[ Edit: fixed by adding UID, GID, and PEER env vars to the wireguard service: https://github.com/ngoduykhanh/wireguard-ui/issues/473#issuecomment-1793604986 ] Following a guide to set-up wireguard and wireguard-ui: https://linuxiac.com/how-to-set-up-wireguard-vpn-with-docker/ Server created on DigitalOcean with IPv4 and IPv6 addresses by default. Configured iptables as per the set-up guide (server also runs another docker based service that opens ports 80, 433, and 9993): sysops@master-control:~/wireguard$ sudo iptables -L Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT) target prot opt source destination Chain FORWARD (policy DROP) target prot opt source destination DOCKER-USER all -- anywhere anywhere DOCKER-ISOLATION-STAGE-1 all -- anywhere anywhere ACCEPT all -- anywhere anywhere ctstate RELATED,ESTABLISHED DOCKER all -- anywhere anywhere ACCEPT all -- anywhere anywhere ACCEPT all -- anywhere anywhere ACCEPT all -- anywhere anywhere ctstate RELATED,ESTABLISHED DOCKER all -- anywhere anywhere ACCEPT all -- anywhere anywhere ACCEPT all -- anywhere anywhere ACCEPT all -- anywhere anywhere ctstate RELATED,ESTABLISHED DOCKER all -- anywhere anywhere ACCEPT all -- anywhere anywhere ACCEPT all -- anywhere anywhere ACCEPT all -- anywhere anywhere Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT) target prot opt source destination Chain DOCKER (3 references) target prot opt source destination ACCEPT udp -- anywhere 172.

Quick and dirty post that pulls together a couple of sources. I might improve the post at some point. I might not… Initial set-up: Source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsuY4o2zLVQ Additional code to specify which video device to create. sudo apt update && sudo apt install gphoto2 v4l2loopback-utils ffmpeg echo 'dslr-webcam' | sudo tee -a /etc/modules echo <<EOT | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/dslr-webcam.conf alias dslr-webcam v4l2loopback options v4l2loopback exclusive_caps=1 max_buffers=2 video_nr=69 EOT Hardware acceleration set-up:

New laptop provided by work. Time to install everything that makes me productive as a PHP developer. Using Kubuntu 21.10 as my base OS. General utilities: sudo apt install \ openssh-server \ net-tools \ htop \ curl \ whois \ ack \ mysql-client \ httpie \ php-cli \ freerdp2-x11 \ meld \ kcachegrind \ vokoscreen-ng \ autokey-qt \ parlatype \ thunderbird-locale-en-gb \ libreoffice-calc \ libreoffice-writer \ libreoffice-draw \ cherrytree Snaps:

I’m late to the mydumper party - https://github.com/maxbube/mydumper Multi-threaded, lightning quick, exports to files per table structure and data. In the Ubuntu world (and likely Debian too) it’s available as a precompiled package: sudo apt update && sudo apt install mydumper Backup everything in a database: mydumper \ --triggers \ --routines \ --events \ --database name_of_source_database It’ll create a date stamped directory with two files for each table. One for the schema, the other with the data.

Wrap the variable (that holds the class name) in brackets: <?php class A { public static function foo($arg) { return 'Argument was "' . $arg . '"' . PHP_EOL; } } $result = A::foo('triggered via named class'); echo $result; $className = A::class; $result = ($className)::foo('trigged via variable'); echo $result; The output of the above code: $ php a.php Argument was "triggered via named class" Argument was "trigged via variable"

Silly thing to happen really. Some system on the instance detected too many connections in a short amount of time - likely due to some automated tasks driven by ansible. That resulted in iptables dropping all connections to port 22 🙁 Thankfully, with google compute, one can access the serial console via the web UI. Unfortunately, all of my users have no passwords - this is to ensure that ssh logins are via keypairs only.

With each new release of Ubuntu, I’ve stuck with the default desktop environment. These have worked well for me over the years, but thought I should see what else there is. The only way for me to do it justice is to run KDE Plasma as my only desktop environment for a minimum of 2 weeks. So both my work station and my personal laptop are use KDE Plasma installed alongside Gnome 3 Shell on Ubuntu 19.

I keep forgetting the steps required for this, so thought I should write them up in one easy to remember blog post for myself. My desktop set-up consists of 2 x 1080 and 1 x 4k display. Making sure that applications are readable is a bit of a farce. But as long as I ensure that certain applications only ever appear on the correct monitor, means that I can alter the launcher to set the correct DPI scaling.

Good morning… Do not consider on my English, I am from Iran.I installed the virus on your system.After that I pilfered all confidential info from your OS. Furthermore I received some more compromising evidence.The most interesting evidence which I thieftend- its a record with your self-abusing.I adjusted malicious software on a porn web site and after you installed it. As soon as you picked the video and pressed play, my software immediately set up on your OS.

jenkins-update.sh: #!/bin/bash set -e if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then echo "New Jenkins version number missing" exit 1 fi VERSION=${1} set -x cd /usr/share/jenkins/ wget http://updates.jenkins-ci.org/download/war/${VERSION}/jenkins.war -O jenkins.war-${VERSION} rm jenkins.war && ln -s jenkins.war-${VERSION} jenkins.war service jenkins restart The above bash script will download a given version of the jenkins.war file and symlink it into place before restarting the jenkins service. Assumptions made: The jenkins.war file is installed to /usr/share/jenkins The server is using upstart for running services User input is sane - there is no validation or sanitisation Comments Matthew Morton says: 27th October 2017 at 10:24 pm

If you get this (or similar) when trying to insert/update in a MySQL database, you table is not able to cope with the extended version of the UTF8 character set. You will need to convert your table to use the utf8mb4 character set, and utf8mb4_unicode_ci collation. An example to do so: ALTER TABLE `your_table_here` CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

Something changed recently, preventing a VM from fully provisioning. Tracking it down was a bit of a PiTA. OS: CentOS 6.9 Ruby: 2.4 - installed from source with the gearlingguy.ruby ansible role Gems to be installed: sass Output of attempting to install the sass ruby gem: $ sudo gem install sass Fetching: rb-fsevent-0.10.2.gem (100%) Successfully installed rb-fsevent-0.10.2 Fetching: ffi-1.9.21.gem (100%) Building native extensions. This could take a while... ERROR: Error installing sass: ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

Using Symfony2, DQL and knplabs/knp-paginator-bundle - how to get around “Cannot count query which selects two FROM components, cannot make distinction” Fails: Works:

I had a need to add ACL rules to entities at the repository level. My biggest struggle was getting dependancy injection working. This is what I finally came up with after a fresh mind and an instant coffee: Comments KingCrunch says: 16th February 2013 at 11:30 am If your EntityRepository needs to know about the DIC, you made it wrong… Wessel says: 13th June 2013 at 12:03 pm Mmm nice trick.

Further to my original quick db update queries, I found the need for a more in-depth approach. A WordPress site my father works on has weekly backups, but he wanted to see that they actually worked. To do so, I set up a subdomain vhost on my bytemark server and set about getting the back to work with it. One of the most annoying/lazy/strange things about WordPress is that it uses serialised arrays within database fields.

Web server: Linux (Ubuntu on my dev setup), Apache, PHP 5.3, Symfony 1.4, Doctrine 1.2. Database server: Microsoft Windows 2008 Server, MS SQL Server Trying to get Symfony to talk to the database server has been a painful experience for the last few days. But perseverance has paid off. Lots of Googling with trial & error has resulted in actually achieving a development setup that will mirror the eventual production setup.

One of the biggest complaints that web developers have is their lack of control over end users. When will we be able to tell them a) not to paste Micosoft Word or b) if you must, paste it into something that doesn’t do formatting 1st. It has a nasty habit of converting quotes into “smart” quotes as well as messing up characters such as the euro symbol €. This is the fix I came up with that allows end users to continue to paste from such programs and bring their weird charset issues with them:

[Update 21st Aug 2013 Post code replaced with a Github GIST. Please fork and help improve this script 🙂 [Updated 7th Feb 2012 Changes: file names are now as they would be if you downloaded via web browser Playlist is now in reverse date uploaded order] I like to have music while I’m coding. It breaks the silence while working alone at home. When I have music playing, it’s best if I don’t have to think about setting up playlists, which is why I used to listen to the radio.

In my last post I raved about the excellent plugin wp-blocks by Keir Whitaker and then went on to extend it a little. Time to extend it a little further, this time by adding a shortcode. Shortcodes are the handy square bracketed code snippets which conjure up more content and functionality direct from a page or post content. The wp-blocks plugin is currently intended to work with the theme template files in PHP.

If you’re used to developing with a CMS such as CMS Made Simple, you would be quite used to having blocks of content separate from the main content system. These blocks can be re-used through-out existing content and within the theme templates. One might even consider this a core function for a CMS. Sadly it’s missing from WordPress. Keir Whitaker has been working on this missing option and gives us wp-blocks.

To follow up from last night’s entry [Resize images on the fly without messing with image URLs]](/2011/03/07/resize-images-on-the-fly-without-messing-with-image-urls/), I was determined to remove the intermediary step of my_resize_script.php. I’ve acheived this goal in the mod_rewrite rule, file name and query string now get passed on to timthumb.php. Updated rules: RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .(gif|png|jpg|jpeg) RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (w|h)=(.*)$ RewriteRule (.*) /full/path/to/timthumb.php?src=$1&%1=%2&%3=%4 [L] This will pass both width and height variables into timthumb if they are declared.

[EDIT: I’ve made this simpler with a follow up post: Mimicking wordpress.com’s image resize URIs] Exporting a wordpress.com site for use on a standalone wordpress.org install is a joy to set up. The export and import system are simple to use and give little or no issues. What is a problem is the automatic resizing of images that wordpress.com offers. One can insert an image in the normal way and then append the image URI with some variables such as width (w) and height (h).

Why oh why does WordPress insist on storing the site URLs within the database? Every other project I can think of either keeps it in a config file or doesn’t bother with one and just works with whatever URL it finds itself on. This is most irritating when you have: more than one developer working on the same project more than one system for hosting the project (dev, test, live, etc) One way to cope with this irritation is to have a collection of .

I’m talking about this plugin: http://www.symfony-project.org/plugins/sfFormExtraPlugin For some reason, getting the plugin to work took a lot of Googling and some trial and error. So here is how I got it working. Hopefully I did this in the ‘correct’ way… cd plugins wget "http://plugins.symfony-project.org/get/sfFormExtraPlugin/sfFormExtraPlugin-1.1.3.tgz" tar zxvf sfFormExtraPlugin-1.1.3.tgz mv sfFormExtraPlugin-1.1.3 sfFormExtraPlugin cd .. ./symfony plugin:publish-assets cd web/js wget "http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.4.3.min.js" wget "http://jqueryui.com/download/jquery-ui-1.8.5.custom.zip" mkdir jquery-ui cd jquery-ui unzip ../jquery-ui-1.8.5.custom.zip mv jquery-ui/css/smoothness ../css</pre> Edit config/ProjectConfiguration.

This list is partly to remind myself what essential apps need to be reinstalled after a system wipe. But it does have me thinking, what do other web developers use on a daily basis? Web browsers: Google Chrome FireFox IE Opera Safari FireFox addons: Adblock Plus British English Dictionary ColorZilla Dummy Lipsum Firebug Html Validator Web Developer Xmarks Code editing: PhpEd Eclipse PDT TextPad vim Code tools: SQLyog WinMerge System tools:

Requirement: pre-filter products by customer group name to product attribute. I was looking for the “proper” way of filtering items by multiple custom attribute settings, but couldn’t find out how. So, the following is a brief explanation of how I’ve got this running in Magento 1.4.1. There are two ways of editing core code in Magento. Wrong: edit files directly in app/code/core/Mage Right: extend modules and keep them in app/code/local/MyDevCompany If you’re in a hurry, you might edit core files directly and then later copy the altered code out into correctly extended module files.

I originally blogged about this on my other site lazygnome.net but that was simply a quick place to record it. I present to you a very quick and handy way of replicating PHP’s trim() function in JS: function ws_trim(value) { return value.replace(/(^s+|s+$)/g, ''); } There it is, simple and usable. I don’t claim to be original with this code. I’m sure that others have done exactly the same themselves. But it surprises me that JS doesn’t come with such a text manipulation method by default.

The documentation on http://prototypejs.org/api/element/writeAttribute is a wee bit scarce. So here’s a quick one on usage. To add an attribute: $('foo').writeAttribute('title', 'bar'); To remove an attribute: $('foo').writeAttribute('title', null); To enable all disabled form elements (in a form with the id ‘container’): $('container').select('[disabled="disabled"]').each(function(e) { $(e).writeAttribute('disabled', null); });

Finding a needle in a haystack is a wonderful bit of symbolism and I welcome its use in many situations. It’s just the implementation of that symbolism that needs to be standardised. For forgetting the order in which a function expects variables to be passed in is tedious. In PHP, for example, there are some very useful functions: in_array() and str_pos() to name but two. Usage is in_array($needle, $haystack) and makes sense as you want to check that the needle is in the haystack.

Running Kubuntu on my 2018 DELL XPS 15 laptop is a joy, when I can reduce the brightness down to its minimum. During daylight hours, the minimum is bright enough and saves on battery usage. But during the evening, when I’m tired from staring at monitors all day long, I found that my eyes were begging me to stop using the laptop. Using the brightness controls on the laptop’s keyboard causes the brightness to step up and down by distinct levels.

TLDR; Install gnome-keyring If you are not using the default install of Ubuntu, you might not be using Gnome. This is the case for flavours such as: Kubuntu (KDE Plsama), Lubuntu (LXQt), Xubuntu (XFCE), and so on. And if you have installed Skype using snap, then you will likely find that it will always ask you to login upon loading, even if you have it configured to automatically run at login.

I keep forgetting the steps required for this, so thought I should write them up in one easy to remember blog post for myself. My desktop set-up consists of 2 x 1080 and 1 x 4k display. Making sure that applications are readable is a bit of a farce. But as long as I ensure that certain applications only ever appear on the correct monitor, means that I can alter the launcher to set the correct DPI scaling.

I used to use a 2 command 1 liner to update my system: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade That was easy enough to type out now and then. But over time it grew to include removing and cleaning downloaded packages as well. Then there’s the matter of knowing if an update requires a system restart. The lazy me put it all into one bash script and made it globally accessible and executable:

Something changed recently, preventing a VM from fully provisioning. Tracking it down was a bit of a PiTA. OS: CentOS 6.9 Ruby: 2.4 - installed from source with the gearlingguy.ruby ansible role Gems to be installed: sass Output of attempting to install the sass ruby gem: $ sudo gem install sass Fetching: rb-fsevent-0.10.2.gem (100%) Successfully installed rb-fsevent-0.10.2 Fetching: ffi-1.9.21.gem (100%) Building native extensions. This could take a while... ERROR: Error installing sass: ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

NewRelic no longer offers server monitoring for free accounts, so what are the alternatives when you’re on a skin-flint budget? There are lots, but I’m not going to review any of them. Instead, I’ve been tasked with getting Amon running on a DigitalOcean droplet so that it might be appraised. Amon can either be used as a SAAS, hosted by Amon themselves. Or it can be run “On-Premise” by cloning the git repo to your own server.

Bringing up a vagrant machine is as easy as vagrant up. If you’re a web developer, it would be nice if it were to add the private network IP address to /etc/hosts of the host machine. Thus giving you instant access to http://my-awesome-site.dev/ This doesn’t happen by default, but it is possible with the use of a plugin. The one I like to use is vagrant-hostsupdater. Install thus: vagrant plugin install vagrant-hostsupdater When you bring up the vagrant machine, it will now automatically add the VM’s name to /etc/hosts.

This tweet has to have been the most popular thing I have ever said. At time of posting it has gained 80 retweets, 25 favourites and many replies/questions. Work recently bought me a new workstation, so the 1st thing I always do is to dual boot with Ubuntu. Some might consider me an edge case user. Though as a developer, I like a rather particular set-up. That is, 3 wide screen monitors with the central one rotated 90 degrees for my IDE.

Example user ‘iain’ sudo mkdir -p /chroot/iain/home/iain sudo useradd -M -d /home/iain iain sudo passwd iain sudo chwon iain: /chroot/iain/home/iain sudo nano -w /etc/ssh/sshd_config # At the end of the file, add: Match User paypoint ChrootDirectory /chroot/iain AllowTCPForwarding no X11Forwarding no ForceCommand internal-sftp sudo /etc/init.d/ssh restart

If, like me, you can’t wait for Ubuntu 12.04.1 to be released, you can force an upgrade of your favourite OS OS. sudo apt-get update; sudo do-release-upgrade -d If you are going from the previous LTS 10.04, then the -d is important. Otherwise there would be no upgrade to offer. The upgrade process should go smoothly enough. Except for when it comes to the kernel. Bytemark VM’s make use of kernels that sit outside of the VM itself.

Current project requires a couple of VPN tunnels to be set up. An IPsec and a PPTP. The IPsec will wait for another day, the PPTP is set up and ready to go. One thing that wasn’t quite right with the tunnel though, is the static route created by PPTP missed out a large chunk of the server’s network. Starting the tunnel sets up the routing rule of 192.168.100.111 to be sent to the tunnel.

Web server: Linux (Ubuntu on my dev setup), Apache, PHP 5.3, Symfony 1.4, Doctrine 1.2. Database server: Microsoft Windows 2008 Server, MS SQL Server Trying to get Symfony to talk to the database server has been a painful experience for the last few days. But perseverance has paid off. Lots of Googling with trial & error has resulted in actually achieving a development setup that will mirror the eventual production setup.

Via the Ubuntu Software Centre: Search for thunderbird Click on the search result “Thunderbird Email” and then on the “More Info” button Enable at least the “Calendar Extension for Thunderbird - Google Calendar support (xul-ext-gdata-provider)” Install the add-ons Open your Google Calendar in your web browser In the left-hand column, under “My calendars”, hover over the calendar of choice and click the down arrow that appears after the calendar name Select “Calendar settings” Close to the bottom of the page will be the “Calendar ID” (in my case it is my full email address.

It’s finally happened. I’ve become so fed up of Windows 7 freezing while I’m working that my workstation now runs Ubuntu 11.04. I would have done it a long time ago, except the lack of hardware compatibility kept putting me off. That said, there are 2 final hardware items that I need to cater for. DisplayLink USB graphics adaptor for my 3rd monitor. Skype ATA device so I can use my desk phone with the Skype Out number.

Installed Ubuntu 10.04 from ISO onto a blank virtual box machine. All worked well for a while, until I recently did an aptitude safe-upgrade. The next time I booted the system, mysql failed to start and refused to do so when I issued: sudo service mysql start It would just hang there. Tracked the issue down to this bug. How I maged to get it to work: In a terminal:

I used to use a 2 command 1 liner to update my system: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade That was easy enough to type out now and then. But over time it grew to include removing and cleaning downloaded packages as well. Then there’s the matter of knowing if an update requires a system restart. The lazy me put it all into one bash script and made it globally accessible and executable:

Something changed recently, preventing a VM from fully provisioning. Tracking it down was a bit of a PiTA. OS: CentOS 6.9 Ruby: 2.4 - installed from source with the gearlingguy.ruby ansible role Gems to be installed: sass Output of attempting to install the sass ruby gem: $ sudo gem install sass Fetching: rb-fsevent-0.10.2.gem (100%) Successfully installed rb-fsevent-0.10.2 Fetching: ffi-1.9.21.gem (100%) Building native extensions. This could take a while... ERROR: Error installing sass: ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

This tweet has to have been the most popular thing I have ever said. At time of posting it has gained 80 retweets, 25 favourites and many replies/questions. Work recently bought me a new workstation, so the 1st thing I always do is to dual boot with Ubuntu. Some might consider me an edge case user. Though as a developer, I like a rather particular set-up. That is, 3 wide screen monitors with the central one rotated 90 degrees for my IDE.

Example user ‘iain’ sudo mkdir -p /chroot/iain/home/iain sudo useradd -M -d /home/iain iain sudo passwd iain sudo chwon iain: /chroot/iain/home/iain sudo nano -w /etc/ssh/sshd_config # At the end of the file, add: Match User paypoint ChrootDirectory /chroot/iain AllowTCPForwarding no X11Forwarding no ForceCommand internal-sftp sudo /etc/init.d/ssh restart

If, like me, you can’t wait for Ubuntu 12.04.1 to be released, you can force an upgrade of your favourite OS OS. sudo apt-get update; sudo do-release-upgrade -d If you are going from the previous LTS 10.04, then the -d is important. Otherwise there would be no upgrade to offer. The upgrade process should go smoothly enough. Except for when it comes to the kernel. Bytemark VM’s make use of kernels that sit outside of the VM itself.

Further to my original quick db update queries, I found the need for a more in-depth approach. A WordPress site my father works on has weekly backups, but he wanted to see that they actually worked. To do so, I set up a subdomain vhost on my bytemark server and set about getting the back to work with it. One of the most annoying/lazy/strange things about WordPress is that it uses serialised arrays within database fields.

Current project requires a couple of VPN tunnels to be set up. An IPsec and a PPTP. The IPsec will wait for another day, the PPTP is set up and ready to go. One thing that wasn’t quite right with the tunnel though, is the static route created by PPTP missed out a large chunk of the server’s network. Starting the tunnel sets up the routing rule of 192.168.100.111 to be sent to the tunnel.

Web server: Linux (Ubuntu on my dev setup), Apache, PHP 5.3, Symfony 1.4, Doctrine 1.2. Database server: Microsoft Windows 2008 Server, MS SQL Server Trying to get Symfony to talk to the database server has been a painful experience for the last few days. But perseverance has paid off. Lots of Googling with trial & error has resulted in actually achieving a development setup that will mirror the eventual production setup.

Via the Ubuntu Software Centre: Search for thunderbird Click on the search result “Thunderbird Email” and then on the “More Info” button Enable at least the “Calendar Extension for Thunderbird - Google Calendar support (xul-ext-gdata-provider)” Install the add-ons Open your Google Calendar in your web browser In the left-hand column, under “My calendars”, hover over the calendar of choice and click the down arrow that appears after the calendar name Select “Calendar settings” Close to the bottom of the page will be the “Calendar ID” (in my case it is my full email address.

This list is partly to remind myself what essential apps need to be reinstalled after a system wipe. But it does have me thinking, what do other web developers use on a daily basis? Web browsers: Google Chrome FireFox IE Opera Safari FireFox addons: Adblock Plus British English Dictionary ColorZilla Dummy Lipsum Firebug Html Validator Web Developer Xmarks Code editing: PhpEd Eclipse PDT TextPad vim Code tools: SQLyog WinMerge System tools:

Installed Ubuntu 10.04 from ISO onto a blank virtual box machine. All worked well for a while, until I recently did an aptitude safe-upgrade. The next time I booted the system, mysql failed to start and refused to do so when I issued: sudo service mysql start It would just hang there. Tracked the issue down to this bug. How I maged to get it to work: In a terminal:

Just a quicky… Using the guide from here, I’ve managed to use the ’net connection of my Nexus One with my Eee PC running Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Speed tests… Nexus One using Wi-Fi and home cable: Nexus One using 3G in the Telford & Wrekin region:

The MySQL PASSWORD() function has started giving a different value on a client’s live server compared to local development servers. This has resulted in end users not being able to log in when PASSWORD()` is used to compare the stored and entered passwords. Why this has happened I have no idea. Any thoughts? dev mysql> SELECT PASSWORD('foobar'); +-------------------------------------------+ | PASSWORD('foobar') | +-------------------------------------------+ | *9B500343BC52E2911172EB52AE5CF4847604C6E5 | +-------------------------------------------+ 1 row in set (0.

This is on myrant.net rather than my other blog on lazygnome.net as it wasn’t as quick and easy as I’d have liked to set up. So, in a way, a very tiny rant with a lot of helpful content (I hope). Inspiration for this article came from following Popey’s setup instructions with Ubuntu 9.10 alpha. Download Ubuntu 9.10 32bit desktop ISO: http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download a) if you have an external CD drive, burn the ISO to a CD.

Applications which steal input focus are pure scum. The only times that a new window should take focus are: application launched by the user. alert box instigated by the application currently with focus. Whilst I’m coding in an editor, I do NOT want the virus scanner to pop up to say its finished running and expect me to care at that time.

I’m a PHP developer by trade with a strong Linux background. One thing that has been lacking from my skill set is how networking really works. In an effort to rectify this, I bought myself a 2nd hand managed network switch from ebay. A 26 port (24 x 10/100mb + 2 x 1gb) “3com SuperStack 3 Switch 4500”. Flashing lights and noisy fans, I feel like I’m headed in the right direction.

Vagrant - Great Hosts Updater plugin - very handy Having to enter your sudo password when the plugin edits your hosts file - really annoying. I finally got around to addressing this on my dev system. Looking at the plugin source there are two sudo commands that we need to cater for. One to add hosts and one to remove. Adding the following to my sudoers file worked a treat:

When something really note worthy happens, I usually don’t go longer than a few days without knowing. But, for some reason, I just learnt about something that happened 19 March 2008. Only by reading this comic in this book did I learn of Arther C. Clarke’s passing. This is particularly shocking as Arthur C. Clarke was the main author of the books I read in my childhood. You’d have thought that it would have been bigger news.

[this is a bit of a random rant, excuse me whilst I ramble] Every year, the sale of fireworks seems to come earlier and earlier. In the UK, we used to use them on the 5th November (or the closest weekend). Now they seem to be in use from the 30th October to mid November. And then over the whole Christmas period. When in the right hands, they can be great fun.

Using Symfony2, DQL and knplabs/knp-paginator-bundle - how to get around “Cannot count query which selects two FROM components, cannot make distinction” Fails: Works:

I had a need to add ACL rules to entities at the repository level. My biggest struggle was getting dependancy injection working. This is what I finally came up with after a fresh mind and an instant coffee: Comments KingCrunch says: 16th February 2013 at 11:30 am If your EntityRepository needs to know about the DIC, you made it wrong… Wessel says: 13th June 2013 at 12:03 pm Mmm nice trick.

Sadly, this isn’t really documented (at time of writing). Adding new protected variables to your User.php entity will not actually create database entries when you try to do a doctrine:schema:update. While one still needs to have the protected variables in this entity class, along with getters and setters, the actual creation work is within UserBundle/Resources/config/doctrine/User.orm.xml Here is an example for adding a foreign key: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <doctrine-mapping xmlns="http://doctrine-project.org/schemas/orm/doctrine-mapping" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://doctrine-project.

Web server: Linux (Ubuntu on my dev setup), Apache, PHP 5.3, Symfony 1.4, Doctrine 1.2. Database server: Microsoft Windows 2008 Server, MS SQL Server Trying to get Symfony to talk to the database server has been a painful experience for the last few days. But perseverance has paid off. Lots of Googling with trial & error has resulted in actually achieving a development setup that will mirror the eventual production setup.

I’m talking about this plugin: http://www.symfony-project.org/plugins/sfFormExtraPlugin For some reason, getting the plugin to work took a lot of Googling and some trial and error. So here is how I got it working. Hopefully I did this in the ‘correct’ way… cd plugins wget "http://plugins.symfony-project.org/get/sfFormExtraPlugin/sfFormExtraPlugin-1.1.3.tgz" tar zxvf sfFormExtraPlugin-1.1.3.tgz mv sfFormExtraPlugin-1.1.3 sfFormExtraPlugin cd .. ./symfony plugin:publish-assets cd web/js wget "http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.4.3.min.js" wget "http://jqueryui.com/download/jquery-ui-1.8.5.custom.zip" mkdir jquery-ui cd jquery-ui unzip ../jquery-ui-1.8.5.custom.zip mv jquery-ui/css/smoothness ../css</pre> Edit config/ProjectConfiguration.

Further to my original quick db update queries, I found the need for a more in-depth approach. A WordPress site my father works on has weekly backups, but he wanted to see that they actually worked. To do so, I set up a subdomain vhost on my bytemark server and set about getting the back to work with it. One of the most annoying/lazy/strange things about WordPress is that it uses serialised arrays within database fields.

In my last post I raved about the excellent plugin wp-blocks by Keir Whitaker and then went on to extend it a little. Time to extend it a little further, this time by adding a shortcode. Shortcodes are the handy square bracketed code snippets which conjure up more content and functionality direct from a page or post content. The wp-blocks plugin is currently intended to work with the theme template files in PHP.

If you’re used to developing with a CMS such as CMS Made Simple, you would be quite used to having blocks of content separate from the main content system. These blocks can be re-used through-out existing content and within the theme templates. One might even consider this a core function for a CMS. Sadly it’s missing from WordPress. Keir Whitaker has been working on this missing option and gives us wp-blocks.

To follow up from last night’s entry [Resize images on the fly without messing with image URLs]](/2011/03/07/resize-images-on-the-fly-without-messing-with-image-urls/), I was determined to remove the intermediary step of my_resize_script.php. I’ve acheived this goal in the mod_rewrite rule, file name and query string now get passed on to timthumb.php. Updated rules: RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .(gif|png|jpg|jpeg) RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (w|h)=(.*)$ RewriteRule (.*) /full/path/to/timthumb.php?src=$1&%1=%2&%3=%4 [L] This will pass both width and height variables into timthumb if they are declared.

[EDIT: I’ve made this simpler with a follow up post: Mimicking wordpress.com’s image resize URIs] Exporting a wordpress.com site for use on a standalone wordpress.org install is a joy to set up. The export and import system are simple to use and give little or no issues. What is a problem is the automatic resizing of images that wordpress.com offers. One can insert an image in the normal way and then append the image URI with some variables such as width (w) and height (h).

Why oh why does WordPress insist on storing the site URLs within the database? Every other project I can think of either keeps it in a config file or doesn’t bother with one and just works with whatever URL it finds itself on. This is most irritating when you have: more than one developer working on the same project more than one system for hosting the project (dev, test, live, etc) One way to cope with this irritation is to have a collection of .

Requirement: pre-filter products by customer group name to product attribute. I was looking for the “proper” way of filtering items by multiple custom attribute settings, but couldn’t find out how. So, the following is a brief explanation of how I’ve got this running in Magento 1.4.1. There are two ways of editing core code in Magento. Wrong: edit files directly in app/code/core/Mage Right: extend modules and keep them in app/code/local/MyDevCompany If you’re in a hurry, you might edit core files directly and then later copy the altered code out into correctly extended module files.

This is on myrant.net rather than my other blog on lazygnome.net as it wasn’t as quick and easy as I’d have liked to set up. So, in a way, a very tiny rant with a lot of helpful content (I hope). Inspiration for this article came from following Popey’s setup instructions with Ubuntu 9.10 alpha. Download Ubuntu 9.10 32bit desktop ISO: http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download a) if you have an external CD drive, burn the ISO to a CD.

Strictly Come Dancing has never been the sort of programme to hold my attention. But whilst I’m keeping my darling girlfriend company, I seem to be distracted from my laptop by the show. The audience annoys me with their reaction to the judges. Bruce annoys me for having lost it years ago. But everybody else annoys me for humouring the old fool. Yes, I’m getting old.