to the bottom. It's smart enough to realize if the user has scrolled up, as well, and will not interrupt them. I've found …

Add "desktop version" and "mark all as read" links to Tiny Tiny RSS mobile plugin

haliphax — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0500

I installed Tiny Tiny RSS on a server of mine, and after tinkering around with it for a little while, I turned on the built-in mobile plugin. It's a wonderful little thing; it uses the iUI library to present a slick, single page application; it strips images out of the …

LDAP authentication with C#

haliphax — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0500

LDAP, or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, is a convenient, central repository for a system's personnel information. LDAP (and other Active Directory services) are widely-used by organizations big and small to consolidate user credentials and identification data. For instance: a reporting services application, a webmail client, and a database administration suite …

Resilient Ubuntu boot-to-RAM USB stick

haliphax — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0600

(Ubun2RAM) - Updated for 13.10

I love my little-engine-that-could media server machine. It runs incredibly well on hardware from at least two generations ago; it is completely headless; the entire system loads itself into RAM in the form of a compressed file system; it all fits onto a bootable USB …

staggr featured on freewaregenius.com

haliphax — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0600

My experimental link-staggering Facebook service, staggr, has been featured on the free software blog, freewaregenius.com. Cheggit:

http://www.freewaregenius.com/automate-facebook-link-posting-at-20-minutes-intervals-with-staggr/

Batch convert audio files to MP3 with PowerShell and VLC Player

haliphax — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0600

I adapted a PowerShell script by Tim Van Wassenhove that recurses through a given directory, searching for various types of audio files. These files are then converted to MP3 using VLC Player's command-line interface. My adjustments to Tim's original script include some string handling bits that ensure filenames with potentially …

Javascript document.write alternative

haliphax — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0600

When a script is loaded synchronously, its element's position in the DOM can be determined. With this information, the <script> element can act as a pivot point for inserting dynamic content. This eliminates the need for document.write, a function which wreaks havoc where AJAX is involved (and flies in …

UserScript: Tidy up TVGuide.com listings

haliphax — Sat, 13 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0500

The way that TVGuide.com's listings are organized is difficult to work with. This UserScript (compatible with GreaseMonkey, Chrome, Opera, and perhaps more) will gut the listings from the layout and give you one all-encompassing, manageable scroll bar for perusal.

rexCrawler and HelpfulHighlighter are now open source

haliphax — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0500

After having dipped my toe in the water of open source with some Arachni module changes and the development of a simple WordPress plugin, I've finally taken the plunge; two of my personal projects are now completely open source, and hosted on github. Much of the code is stale—and …

Programmatically compile Audiences in SharePoint 2010

haliphax — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0500

According to the documentation for the SharePoint 2010 SDK, you cannot trigger Audience compilation programmatically. Well—that's not true. It isn't documented, but it is possible. The painful thing about it is that you must know the ApplicationId of the UserProfileService application. This is where reflection comes in extremely handy …

WordPress plugin minify Makefile

haliphax — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0500

While working on my first commercial WordPress plugin, the need for build automation finally struck me. The environments in which I do my most development are all driven by Linux, and so I wanted to use a tried, true, and ubiquitous build automation mechanism to fulfill my need. As such …

JavaScript Challenge #2 (Whac-A-Moo)

haliphax — Sun, 05 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Though I am not a proponent of the MooTools JavaScript framework, their blog is an interesting resource that I enjoy reading. Not only is it packed with sensible practices and interesting insights, but they have recently begun posting JavaScript challenges where developers are tasked with building whatever system is presented …

Add password maintenance feature to cgit with PHP

haliphax — Sat, 28 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Have you ever wanted to have a nifty, browser-driven password maintenance feature in your htpasswd-secured cgit site? I've been meaning to build this for a while—and I finally did it. Granted, this was not a difficult task, and I'm not expecting to bask in any glory for completing …

Using cURL for parallel PHP without pcntl_fork

haliphax — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0500

So, you want to do some parallel processing in PHP (alliteration FTW!), but your service provider does not grant you access to the pcntl family of functions*. What do you do? If you're in a *nix environment with access to the curl command line application, then you get creative.

First …

Easy SSL redirection for select folders in nginx

haliphax — Thu, 24 May 2012 00:00:00 -0500

I have many various web applications installed on my server; some of them need to be wrapped in a secure connection, while it is less important (or meaningless) for others. For those applications whose security I am concerned about, I've developed an easy way to force nginx to serve the …

Add threaded discussions to cgit with disqus

haliphax — Fri, 11 May 2012 00:00:00 -0500

While it provides an efficient, organized web front-end for your personal git repositories, the cgit application is missing a few of the more sparkling features found at github--notably, a comments/discussion system. Enter: disqus.

Disqus is a Javascript-injected, centralized discussion system that is gaining traction with blogs and other …

Posts to resume shortly

haliphax — Wed, 02 May 2012 00:00:00 -0500

I've migrated the blog back over to my VPS, as my hosting provider has been trying to blame me for the poor performance of my scripts on their hosting platform. I've got everything running on my VPS machine now (and I do mean everything) thanks to nginx, php5-fpm, and 752MB …

What's My Status v1.2 released

haliphax — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0600

My WordPress microblog feed widget recently went through another update. This time around, I've added the ability to filter out replies and re-posts ("retweets" in Twitter lingo, "redents" in identi.ca speak) from your activity feed. Pick up the new version from the WordPress plugins site.

What's My Status? v1.1 released

haliphax — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0600

My microblogging feed widget for WordPress, What's My Status?, has been updated. The plugin now uses curl for its main retrieval mechanism, with standard URL fopen as the fallback. Additionally, the Reset cache command has been fixed. You can grab the plugin for yourself over at the wordpress.org site …

bulkRename v2.0 released

haliphax — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0600

I've converted my bulk file renaming utility from VB.NET to C# and made use of a command line arguments parsing library so that it will accept folders and regex patterns with spaces in them. It behaves a bit weird if you don't encapsulate your arguments in quotation marks (") or …

Selective backup/copy script for moving files into production

haliphax — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Whenever our web site needs to undergo re-branding, there is always the hassle of creating both the selective package of files to move into production from development and the selective back-up of the necessary files already on the production server. While this is not a soul-crushingly elaborate and tedious task …

Simple file access concurrency in C#

haliphax — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0500

When working without the safety net of a RDBMS in a multi-user environment, file concurrency may become an issue. In a project I've been working on recently, XML files are being used as the custom data store. This is all fine and dandy for now—with a user base of …

Using WSE 3.0 with Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5

haliphax — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0500

While I'm sure many of you have "moved on" to Visual Studio 2010, there are a large number of us still using 2008. Recently, my shop needed to write some code for interfacing with a vendor's web services. No problem, right? Well… not quite. It was quite an undertaking to …

Kill all shared memory segments in Linux

haliphax — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0500

See update below.

I recently whipped up a shell script to kill all (IPC) shared memory segments in Linux for a client on oDesk.com. He wound up going with another contractor's offer, and so I figured I would post my script here for the benefit of all.

ipcs …

jQuery.imgradio Plugin v1.0 released

haliphax — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0500

The default HTML radio buttons and check boxes aren't the most aesthetically pleasing things in the world of web design. With this in mind, I have created a jQuery plugin that will replace those pesky <input /> elements with <span /> elements for your CSS styling pleasure. Under the hood, the original …

jQuery.noFlickerSlide Plugin v1.0.0 released

haliphax — Fri, 13 May 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Since 1.1.3, jQuery's slideUp() method has had problems with flickering in Internet Explorer. While this issue can generally be fixed by avoiding Quirks Mode with a DOCTYPE declaration, it doesn't always work so easily. (The HTML 5 declaration worked for me, but was unfortunately not an option in …

Forward Gawker sites to their UK counterparts for a better layout

haliphax — Mon, 09 May 2011 00:00:00 -0500

I wrote a (really) simple userscript today that reloads Lifehacker pages under uk.lifehacker.com. Why did I do this? Because the Lifehacker UK site doesn't have the trendy new (horrendous) AJAXified layout. Maybe using a hosts redirect instead of a userscript is a better way to handle it (since …

Send XMPP messages with Perl (from the command line, too!)

haliphax — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0500

I had been looking for a small, simple utility for Windows that could send XMPP messages from the command line for use in various automated tasks and notification processes. I came across sendxmpp as part of the CygWin installation, but could not successfully install its dependencies with CygWin's CPAN port …

Create anchor links in Twitter status text with PHP

haliphax — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0500

In a previous blog post, I outlined how to [convert Twitter @mentions,

hashtags, and

URLs](http://roadha.us/2011/03/create-anchor-links-in-twitter-status-text-with-javascript/) (with or without protocol prefixes) into anchor links using JavaScript. Here is that same process wrapped up in a PHP function instead for your server-side needs.

 1
 2
 3 …

What's My Status? v1.0.0 released

haliphax — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500

My first officially-recognized WordPress widget, What's My Status?, has been released! It is a widget for displaying a given user's status feed from identi.ca, Twitter, or any other service that provides a Twitter-like API. There are several features in the works for future versions—such as inclusion and exclusion …

Create anchor links in Twitter status text with JavaScript

haliphax — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Note: This also applies to any service using a Twitter-compatible API, such as StatusNet (see: identi.ca) with some minor configuration changes.

As a side project, I have been working on a StatusNet (specifically, identi.ca) status feed widget for the WordPress PHP platform. I had spent a fair …

Help! I can't delete phpMyAdmin's setup.php

haliphax — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0600

I've got a VPS server running Debian 5 "lenny" and recently attempted to perform several software upgrades to bring it up to speed (it had been longer than I care to admit). However, the upgrade for the phpMyAdmin package continually failed, stating that it was unable to remove /usr/share …

Check all CheckBoxes in a GridView using jQuery

haliphax — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0600

If you're working with a GridView control where you've built a CheckBox control into each row of data displayed, odds are, it would be convenient for your users if a "Check/Un-check All" option was available. The following example will show how to do just that; and with only the …

Custom error messages with ValidationSummary in ASP.NET

haliphax — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0600

Sometimes, there are problems encountered in a code-behind file that don't warrant the extra work and mark-up that would otherwise be required to add CustomValidator controls to the page for displaying error messages to the user through your ValidationSummary. Wouldn't it be nice if you could (somewhat) easily take care …

Programmatically modifying file permissions in .NET

haliphax — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0500

For one reason or another, somewhere down the line, you're probably going to want to modify a file's access permissions from your code. Maybe your users have a nasty habit of overwriting them, or you want to ensure that newly-created files are given a specific permission mask. Whatever the reason …

Image dimension Field Validator for Sitecore CMS

haliphax — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0500

This StandardValidator extension will determine whether or not a given ImageField's source image's height and width match with given parameters. Either parameter can be omitted if, for instance, you only care about validating the width of an image (or conversely, only the height).

Note: In the code below, replace …

Currency Field Validator for Sitecore CMS

haliphax — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0500

This StandardValidator extension will determine whether or not a given field value passes for currency. In order to do so, it must meet the following requirements:

It must pass decimal.TryParse()
It must not have more than 2 digits past the decimal point

Obviously, this does not fit all international …

Fix CodeIgniter IP address detection on lighttpd

haliphax — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0500

If the results of a call to $this->input->ip_address() gives you "0.0.0.0" (the "invalid address" response) and you're running lighttpd as your web server, you may be able to fix it ~~with a minor tweak to~~ by extending one of the base CodeIgniter libraries. An IPv6-style …

New WordPress blog

haliphax — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0500

I've transferred my blog from the Blogger platform (externally hosted) to the WordPress platform (self-hosted) for a couple of reasons. First of all, I wanted more control over the blog on principle. Also, I needed an excuse to become familiar with the WordPress system—and working something into my own …

bulkRename v1.1

haliphax — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0500

A while back (in 2008), I wrote a simple system utility with VB.NET which leverages the power of regular expressions to rename files in bulk according to a pattern. I've had to use it several times recently after placing it on a metaphorical shelf to gather dust, and it …

Query across servers in Microsoft SQL Server 2005

haliphax — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0500

If your organization/project has data repositories spread across more than one database server, chances are that you will eventually want to pull data from more than one server instance in a single query. If you want to perform these cross-server queries without setting up a persistent Linked Server configuration …

Replacing MS Word's quotation marks in VB.NET

haliphax — Mon, 10 May 2010 00:00:00 -0500

When dealing with text pasted from Microsoft Word, the presence of "special" (read: non-ASCII) quotation marks and apostrophes can be quite troublesome. Here's a simple way to convert them to "standard" (read: ASCII) quotation marks and apostrophes...

VB.NET Code:

1 2	myString = Regex.Replace(myString, "\u201C\|\u201D", """") myString = Regex …

URL rewriting template engine

haliphax — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0600

My employer is currently in the process of standing-up a content management system (CMS). In the process of migrating links on our existing site to the new CMS site, there are going to be—at least, at first—a metric tonne of possible URL redirects necessary. Since the majority of …

Backup automation and emailing attachments in Linux

haliphax — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0600

Any programmer who's ever been burned by data loss can tell you—you've got to have backups of your work. If it's code, perhaps they use a version control system such as Subversion. If it's something a little less-readily available, such as a weekly database text file dump, it might …

PDF to TIFF batch conversion with ImageMagick

haliphax — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

I have recently been tasked at work to create a script that will convert PDF files to TIFF files to be used for annotation within our document imaging service. The script is responsible for the following process:

Create back-up copies of each PDF
Time-stamp those back-up copies
Convert each PDF …

Redirect Tomcat to FQDN

haliphax — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Recently, I have been trying to configure several Tomcat servers (versions 5.0, 5.5, and 6.0) to restrict all traffic to SSL and ensure that all requests are served through the FQDN (fully-qualified domain name) of the server involved.

Well, the first half of that adventure was relatively …

WebFOCUS Impact Analysis report compactor

haliphax — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Here's a little script I whipped up to combine several Impact Analysis reports generated by WebFOCUS Developer Studio. The script opens HTM-formatted IA reports, skims the data, and then concatenates it all in one CSV-formatted output block.

PHP code:

Linux: Get size of sub-directores in current directory

haliphax — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Edit: Now that I'm more familiar with the Linux command line, I realize that I was trying to reinvent the wheel. I don't know if I missed this part of the du manpage or what, but the functionality I was looking for is baked in:

du -hd 1

The h …

Photobucket thumbnail bookmarklet

haliphax — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500

I've built a pretty simple little utility for turning the URL of an image hosted on Photobucket into a thumbnail which links to the full-sized image. I've designed one version for building bbCode (forum) mark-up, and one for building a basic HTML thumbnail link. Save the links below to use …

View live page source with Javascript

haliphax — Tue, 19 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Have you ever been working on an AJAX-enabled webpage, or a page with complex redirects and permissions, and tried to view its source? What you wind up getting generally looks nothing like the current state of the page in question. You are viewing its initial state, since the browser loads …

Help! KB932091 broke my SharePoint installation!

haliphax — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Well, it broke ours, too. Our root site collection was completely inaccessible, and the main SharePoint site was returning an HTTP status code of 500. After 12 solid hours of wild goose chases tracking down erroneous error messages, we installed KB936867. The installation failed on both steps 8 and 9 …

Consuming newlines with the Javascript regex engine

haliphax — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500

In most server-side languages (with an available regex engine), programmers are given a wonderful set of pattern modifiers. One such modifier for PCRE (Perl-compatible regular expressions) is the "s" modifier, known in PHP as the constant PCRE_DOTALL. This modifier will cause the "dot" character--which will usually match any normal character--to …

rexCrawler v2.5.0.0 released!

haliphax — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500

I have released a new version of my home-grown desktop search software, rexCrawler. Several aesthetic updates have been included, as well as tighter exception handling. Read about it here or download it here. Enjoy!

Urban Dead Greasemonkey Scripts

haliphax — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600

I've built a home for all of my Urban Dead Greasemonkey scripts at sites.google.com/site/udscripts. It currently houses CHUD, UDInventory, and the UDBrain Frame Fix script. It will be my base of operations for UD mods from here on out--and I plan to begin working with Google …

UDInventory - GreaseMonkey script for Urban Dead

haliphax — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600

I've written another GreaseMonkey script for the web game, Urban Dead. This one will compact your inventory by grouping together guns, ammo, first-aid kits, syringes, etc. You can install it from GreasyFork. ~~Click here for an iWitness screen shot.~~

Files as Resources in .NET projects

haliphax — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0600

Have you ever found that sleek application you wrote slowly becoming scattered over time with the use of external files? Say you want to create a simple GUI application that can be distributed as just an executable file. What if you want to use a *.chm help file? This article …

rexCrawler v2.4.5.0 released

haliphax — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0600

My complex file searching software, rexCrawler, has been updated. Version 2.4.5.0 improves on version 2.4.4.0 by adding an instructional help menu to the menu strip in the main window of the program. You can download the new version in the releases section of the …

chud - GreaseMonkey script for Urban Dead

haliphax — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0600

I've finished putting together my first GreaseMonkey script! It's called "chud"—the Caddy Healer for Urban Dead. It's been built to plug-in to my favorite web-based zombie apocalypse, Urban Dead. It will bring up a list of anyone in your map cell who can be healed with a first-aid kit …

rexCrawler release

haliphax — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0500

I've released one of my personal software projects, rexCrawler. It is a program I use at work to search specified files/folders for (optionally) specified text/patterns. Knowledge of regular expressions is suggested, but unnecessary. Output can be sent to the screen, a CSV (comma-separated values) file, or both.

You …

Browser-independent XML load with Javascript

haliphax — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0500

XML data is, in a word, awesome. It's standardized, it's well-formatted, and there are XML parsing methods in nearly every major programming language--including Javascript. However, when using Javascript, the nasty problem of "browser agnosticism" comes into play: a method that works in Firefox may not (read: won't) work in Internet …

Browser-independent XPath with Javascript

haliphax — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Now that you're able to load XML and transform it using an XSL stylesheet, wouldn't it be handy to also be able to perform XPath selects/functions on that XML outside of the stylesheet's formatting? Why, yes. Yes, it would:

Javascript code:

Browser-independent XSLT with Javascript

haliphax — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0500

To piggy-back on the Javascript function to load an XML document: what can be done to load an XSL stylesheet and apply it to the XML? For the most part, loading it is a snap... but, as is often the case, Internet Explorer is the exception to the rule. So …

LDAP authentication with VB.NET

haliphax — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Retrieving user properties from LDAP with VB.NET

haliphax — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

As discussed in an earlier post, LDAP can be a wonderful tool for centrally storing user information and credentials. I've written about how to authenticate against the LDAP repository... but what if you're just looking for information?

The following code will contact the LDAP server and retrieve all properties for …

Simple MD5 hashes in VB.NET

haliphax — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

MD5 (Message Digest) hashes are a simple, efficient way to encode/encrypt information to be passed around. Rather than containing the data itself, an MD5 hash is merely a fingerprint of the information. The hash cannot be decrypted, but is instead compared to other hashed values for verification. This can …

Using the ConnectionStrings element in ASP.NET web.config

haliphax — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500

If you are building a series of web applications that may rely on duplicate data (such as connection strings for pages that query databases), or you want to separate certain constants from your other code, you need a centralized method for storing and referencing that data. In this case, the …

Wipe all elements in a form with Javascript

haliphax — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Javascript has a nifty method associated with the form DOM object called reset(). Using this method will revert all values of the form's associated input controls to the values they contained when the page was last sent to the user's browser. That's great... but if you want to revert the …

Prepared SQL statements in VB.NET

haliphax — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Thousands of websites have been hit lately by the rash of SQL injections being perpetrated en-masse. Most languages (current versions, at least) have a procedure for separating parameters from the query they augment in an effort to prevent SQL injection, and VB.NET is no different.

Assuming you have stored …

Central repository

haliphax — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500

I'm starting this blog for two reasons.

First of all, I wanted somewhere that I could (try to) keep track of all of my programming projects/interests; sort of an "online notepad," if you will.

Second, I figure maybe some of the problems I'm working on--or hopefully, my solution(s …