Code from the sideline

And again jQuery Slider

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 08:05:10 -0500

Trying to make some slider plugins for jQuery work with a HTML list didn’t prove to be as simple as expected I started working on a simple slider to work with all HTML elements. So here it is in a first working version to be improved and worked on in the futur as need arises.

FirePHP and Codeigniter 2

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 11:00:05 -0500

Working on a Codeigniter 2 Project right now I decided to give FirePHP a spin since it was pointed out to me for being somewhere around the next best thing to sliced bread for PHP Debugging… or something like that. It really seems nice so far I have to say!

Looking for some Codeigniter library but only finding a CI 1.7 one I decided to try to just drop in the provided code from the FirePHP site and guess what it just works. Download the FirePHPCore, currently 0.3.2, and unpack FirePHP.class.php to the Codeigniter application/libraries folder (I also renamed it to firephp.php as well). Now the library can be loaded either via adding it to the autoload.php as

$autoload['libraries'] = array('firephp');

or just load it when needed via

$this->load->library('firephp');

I prefer to autoload since I only load it in my development autoload.php anyway. Having different configs for development and production is as easy as setting up a directory structure like the following and just drop the configs in the environment folders.

Now it is time to install both Firebug and the Firefox FirePHP Plugin for Firefox 8+. Currently the latest FirePHP needs to be installed via the link since the one provided as stable via Addons is not working with Firebug 1.9. Get the latest from the FirePHP site or you will get an error.

Thats it! Now logging a message is as easy as

$this->firephp->log("FirePHP is working!");

Shrtr - Heroku, Redis, Node

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 12:17:01 -0500

Heroku provides node.js hosting for some time now and I didn’t have time to check it out, so yesterday I took some time and decided to write a quick app to check it out. You can find it as Shrtr its a URL shortener using Redis in the backend. So for anybody interested code is available on Github.

Clean configuration defaults via Object.create in Node.js

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 07:13:00 -0500

While recently coming back to clean up some Node.js module code I was looking for a nicer way to handle configuration of an object besides doing something like this to handle both configuration options and defaults.

var MyModule = function(opts){
  this.foo = opts.foo || 1;
  this.bar = opts.bar || 2;
  // the list goes on
}

In my opinion this code is not really readable, and defaults are not as obvious as I would like them to be. So I decided to let myself get inspired from jQuery which provides a nice way to handle settings and defaults in plugins, via $.extend(defaults, options) so my first Idea was to simple create an extend function in node, but since I would have to extend Object to make this as clean as possible I was looking for a way to handle this natively, and this is where Object.create comes in handy.

Object.create allows creating of an object based on some prototype as well as some default values, which is exactly what I was looking for. Do to the way Object.create handles properties the options need to be prepared before merging them in the configuration, which is finally bound to this.

var MyModule = function(opts){
  // some default values 
  var defaults = { foo: 1, bar: 2 };

  // prepare the options for Object.create
  var options = {};
  for(var i in opts){
    options[i] = { 
      value: opts[i], 
      enumerable: true, 
      writeable: true, 
      configurable: true } 
    };
  }

  // let Object.create merge the options with the defaults
  var config = Object.create(defaults, options);

  // bind to this
  for(var o in config){
    this[o] = config[o];
  }
}

Any suggestions for a different cleaner handling of configuration options are highly welcome.

EDIT: Fixed extra level of nesting in options thanks to Sami Samhuri

Filmspieler

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 09:10:44 -0500

Some time ago, me and a good friend of mine, Sebastian Weber decided to take up podcasting. At the time he was still working for PCGames, a german games magazine, and so there was not really the opportunity to do so. But now the time has come and we are now booth working together on recording out new Podcast “Filmspieler”. To get the “Film” part going, another really good friend of mine, Florian Negwer is contributing.

So whats this all about? It really is a project born from our love towards movies, games, and especially talking about those. We are not focusing on news but the stuff we are currently excited about even if it is older already.

All 3 of us are really excited to get this going, our first episode is currently out and we hope to continue in a 2 week rhythm, while writing articles on the webpage as well in between.

We’d love some feedback so check it out at “Filmspieler”.

BEWARE: Everything is in german.

Todo.txt syntax highlighter for Vim

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 10:43:16 -0500

As mentioned before I am a big fan of Gina Trapanis’ Todo.txt a command line todo list manager completely based around a bash script to manage a txt file. I already wrote a highlighter plus some basic commands as a plugin for TextMate which I now started to port for Vim. Currently the syntax highlight is working, the commands will follow. Stay tuned!

Nginx forward all requests to https

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 13:00:13 -0400

Since listening to Mike West and reading his posts I finally decided to really move all my stuff hosted on my own server to SSL. Certs are really not that expensive anymore (about 9$ per Year) and getting more IPs for my server was easier than expected (Whats up with IPv4 depletion aye?).

Since I want everything reachable with all the old links I decided to forward pretty much everything to the ssl host, to do this via Nginx the following little config should work, so I wanted to share since it was not as easy as expected to actually get everything running nicely. It forwards in this case http://example.com http://www.example.com https://www.example.com all to https://example.com.

To make sure the clients will only use SSL from now on the server serving SSL should furthermore have ” add_header Strict-Transport-Security “max-age=31556926; includeSubdomains”; ” somewhere in the config.

Thats it… now to move over more stuff.

Hermes allows google to index the parcel tracking?

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 09:59:23 -0400

While waiting for my iPhone 4s today I received a message about my tracking status and so I was checking the Hermes tracking page. When it told me the status of my packet I was curious when it will arrive so I decided to google for that, and was kind of surprised what showed up…

Oh well so It seems like google is indexing the Hermes tracking system, you can even click it and view the links for another persons’ packages….

It’s actually not a big deal, I’m just confused why Hermes would allow google to index this. It’s not really useful for anybody and even though it is publicly available information feels kind of weird to have another persons delivery as the first google result.

Use a different single template per category in Wordpress

Sat, 08 Oct 2011 07:43:34 -0400

In a recent Wordpress project the posts are displayed on different pages differentiated by category instead of type. In this case different designs are loaded based on categories as well, since the theme needs to match the design of the current page. Wordpress does not provide a build in mechanism to do this, it only does for post types.

The solution is rather simple, use the single.php file to first check the category and load the matching template. Since in my development environment the categories might match to different IDs than in the deployed instance it’s more practical to match by name instead of ID. Importantly first the category ID needs identification by name, and is stored to load the matching template, since matching via the $post variable can only be achieved via ID not name or slug. For anybody interested I put example code up on github.

Grouptime is in the App store

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 04:20:46 -0400

The iPhone App I, as part of a team, was working on during the last couple months for a client reached the Appstore some days ago. You can find everything about Grouptime on the Webpage. By the way the App is build using Titanium, and is the reason for me to be developing the jpgcompressor Titanium module.

And now back to work on the Android Port, go go go!

Using shell script to deploy automatically

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 07:50:00 -0400

Automatic deployment is essential for any project which is supposed to be worked on and run continuously. Until recently I was using capistrano to do this, but since development seems to have kind of stalled recently I decided to look around for an alternative, which I found in deploy a shell script by TJ Holowaychuk. To check it out I am currently using it to deploy a small Codeignitor project I am working on the side and use to try out new stuff. It really is easy to use and quite flexible due to allowing pre and post deploy hooks as well as automatic tests to check if the deployed version is working, and rollback if it is not. The use with CI is quite simple the only thing todo is to make sure that the right permissions are set which can be easily handled by a post-deploy shell script.

Usage

On the server it creates a simple directory structure with

ENV_ROOT/current ENV_ROOT/shared ENV_ROOT/source

in my case for both staging and production. This is done via an initial

deploy [ENV] setup

all following deploys are done by issueing

deploy [ENV]

Modifications

For some reason some commands were not working for me in Bash ond my Mac so I had to do some small ajustments, I guess it is due to the version of bash I am using being not current maybe. You can find them in my fork

Integrate doctrine 2 in zend 1.11

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 10:01:30 -0400

Just some quick notes on zend and doctrine. Right now I am in the process to rewrite a web application which is based on zend and doctrine, and in the process is ported over to the latest versions of both. Since doctrine does not integrate completely seamless in zend, yet, there is some glue code to be included to make it work. While looking for the right way to do it I came across a video which explains everything nicely. The code which holds everything together is Bisna which is available as part of NOLASnowball. To make it work simply check out the “doctrine2-managed-crud” branch

$ git clone https://github.com/ralphschindler/NOLASnowball $ git co doctrine2-managed-crud

and copy Bisna, Symphony, Doctrine from the library folder to your project, also the application.ini file needs to be adjusted to. For a more extensive explanation check out the video mentioned above.

Scaling images in Titanium (JPGCompressor Update)

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 09:44:41 -0400

Since I wrote the initial version of jpgcompressor for titanium, I needed scaling of images as well. The only way to do this in titanium is to overlay an Ti.UI.imageView and grab the picture out. This is neither fast nor clean, and it seems to reduce the quality for some weird reason. Since I figured I’m not the only one facing this problem, I added the feature to jpgcompressor via the scale function. Documentation is available in the example. If there are any problems please let me know, the code is build against the new 1.7.2 version of Titanium but should work with previous versions as well by adjusting the manifest as well as titanium.xconfig.

Quickly find all Translateable strings in titanium project

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 14:17:51 -0400

There is still room for optimization ;)

JPGCompressor for Titanium

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 20:14:42 -0400

Since Titanium is not exporting the UIImageJPEGRepresentation function present in the iPhone SDK, there finally was a reason for me to write a little Titanium Module to do that myself. It is quite easy just define the desired size and pass the picture as a TiBlob, it is compressed as close as possible to the desired size and returned. Example usage is present in the app.js used for testing in the Project.

Enjoy.

IPv6 Appengine and iPhone Simulator

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 07:42:06 -0400

Since yesterday appengine is also available via IPv6, but the iPhone Simulator does not handle IPv6 all that well. So if there is IPv6 available on the Mac running the simulator, and the app connects to appengine requests seem to fail at random right now, not returning any data. In my case I had tunnelbroker providing me with IPv6 and request from the Simulator were not getting through from time to time, so for now I decided to shut down the tunnel. Just a quick info for everybody who might face a similar, random seeming request fail.

Todo.txt in Cygwin: Remember there is a windows sort!

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 08:00:06 -0400

Setting up todo.txt in cygwin I stumbled across the script not working due to the following error: $ todo.sh ls Input file specified two times. -- TODO: 0 of 66 tasks shown After some search it came clear that the problem was that todo.sh tried to use the windows internal sort command for sorting instead of the cygwin one. This can be solved by setting TODOTXT_SORT_COMMAND in the config file to “/bin/sort” instead of just “sort”. Now everything works fine.

Get links from twitter to improve RSS Reader experience

Wed, 25 May 2011 08:06:06 -0400

For some time now I’m using Fever to get more out of my RSS feeds. It’s nice to have a rating on articles which are important to me. There are some high volume feeds I just don’t have the time to scan, but still if something important comes up I don’t want to miss it. This is also where a great service comes in a guy I know from College build, it’s called Chillitweets. Chillitweets scans your twitter stream to extract links and presents them to the user. Since, by definition, I follow users I’m interested in they will as well post links I’m interested in which get added via Chillitweets RSS feed to my Reader. Now they can be used to rate the feeds I’m presented with. I’ve been a user of Chillitweets since the early days and I gotta say Mario really build a great service there. And to see NodeJS in action is always nice :).

Todo.txt TextMate Bundle

Sat, 14 May 2011 16:05:00 -0400

Todo.txt is a command line todo list manager completely based around a bash script to manage a txt file which holds the todos and an Android App is available as well. Since it is just a plain text file it is really nice to work with, and it syncs very easily, even if the machine you are working with doesn’t feature a GUI. From time to time there is the need to edit the file not via the command line but via an editor. To ease my life doing this I was looking around for some support in TextMate, and since there was none I decided to start a TextMate bundle for it. Currently there is just some syntax highlighting but I plan on adding some commands as well as soon as I figure out what might be useful in the editor. The goal is not to replace the command line after all since it works perfectly well. So for anybody interested check it out, code is available on github.

UPDATE: Started to add commands, nice to use ruby to extend my text editor.

SSH into Windows

Thu, 12 May 2011 08:00:06 -0400

Sometimes it’s just nice to have a secure access to the Windows box at home. In my case, if possible, I try to use SSH all the way, especially since it allows tunneling as well as file access in an easy to use fashion. So just for a quick setup I currently am using freeSSHd on Windows. To be more secure I only allow authorization via a ssh key for my own specific user. This is done by copying the “key.pub” file to “C:\Program Files\freesshd” and rename it to the user using it, in my case it’s now “phil”. Now just change the settings to only allow specific users, and the authentication to require Publickey. Now everything just works like every other SSH server, and it’s possible to use this connection for tunneling, file access and in my case to tunnel my RDP connection.