mrclay.rg

ReCaptcha Broken? Here’s the fix

Sometime recently ReCaptcha decommissioned its old API hosts: api*.recaptcha.net. The new API locations are at “http(s)://www.google.com/recaptcha/api”. If you rely on Zend_Service_ReCaptcha (or its form element), you’ll need to change some constants in Zend/Service/ReCaptcha.php:

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Xdebug 2.1.1 for XAMPP OSX 1.7.3

xdebug-211-xampp-osx.tgz contains a freshly compiled xdebug 2.1.1 module for XAMPP OSX, using this tutorial as a guide. The archive contains step-by-step install instructions w/ bash commands. Happy debugging with fewer bugs.

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Bash: Resolve symlinks in your working directory

Say you have created a symlink from your home dir to another location: $ ln -s /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/htdocs ~/htdocs Now you can easily change to the XAMPP htdocs: cd ~/htdocs and then get back home: cd .. But how do you get to xamppfiles? Update: Thanks to sapphirepaw, the solution is simple: cd -P htdocs/.. or

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How to Modify a 3rd-party Chrome Extension

I wanted to add a little feature to the Delicious Chrome extension, but couldn’t find any reference to how to edit/clone a 3rd-party extension. It turns out—at least for making minor mods—it works how you’d think: Change some extension files. Restart Chrome. Caveat: Undoubtedly an update of the extension would wipe out these changes, and following

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Shibalike: a PHP emulation of a Shibboleth environment

Update 2011-06-23: All the essential components of Shibalike are complete and the project is hosted on Github. This is currently blueprint-ware, but I’m excited about it. A co-worker and I have laid out a design for a flexible system that can emulate a working Apache/PHP Shibboleth stack, without requiring any outside resources (e.g. an IdP,

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Where the murder of a thousand children is a sign of success

Only in the drug war. “It may seem contradictory, but the unfortunate level of violence is a sign of success in the fight against drugs,” — DEA head Michele Leonhart From 2009: “There will be more violence, more blood, and, yes, things will get worse before they get better. That’s the nature of the battle,” — U.S.

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EA Skate started as a text game

EA’s Scott Blackwood talks about prototyping the flick-it controls for EA skate. But we really liked it on paper. We worked with our lead programmer at the time, and really, in about two or three days, he built a prototype, and it was great. We actually were up and playing the game — no rendering,

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“The Authoritariate”

Whenever a teacher or police officer is revealed to have engaged in abusive behavior, a certain group of people always crawl out of the woodwork to defend the person of authority. They’re prepared to ignore any amount of evidence presented and to blame any abuse victims for being overly sensitive or for failing to do

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Designing a Contextual Role-Based Capability Control System

Update May 2: ScopedRole is now a PHP5.3 library based on this design and is passing initial unit tests! After surveying a few permissions models that one might want to choose for an LMS, I think Moodle really got right the notion that role-based permissions should be flexible depending on the domain(s) the user’s in.

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Programming is…

Myth: Programmers get to write code all day. Truth: Most programmers spend a ton of time (in no particular order): Carefully composing e-mails to other programmers/mailing lists/non-technical folks Sitting in on meetings, working on mockups and DB schemas, worrying about performance implications of proposed features Writing bug reports and searching through bug DBs Scrambling to

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