Category: Dev & Systems

There’s a bash exploit doing the rounds that is drop-everything serious. The short version is that it is: related to how environment variables are processed: trailing code in function definitions was executed, independent of the variable name So, a correctly formed command can be used to execute arbitrary code on an affected system; anything running bash.…

Are you about to get a freelancer to work on your existing WordPress site for you or one of your clients? Here’s a simple SQL script you can run against your dev database to randomise all the user information EXCEPT a test login before you send it over to them. It will also set that test…

I found a handy plugin this weekend for keeping my PHP development Vagrant VM VirtualBox guest additions in sync: vagrant-vbguest Every time you do a vagrant up it’ll do a check, which might occasionally get annoying if you’re in a hurry, so there’s a config option to disable it on a per-vm basis:

Assuming you want to develop HTML5 apps to run on mobile devices using Phonegap/Cordova then the easiest place to start is Android if you’re a Windows user as you don’t need a separate Mac, you don’t even need a device to test on as there’s an emulator. Anyway, I’ve had to do this three times…

Quick post for future reference. Just installed Debian or Ubuntu, need Vim back to what you’re used to? edit /etc/vim/vimrc uncomment add Tabs are now always two spaces and you can actually see the text. Don’t forget to add export EDITOR=vim to .bashrc either.

Problem: you need to get someone else to set up your web application on another server. Even with a signed NDA it’s not really a good idea to be sending over MySQL dumps containing real people’s details and it is almost certainly against data protection rules. If so, and you need to do it right…

Want to find your Windows start-up folder to add a new shortcut? Win+E then clicking through Computer -> C: -> Users -> AppData -> iforgetwhereitisthesedays /a> too much of a drag? Try: Win+R then type shell:startup I found a huge list here, most are a bit pointless but cialis online I can see a use…

I was building a shared work laptop the other day, something that I would primarily use on building sites for system commissioning. As part of the install I had automatically installed Dropbox along with other useful utilities and then suddenly had the thought. “I won’t be the only person using the laptop. All my stuff is on here in Dropbox. Also,…

Just installed Windows 8? Looking for Notepad? Powershell? Windows+R still works, so you could just run the command. Ditto Windows+E to navigate the file system and find it, but in either case that’s not really what you’re after is it?. You want a menu of everything installed, right? You need the search interface. This brings up a…

Mention Quicksilver and the more techie OSX users out there will wax lyrical about its ease of use and its powerful features. They have a point! Windows has always been a bit rubbish when it comes to the CLI, even adding Powershell isn’t a huge improvement. So, enter stage left Launchy. Launchy is fantastic. It’s…

Simple one-liner that I use when I’ve lots of files to add to a subversion repository:

I’ve already installed Trac and I now want to be able to set-up multiple projects with the minimum of fuss. My requirements are: The most important job is to get Apache set-up properly. I’m using mod_python so:apt-get install libapache2-mod-python I then set-up a VirtualHost for http://my.trac.url, thus: Note the LocationMatch. From the docs: This will…

I used to get annoyed when pasting text into a Vim window as each line would indent one more tab than the last line. To fix it I used to add set noautoindent in /etc/vimrc, however this unsurprisingly turns off auto indenting, which is a useful feature for normal typing. Today I came up with…

My background task over the Christmas holidays was to ensure that I could give read/write access to a subversion repository situated on a machine within our corporate network so that staff or external contractors can access it via the interweb but without me needing to open up additional ports on our firewall. The server running…

The following is a no-frills install guide for getting Trac up and running on a Debian ‘etch’ Linux system. The assumption is that you’ve already got mysql and subversion working and have created a subversion repository (tip: apt-get install mysql-server subversion). The first thing that we need to do is install Python, easy_install and the…

More brain dumping, this time after setting up MySQL on my test server to replicate offsite as the data on there is becoming important. Both machines are running fully updated and upgraded Debian Etch and MySQL 5 as a Debian package with identical copies of the MySQL databases in /var/lib/mysql/. On the master I: I…

Ok, if you ‘do’ Linux, then you’ll probably already know this one. I did, kind of, but had to Google to remind myself of the exact chain of commands. So here I am writing it down so it’s easier to find next time. In my case, I had a load of Apache conf files where…

I needed to migrate all of our subversion repositories from an overworked machine onto a new dedicated machine. As I had about 30 repositories to copy over, I didn’t fancy doing each dump -> copy -> create -> import manually, so I came up with the following. Which, amazingly, worked the first time. I’d say…

This morning I’m debugging an issue on a script that gets cronned every minute. I’ve a shell open on the server and the file in question open using Vim and I notice each line has a trailing ^M…. Aargh the dreaded DOS linebreak. Dusting off my rusty vim-foo I simply do a search and replace…

I was recently asked if I’d sucessfully got the Symfony plugin sfSimpleCMS working and I’m afraid my answer was no. I had tried briefly when preparing for my talk, but something didn’t work and I carried on with other things. Being reminded of it and having an hour to kill before I head off to…

As someone doing more and more frontend development using javascript I’m trying to shore up my knowledge a bit. For example some of the shortcut syntax I wasn’t sure about and I knew I could do with more backgound on how the language deals with objects. With this is mind I’m half way through Douglas…

I recently bought a Mac, and today was the first day that I only had a Mac on my desk (as I took the Windows PC to use at home). After a week or so of build-up to today, using it more and more, I think I’m turning the corner and whilst I did manage…

With the recent release of Debian Etch to stable I’ve updated my aged Building a PHP development server article. In it I finally admit that Apache 2 exists plus I fix an embarrassingly large amount of typos. Hopefully it will be useful to someone.

I was stuck for a few mins just now when trying to do a ‘make install’ for php 5.2.1. I was getting the following error: apxs:Error: Activation failed for custom /etc/apache2/httpd.conf file.. apxs:Error: At least one `LoadModule’ directive already has to exist.. make: *** [install-sapi] Error 1 As you can see the assumption is that…

Broken Javascript in IE *really* sucks as one gets really obscure error messages and alert(); becomes your only friend, or so I thought. I've recently done quite a lot of javascript DOM work for a site including some AJAX stuff and whilst it was a pleasure to develop in Firefox using Firebug, I'm now getting…

My secondary mail server (that runs qmail) had a load of email queued up today that I needed to flush. Googling comes back with people saying run qmail with daemontools then you can use on of the nice qmailctl scripts to do a 'doqueue'. Needless to say I'm not running with daemontools (my primary is),…

I've been working on a site that'll be launching in the new year that contains its share of contemporary web technologies (look, roll your eyes if you want but I managed to avoid the W2 word); it also has its fair share of subtle drop shadows which have to work over a stripy background. Initially…

I've been playing with the AJAX support in Symfony this weekend and I'm blown away by how easy it is. Today I put together a detailed/summary view switcher for a list of items coming from a database with a (script.aculo.us) fade in/out effect and I didn't need to write one line of JavaScript. Now that's…

I've updated my svn repository creation script, it now copies and imports the code. Works for me, etc. [code]#!/bin/sh # Darren Beale – siftware.co.uk # bealers@gmail.com # Oct 06 # v0.2 # This simple script creates a folder structure # containing /trunk /tags and /branches. It then places the # contents of a folder specified…

In 1997/8 (whenever it was) I got really excited by Flash 3 coming out; I even went to a do at the Islington Design centre (UK/London) where Macromedia pimped it (showing eye4U and Gabocorp, remember them?) and I got a free pen, woo. I played with it for a while, writing a cartoon strip called…

Rob Allen, who is on PHPWM and who I met at the recent PHPWM meeting in Worcester posted something on his blog detailing his prefered directory structure recently. Here's mine, seemingly nicked straight from FHS: /home/$USER/www/$PROJECT: /codebase /bin // anything with a shebang in /etc // config files /htdocs // document root /lib /class /function…

I've been migrating a large number of websites over from one server to another, always an enjoyable task. So I get to the last one, copy the database over and do the normal mysql import along the lines of: [code]mysql -ufoo -pbar database_name < database_name.sql[/code] Errors++ Turns out the Donke^H^H^H^HDeveloper who built the application didn't…

When creating a tarball, to exclude folders one simply uses the –exclude= flag: For example to tar up the contents of /var/log but to exclude /var/log/apache & /var/log/mail/ tar -jcvf logfiles.tar.bz2 /var/log/* –exclude=/var/log/apache/* –exclude=/var/log/mail/* Just in case you didn't already know then the 'j' flag in the 'jcvf' tells tar to use bzip2 compression.

I’m in the middle of migrating a lot of websites from one server to another. Here’s a small script I knocked up to take a dump of all the MySQL databases on that machine: [perl]#!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; my $dumpDir = “/tmp/foo”; my $dumpUser= “root”; my $mysqlBin = “/usr/local/mysql/bin”; my $mysqlPassword = “bar”; foreach (`ls…

I can’t be arsed with RSS feeds; they are too high maintenance and I just don’t have the time to read them any more, especially so since I became a freelance web developer again and all my time is spent working or trying to get work. I thought the Google Reader might work for me…

[code]#!/bin/sh for FOO in a b c d e f; do echo $FOO done[/code] Outputs a b c d e f

After quite a bit of resistance on my part I'm afraid that it's time to get down with the kids, hence: Install ruby [code]apt-get install irb1.8 libreadline-ruby1.8 libruby libruby1.8 rdoc1.8 ruby ruby1.8 ruby1.8-dev[/code] Install gems [code] cd ~bealers/build/src wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/5207/rubygems-0.8.11.tgz cd .. tar zxf src/rubygems-0.8.11.tgz cd rubygems-0.8.11 ruby setup.rb[/code] Install Rails [code]gem install rails –include-dependencies[/code]…

to replace all instances of – say – 127.0.0.1 with 10.0.0.1 in a file then using vi you can do: [code]:%s/127.0.0.1/10.0.0.1/g[/code] if you mess it up then press u for undo. Of course if it's an important file then back it up first.

Share ssh keys: client: [code]cd ssh-keygen -t rsa[/code] the copy ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub over to server server: [code]mkdir .ssh cat id_rsa.pub >> .ssh/authorized_keys[/code] Job done

I just downloaded MySQL workbench 1.06 beta. I stumbled across it after finding this message on the DBDesigner forum page: Dear DBDesigner4 users, Due to several attacks against the DBDesigner4 forum it has now been closed down.We simply cannot understand the sick motivation of people to attack Open Source projects.So please understand that we will…

CMS Made Simple uses the great GPL WYSIWYG editor FCKeditor and I noticed this morning that it has a spell checking facility. To get it to work, I: Installed aspell on my dev server: [code]apt-get install aspell Reading Package Lists… Done Building Dependency Tree… Done The following extra packages will be installed: aspell-bin aspell-en dictionaries-common…

CMS made simple (CMSms) is great as it does what it says on the tin e.g. it's a CMS and it's easy to use and configure. Most importantly for me, it's easy to skin and modify. It uses Smarty as a template engine and I have to admit that I was dubious when I saw…

Simple one, you have a windows virtual machine and you want to copy it: Copy the folder the VM is in (assuming you use a folder per virtual machine) and rename it to the new host name Click on the .vmx icon (you can rename this file first so it's new-host-name.vmx) Select “Edit this virtual…

If you've just installed something and want to make sure it starts on boot then the init.d script needs adding to the various run level folders as a symlink. It's a bit of a drag and it can be sometimes forgotten. Never mind, Debian comes with a handy script: Lets assume that we have a…

A mini How-To detailing how I created a separate virtual partition for my local dev server: I halted the virtual machine and then under VMWare settings I select Hard Disks then add. Once the disk is created and saved out I re-start the machine. Initally we have to partition the disk and make it a recognised file system. Once…

I wanted to add my Zend Framework example code to subversion but to do that I needed a local Subversion repository 🙂 As I had to figure out some of the bits how to this, I decided to put all of my steps into a mini How-To. Here it is: http://bealers.com/how-to/creating-a-subversion-repository/

On my virtual Debian Sarge development server running within VMWare I wanted to create a separate virtual disk so that if I ever want to use the data on it with another virtual machine I can. Here’s the mini How-To: http://bealers.com/how-to/creating-a-separate-vmware-hard-disk-for-a-linux-virtual-server/

Scenario: You are connected to a Linux webserver via a Windows terminal client such as PuTTy. You copy some text to paste into a Vim document open on the remote machine and you get tab hell: Here’s an example of something I pasted in tonight: [code] ServerAdmin webmaster@host.some_domain.com DocumentRoot /home/bealers/www ServerName bealers.com ErrorLog /var/log/apache/bealers.com-error.log CustomLog…

This item assumes that you already have svn installed and this is the first time you’ve created a repository for this server (else leave out certain bits) All items here worked for me on my local development server where I’d already installed subversion but up to now had only been using it as a client to check…

I’ve a Dell Axim x30i and occaisionlly I use it to look at things on the int3rweb. Windows 2003 Mobile Edition comes with IE (suprise suprise) but I’d rather use something else. Minimo, sounds like the perfect replacement, though it’s still heavily in development (I guess) and on my first install seemed to be slow…

I have a Dell Axim x30 and a Motorola v3 and I want to connect to the int3rweb using the PDA via the phone sometimes. I was missing the modem string, so it didn’t work. Anway, mostly for my own future reference, here’s a quick list when I need to do it again (e.g. on…

At work we use subversion to manage our code, we also use Trac to manage bugs which has handy hooks into subversion. Unfortunately they are on different (internal) servers. This is quick What I DidTM to get the live svn server (taipan) to sync with the Trac server (apu) taipan: svn server (Debian 3.0 woody)apu:…

I want to do some scripting to parse the contents of the iTunes XML library and ultimitely transfer the contents to a remote server. For my desktop I use Windows XP because It Just Works most of the time and I reckon that doing what I want under DOS is probably impossible, I don’t know…

A very easy to install WP plugin that gives you good range of basic stats in your admin screen http://jrm.cc/archives/blog/wp-shortstat/

Today I was writing some code – which is actually suprisingly rare these days – and I was getting an error about a particular function not existing in PHP5, array_diff_key() Luckily some body already thought about this and has ported a lot of the older functions into PHP classes that get bundled with Pear (which…

At work I’ve a MySQL 4.1 Master -> Slave set-up over our VPN as a backup and for local data processing. Today we realised that it’d not been replicating for days, @rse. Running “SHOW SLAVE STATUS G” on the slave showed: mysql> show slave status G *************************** 1. row *************************** Slave_IO_State: Master_Host: 10.0.2.136 Master_User: replicate…

Easily the best web application I’ve ever seen: http://maps.google.co.uk For starters type in ‘Curry E1’, when that’s loaded, type in ‘Curry E2’, also note that the map is draggable at all times This is what I call a web application, I’m glad I don’t have shares in Streetmap or Multimap!

I need to make sure that a particular host is available 24-7/365 for an application that my company is building. There is loads of information on local clustering but not much on balancing over networks in various physical locations My posting to GLLUG has been the best source of information so far: This looks good…

I’m going ot have a go at writing a Firefox extension. The upside is that I have an idea, the downside is that it looks like after 6+ years being a web developer I’ll actually have to know more than 10 JavaScript methods. I have some time off over Xmas so I’ll have a pop…

(I will keep re-editing this post and resetting the timestamp) I assume (and hope) that some of these will be solved by using pugins. 1) Description per category 2) Breadcrumbs for the embedded categories 3) Gallery and random image showing on the LHS or RHS 4) Decent email -> post script 5) Recent posts list…

1) needs greater margin and to stand out 2) Source code highlighter would be excellent 3) Seems a bit dodgy parsing, some tags get eaten.

I need to hack wp-keitaimail to work with wordpress 1.3 as it seems the WP 1.3 uses a newer XML-PRC library, Incutio XML-RPC Library IXR It looks as if I’m not the only person to have had to reverse engineer something similar, a quick google came up with http://www.bbcity.co.uk/entry/1585 I’ll write a few example scripts…

http://uk2.php.net/mysqli The mysqli extension allows you to access the functionality provided by MySQL 4.1 and above. More information about the MySQL Database server can be found at http://www.mysql.com/ This is news to me! I wonder if the PEAR DB_MYSQL that we are using is taking all of these new functions into account? Although I can't…

I was playing around with a virgin DSVR (vs300) account for a few hours during the week, just getting php and MySQL ready for use. Vi was really annoying, giving me the dreaded A B C D routine when the arrow keys were pressed in insert mode. vim in compatible mode, I could’nt find a…