Mini rants, mostly about Linux admin and PHP code
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) {
$(e).writeAttribute('disabled', null);
});
The MySQL PASSWORD() function has started giving a different value on a client’s live server compared to local development servers.
This has resulted in end users not being able to log in when PASSWORD() is used to compare the stored and entered passwords.
Why this has happened I have no idea. Any thoughts?
dev
mysql> SELECT PASSWORD('foobar');
+-------------------------------------------+
| PASSWORD('foobar') |
+-------------------------------------------+
| *9B500343BC52E2911172EB52AE5CF4847604C6E5 |
+-------------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
live
mysql> select password('foobar');
+-------------------------------------------+
| password('foobar') |
+-------------------------------------------+
| *9061D7B8DA0D4523AD448B53D80C2B551EDF8CD1 |
+-------------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
This is on myrant.net rather than my other blog on lazygnome.net as it wasn’t as quick and easy as I’d have liked to set up. So, in a way, a very tiny rant with a lot of helpful content (I hope).
Inspiration for this article came from following Popey’s setup instructions with Ubuntu 9.10 alpha.
By this point, Boxee is accessible via the Sound & Video menu.
Next task, for me, is to get an external enclosure for my internal blu-ray drive (still waiting for decent blu-ray support in linux).
Finding a needle in a haystack is a wonderful bit of symbolism and I welcome its use in many situations.
It’s just the implementation of that symbolism that needs to be standardised. For forgetting the order in which a function expects variables to be passed in is tedious.
In PHP, for example, there are some very useful functions: in_array() and strpos() to name but two.
Usage is in_array($needle, $haystack) and makes sense as you want to check that the needle is in the haystack.
But, it’s strpos($haystack, $needle) that messes things up. You can’t look for a haystack within a needle!
So, because of strpos() confusing things, it’s quite often that I (and other’s I’m sure) mix the order, no matter which function is in use. Unless I’ve been using the function within the last few hours, I’ll most likely get it wrong.
These are long standing functions in a well established language, so there’s no hope of these ever being corrected.
For new functions, a possible answer would be to pass variables by associative array when the function has more than 1 variable input.
An example of calling such a function would be: myFunction(array(‘needle’ => ‘malteser’, ‘haystack’ => ‘bag_of_revels’));
This way, it wouldn’t matter which order you remembered to pass in the variables. As it happens, this is how I write my own functions.
Apparently, something similar is done in Python. Might get around to learning it sometime…
Applications which steal input focus are pure scum.
The only times that a new window should take focus are:
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.