Jan 26 2012
Day-to-day I use Gedit with a ton of plug-ins to do my PHP development but a friend of mine suggested I gave Netbeans 7 a go. I last tried Netbeans at version 6 and wanted to know if it had fixed the problems it had. However after installing it on linux it just looked awful, [...]
Jan 6 2012
I thought it was about time I updated my site as it was running as a Drupal 6 install. I wanted to concentrate on the blogging aspect of the site and thought that WordPress might be closer to what I needed from a CMS. So here is how to convert a drupal site to wordpress. [...]
Sep 24 2011
When im writting a Codeigniter 2 application I prefer to have most of my code in the libraries and leave the controller as blank as possible. This allows me to reuse code like forms in other sections of the site. eg you want the login for to be in 2 different places. However Codeigniter’s Form_valiation class does not allow for custom validation callbacks in a library. The only way to fix this is to hack the Form_validation class. I have created a modification that allows you to call a validation callback from any class.
Jun 17 2011
My editor of choice is the Espresso IDE and I recently found an awesome colour theme called quiet light over at one crayon. Check it out.
Jun 8 2011
Using CodeIgniter’s framework for query binding is great but can make it hard to debug problems in your SQL statement. The solutions I have come up with is to use the compile_binds function. This will output your SQL statement after the parameters have been cleaned and added.
var_dump($this->db->compile_binds($sql, array($param1, $param2)));
Jun 2 2011
You can add generic validation functions to codeigniter by extending the Form_Validation. You do this by creating a file called /application/library/MY_Form_Validation.php.
If you load the Form_Validation library it will pick-up this class and use it instead. Because it extends the original class CI_Form_validation you still have access to all the normal functions.
Here is an example that adds 2 validation functions:
Apr 8 2011
After settings up a new Ubuntu 10.10 webserver I started getting these messages while using subversion.
svn: warning: cannot set LC_CTYPE locale
svn: warning: environment variable LANG is en_GB.UTF-8
svn: warning: please check that your locale name is correct
They seemed not to affect the subversion commands i was runnng but are just a bit annoying. After the normal google skills download I came across the Ubuntu page on locales. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Locale.
I used the local -a command to list the installed locales which gave me.
Nov 25 2010
Ignoring files in subversion I think is totally un-user friendly so I have written a tutorial to try and explain how it works.
Firstly you need to set the default text editor for subversion. To do this you need to set the SVN_EDITOR enviroment variable which is just a one liner in terminal. I am a nano fan so mine was:
export SVN_EDITOR=nano
Nov 23 2010
Found this awesome little OS X widget that gives you a complete PHP reference. Really handy to just have your dashboard key and have all the functions and classes there.
Aug 11 2010
I wanted a cron job to run that would backup my Mysql database each hour. But I also wanted the command to create a new file each time preserving the history.
This is the command I came up with:
mysqldump --opt -u [username] [dbname] > /path/to/backups/database-`date +%Y-%m-%d-%k:%M:%S`.sql