Simon Holywell

jQuery and iFrames

2009-10-29T12:17:54Z

I worked on a project while ago that required the use of iFrames to create “AJAX” file uploads. It took me a little while but I finally worked out how to get the contents of an iFrame using jQuery. To get the contents of an iFrame we need to wait until the iFramed content has [...]

Opera Mini 5 Beta

2009-10-09T09:03:55Z

Opera has released a new version of their free mobile browser Mini for beta testing. Head on over to mini.opera.com to download it or if you are reading this from your mobile the direct link to the beta is m.opera.com/next. The new version is much improved in many areas. The first thing you will notice [...]

jQuery Using and Manipulating Select Lists

2009-11-02T14:15:26Z

JQuery is a fantastic tool but sometimes its functionality can be obscure or doing it one way might not work in a certain browser (MSIE6 anybody!). I have often found myself trying to remember the best way to work with HTML select lists so I am compiling this list of hints for future use and [...]

Moving to git and setting up InDefero as a web frontend

2009-09-01T16:10:54Z

Most of our development is done on Vista desktops (although I also run Ubuntu of course) and we wanted a web interface for easy browsing of code so I needed to use a pervasive and well supported VCS. After much hunting around and looking at Bazaar, Mercurial and git I decided to go with the latter [...]

Handy Linux Commands

2009-09-24T09:08:03Z

I use most of these commands every day to simplify my terminal interactions with an Ubuntu development box. This is more of a personal reference but thought I would share incase you find it useful. Task Command Get all users on the system for user in `getent passwd | cut -d: -f1`; do id $user; done Delete all .svn or any file [...]

Samba File Share Over SSH Tunnel

2009-03-18T14:02:53Z

Sometimes you need to be able to access a remote Samba server in a secure manner from a Windows machine. This is a relatively simple procedure on an XP SP3 machine like mine linking into an Ubuntu server pre setup with Samba file sharing. Windows is a little bit annoying as it binds all filesharing operations to [...]

Memcached and APC: Two Simple Techniques to Speed up your PHP Web Application

2009-08-04T13:29:51Z

Memcached and APC are two tools that you can install on your server and gain almost instant gratification! APC basically caches executions that you send to a PHP process so that the next time you ask the parser to run your script it only has to look for some pre-chewed opcode in memory rather than parsing [...]

Installing APC and Memcached for PHP Sessions on Ubuntu and Debian

2009-03-18T14:00:27Z

Installing APC on Debian or Ubuntu is as simple as: user@server:/directory/$ sudo apt-get install php-apc Now let us reboot the Apache process to enable our new cache: user@server:/directory/$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart APC should now be ready to run on your server. Try running the following command to verify it is setup; you should get something in response like mine: user@server:/directory/$ php -r ‘phpinfo();’ | grep [...]

Haiku OS Progress

2009-03-18T13:58:15Z

I have previously written about Haiku (formerly OpenBeOs) on my blog and I am pleased to say that I revisited this project last night and had a play with the latest nightly builds. It has moved on from the last time I look at it nearly 4 years ago now, but it still has some [...]

Using phing for good – Unfuddle Add Repository and SVN Import Tasks

2009-03-24T16:38:50Z

As you may be aware I have recently been playing with the excellent Agavi framework and it introduced me to the interesting phing tool. Phing can be used to automate tasks with build files that are close to interoperable with Apache Ant, which uses XML files to configure builds. The advantage phing has for us [...]

Installing APC and Memcached for PHP Sessions on Redhat

2009-03-18T13:59:34Z

Installing APC on Redhat is as simple as: [user@server directory]# yum install php-pecl-apc APC should now be ready to run on your server. Try running the following command to verify it is setup; you should get something in response like mine: [user@server directory]# php -r ‘phpinfo();’ | grep ‘apc’ apc MMAP File Mask => /tmp/apc.s5jA6w apc.cache_by_default => On => On apc.coredump_unmap [...]

PuTTY and Control + S or Ctrl + S

2009-03-16T12:05:21Z

As you have found this page I am sure you have accidentally hit the control+s short cut whilst inside a PuTTY shell and following that no keystrokes appear to affect the session. Basically hitting ctrl+s causes PuTTY to stop executing the stream coming in from the keyboard. It does however still listen to [...]

Firefox 3.1 has Web Workers (threading) and Geolocation

2009-03-11T15:04:52Z

The latest beta 2 release includes web workers, which are essentially threads allowing you to farm off Javascript heavy lifting to background processes so that the interface can continue to load without being impacted upon. The Mozilla developer center [sic] has an interesting article on implementing them; Using web workers, which includes a couple of worked [...]

CrunchBang Linux on the Eee Pc

2009-03-11T13:25:25Z

So far I have tried out Ubuntu, eeeBuntu, EasyPeasy Linux and CrunchBang Linux (all of which are Debian based) on the Asus Eee PC. Ubuntu was a bit of an annoyance to get setup and it was troublesome trying to get all the buttons or the sound and microphone to work so I then tried [...]

Agavi Release Candidate 1

2009-02-21T11:51:18Z

A bit slow off the mark with this one but Agavi 1RC1 has been released and it is of course looking very nice. The 1.0 feature set is complete and potential bug fixes are the only things standing between now and 1.0 in earnest. Features that I am particularly interested in include the recent [...]

A Good Windows Development Environment and Ubuntu Virtualbox

2009-02-18T15:17:24Z

Often Linux just does it better! Often I find myself developing a Windows machine without access to a Linux development server, but I still need to access to some of the Linux binaries and features such as cron jobs, the at command and binaries such as imagemagick, pdftotext, etc. Some things can be emulated with [...]

Enabling sites and modules in Apache on Ubuntu or Debian

2009-07-17T14:34:28Z

I really like the way the Apache modules and virtualhosts are seperated out on Debian into folders containing those, which are available and those which are enabled. There is one small problem with this – it is more work than before! Luckily there are some helper scripts. The Apache configuration files are layed out in the following way: mods-available – the [...]

Securing SSH with Key Based Authentication

2009-01-25T00:31:05Z

Certificates are a useful way of restricting access to your SSH server because a user must have three things to log onto the server: Username Password Certificate Normally they would only need to have a password and username, which can be guess at or (potentially) brute forced. Forcing the user to supply a certificate on log on means that [...]

Linux to Windows Server – Migrating and securing your crontab

2009-01-25T00:32:13Z

In the PHP development arena the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) stack is very common, but once in a while a client will come through the door with a Microsoft background. So what do you do if your CMS or framework was built with a Linux base layer in mind? Sounds easy, [...]

Agavi 1.0 Beta on XAMPP 1.7.0

2009-02-21T11:54:55Z

To install the new XAMPP ensure you firstly uninstall and remove your current XAMPP folder. Upgrades are not supported with this version due to the differences one of which is the removal of PHP4 support from the XAMPP package. I like to install agavi via the pear package that is available: Open a command prompt and navigate to [...]