Chris Mckee Designs, by Chris McKee, who'd of guessed | ChrisMcKee.co.uk

Magento Developers Lend Me Your Data

Chris McKee — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 21:35:11 +0000

I’m looking at testing the new developments that Magento plan to release in version 4, but I need a few sizable databases to test the new speeds etc with. My own test bases generally range up to 1000 products, 30 attributes. So if anyone has higher and wishes to help-out by lending me their database [...]

Magento Beginners Guide… Its a Book for Magento Beginners, No-Really

Chris McKee — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 21:09:05 +0000

Anyone who already knows me knows I have a ridiculous amount of books; mostly e-books thesedays (the future-wifey takes exception to a book-based house-invasion) and mostly for reference. I am by all definition a book whore. So when PACKT offered to send me their latest so I can review it and didn’t stipulate any real [...]

Ever wondered why Magento Layered Cache Was SOOOO Slow and Greedy

Chris McKee — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 15:13:01 +0000

Ever wondered why Magento Layered Cache Was SOOOO Slow and Greedy, as in it sees mysql as its bitch and likes to consume as much resource as humanly possible. This is a SINGLE update query based on my test 'footwear' store, several attributes etc. Course the more attributes you have the slower it goes.

Validating UK Credit & Debit Cards With LUHN to Type

Chris McKee — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 12:53:00 +0000

Credit Card validation is a Pain in the Arse My Co-Worker pointed out this wont validate all Maestro Cards; Now hunting a list of registered prefixes. But its not going anywhere fast. So I’ve combined two of the scripts I’ve found to meet my needs, added UK credit card data (Maestro/VisaDebit etal) and here it is. Base Sources: [...]

Curl HTTP 417 – Expectation Failed

Chris McKee — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 10:30:50 +0000

I was nocking up a client script to drag down a news-feed and post it to a Wordpress blog; the script ran fine, no posts appeared and no errors occurred… irritating.

So I figured I'd share this pain in the arse issue fix to the "HTTP/1.1 417 Expectation Failed Error"

Magento Commerce – Layered Navigation Cache Error – Part Badger Part Duck [fixed]

Chris McKee — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 16:09:30 +0000

PHP-CLI Edition * Auto Product Count * Auto On Completion Destroy Temp Files * Various Optimizations *NEW* PHP Web Browser Edition * Three files; * Wrapper (which you run from your browser) * Two IFRAMES: The main functional script and a counter to show its not fallen asleep

Saving user content to XML (Error Contains None UTF-8 Content) aka How to Remove Invalid Characters in UTF-8

Chris McKee — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 08:58:26 +0000

When encoding use content to XML there are often issues that occur… 99.9% of the time stemming from users copy-pasting from MSWord in to text boxes and all the odd characters being carried through. PHP will play dumb and happily save this, then winge like a b’tch about displaying it. A few quickfixes on saving the [...]

A Survival Guide for Decent Folk

Chris McKee — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:18:26 +0000

Taken from http://nightjack.wordpress.com/ before Sir David Eady QC merrily allowed the removal of anonymity privileged to the the author, losing him his blog and very nearly his job. That’s Sir David Eady of Tenterden, Kent who values anonymity up to the point where it exposes legal incompetence. Source: NightJack In these days of us increasingly having to [...]

Browser Testing

Chris McKee — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 23:16:08 +0000

Ok to save time (and the fact I type enough to drive me nuts) I’ll cut the bull and just give you a set of great tools for browser testing. IE Tester – this neat FREE bit of software lets you test in all the IE browsers since 5.5 within one browser. Great stuff; the [...]

IE 8 is finally out complete… and its not terrible

Chris McKee — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:49:46 +0000

Regardless of whether or not your a fan of IE, bits of functionality in windows will make you use it, whether it be update or irritating banking sites that insist on making you use a specific browser; so do yourself a favour and download it anyway… if your on a mac you can just go [...]

Magento Commerce – Layered Navigation Cache Error – Part Deux

Chris McKee — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 04:12:15 +0000

Solution 2 – Running the Layered Navigation Cache in bits from PHP-CLI Part Three Solves a lot (GO BADGER) So not everyone has half a gig of ram to play with, that’s a git. Funnily though, I don’t have PS on the server I’m developing Magento on (why, oh god why?) so I cant build a shareable [...]

Magento Commerce – Layered Navigation Cache Error

Chris McKee — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 14:01:01 +0000

When running a cache refresh on Layered Navigation the script times out producing either an Error 500 or server based error. The problem is then made worse by magento's failure to recognise that the process didn't complete.

Submit Your Site Feeds

Chris McKee — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 01:07:40 +0000

Submit Your Site Feeds [REPUBLISHED FROM OLD SITE] There’s little to love about search indexes, they can easily make or break a company, spread vicious rumours that are a nightmare to remove and last but not least drive web-masters to the point where they crack. Just to save time; there’s not many search engines left any more, nearly [...]

Converting a Date to MySql Formatted Date

Chris McKee — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 01:03:28 +0000

Converting a Date to mySql Formatted Date [REPUBLISHED FROM OLD SITE] This is a php coded function provided to allow people to convert dates from standard input format to mysql storage format. /** * function dateconvert * * dateconvert is a handy function to take one of the aches and pains out of mysql * by converting data from a variable (posted [...]

How to Solve: “Delayed Write Error”

Chris McKee — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 00:57:44 +0000

[Republished from old blog] With many large hard-drives on Windows XP, attached via SATA, people have started to encounter issues where the disk drive starts to display problems displayed in the windows information bubble listing that drive X:(your drive name) has encountered a “Delayed Write Error”, usually followed by some file name your probably not even accessing. Now [...]

Installing Advanced Policy Firewall on Media Temple

Chris McKee — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 14:51:01 +0000

Prerequisites for installing APF on MT [Taken from old blog] 6 pack of beer or other alcoholic beverage (as this is really boring) About an hour of your time (allowing time for drifting off and watching tv) Large blunt object (hands will do) for mashing keyboard (mt) Developer tools installed (mt) SSH Access (mt) slow bleeding brain hemorrhage. Access to the internet [...]

UNITE! in the name of hippy whacking

Chris McKee — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 14:46:07 +0000

UNITE! Thousands of half arsed under-researched opinion mongering by thousands of people that don't matter, won’t make scratch difference.

A Quick review of my recent hosts aka the Host Sucks List

Chris McKee — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 15:15:32 +0000

My hit list of previous hosts, that rocked, sucked and blew