Rob Lowe - roberthenrylowe.com

Iron Man was awesome plus more!

rhlowe — Mon, 05 May 2008 15:59:21 +0000

I saw Iron Man on Thursday night and it rocked me like no other movie. Some would say I was exaggerating if I was to claim it to be the best movie ever, but I won't comment on that.

In more good news, Marvel announced today that there would indeed be a follow up slated for April 2010 and a Thor movie due in June that year. What's more, following the likely success of those movies, there will be a Captain America movie May 2011 and a full-blown Avengers movie July 2011. Frankly, the idea of five (including the up coming Hulk movie) culminating in an Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Captain America pound fest on whatever sorry set of villains marvel green lights to face them may honestly be better than sex. See the official release.

Troy N. Thompson

rhlowe — Sun, 04 May 2008 02:24:47 +0000

Securing your X-Cart installation

rhlowe — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 20:55:14 +0000

WebsiteCM has a great article on securing X-Cart. The article offers some insight on how the author makes sure X-Cart is secure but the concepts introduced are applicable to any web application, even Drupal.

Goals Update

rhlowe — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 01:06:15 +0000

Update on my site wide goals:

~~Add Services and Pricing page~~
~~Create new portfolio~~
~~Update~~ ~~portfolio~~

That's right, I am all done. Sure sure, this was a small list, but it was also a list I had not completed for 3 months until I posted it the other night and that really motivated me to com plete it. There will definitely be more lists to come.

SW Engineering, Inc.

rhlowe — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 20:15:04 +0000

Site Goals

rhlowe — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 18:11:21 +0000

After spending the past week working from home full time, I decided that I should probably get my site up-to-date, so I set a few goals for myself:

Add Services and Pricing page
~~Create new portfolio~~
Update portfolio

So far so good, I am still writing the copy for my services and have a couple portfolio pieces to drop in from my last job, but everything is coming right along.

Elmo say 'kill'

rhlowe — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 22:09:37 +0000

A Florida family has recently been terrorized by an evil Elmo doll who threatened to Kill their son, James.

Override template.php in Drupal

rhlowe — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 20:33:33 +0000

Do you want to override template.php in Drupal, say to produce a custom administration theme? If so, boy do I have a treat for you. This technique involves using the '_phptemplate_variables()' function. Say, for example, you have created a new template page named 'page-admin.tpl.php'. You want pages who's URL ends in '/admin', '/tracker', '/node/add', '/node/edit' and any sub paths from those to use the new template page. The following code would accomplish your mission:



function _phptemplate_variables($hook, $vars = array()) {

	switch ($hook) {

		case 'page':

			if ((arg(0) == 'admin') ||

				(arg(0) == 'tracker') ||

				(arg(0) == 'node' && arg(1) == 'add') ||

				(arg(0) == 'node' && arg(2) == 'edit')) {

				$vars['template_file'] = 'page-admin';

			}

		break;

	}

return $vars; }

And voila, all your admin pages will inherit their layout from page-admin.tpl.php.

If you found this useful, please leave a quick comment, thanks!

Aptana 1.0 Released

rhlowe — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 04:30:48 +0000

Aptana Studio 1.0

My web development IDE of choice, Aptana released version 1.0 today! They released both a Community (free) and Pro ($99) version.

What's New?

The name of the package has been changed from Aptana IDE to Aptana Studio. Aptana Studio has been given a bit of a face lift, the menus and tabs are cleaner looking. The Community Edition of Aptana Studio offers html, css and JavaScript code assist, FTP support, Gecko JavaScript Debugging and an integrated Visual Script Doc for starters.

Also new is the pro version which adds JavaScript Debugging for IE, SFTP/FTPS support, a JSON Editor, Project Reporting and Pro Support. The new version of Aptana Studio Pro is available for the introductory price of $99 (Regularly $199).

I have been using Aptana or the Aptana plugin for Eclipse for a year and a half and over that period, the only complaint I have ever had was that the RegEx engine was a bit slow and often crashed when working with large (+20MB) files. That was the only reason I kept a copy of Dreamweaver on my system. Hopefully the Aptana team fixed that, I'll be sure to test it out.

Have you used Aptana in addition to any other development IDE? Share your comments in the comments section

Installing Smarty in a non-default location

rhlowe — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 04:55:07 +0000

Are you just starting out with the Smarty template language? Are you trying to install it some place other than in '/usr/local/lib/Smarty-xxxx'? If so and you are having problems, you are not alone.

I wanted to install Smarty some place other than the default location, actually I wanted to install it below my web root in a directory named 'library'. Looking at Example 2.5 on the Smarty Basic Installation page, I tried the following code:



ini_set('include_path', ini_get('include_path') . PATH_SEPARATOR . '/library/Smarty-2.6.18/libs/');

But that did not work I kept getting an error and after a little playing around I realized I needed to use the '$_SERVER[DOCUMENT_ROOT]' super global, like the following:



ini_set('include_path', ini_get('include_path') . PATH_SEPARATOR . $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/library/Smarty-2.6.18/libs/');

And viola, it works!