mrclay.rg

GitHub: Please Syntax Highlight New Files

While syntax highlighting diffs in general would be difficult, it would be easy (and super useful) to apply it to new files. (All I did to create the mockup below was to take the regular file view and apply background #DDFFDD. It could be that easy.)  

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Installing xhprof on XAMPP for OSX Lion

Directions adapted from Ben Buckman. Download xhprof. cd path/to/xhprof/…/extension # If you don’t have autoconf… I didn’t. sudo chmod o+w /usr/local/bin #(brew needs to write a symlink there) brew install autoconf sudo /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/bin/phpize Make sure you have a CLI C compiler. I installed one via XCode. sudo MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.6 CFLAGS=’-O3 -fno-common -arch i386 -arch x86_64′ LDFLAGS=’-O3

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jQuery.Deferred() is pretty easy

I was using an asynchronous file uploader and, for usability, wanted to make sure the upload progress bar was displayed for at least a couple seconds before changing the view. The jQuery.Deferred object made this a breeze, eliminating a bunch of callback/isDone checking mess: var uploadFinished = $.Deferred(), timerFinished = $.Deferred(); $.when(uploadFinished, timerFinished).done(function () {

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Shared Server Development with PhpStorm

Working on a remote server—with or without multiple developers—is just asking for problems, but sometimes there’s no way around this. I’ve used several IDEs for this task and found that PhpStorm has several unique features that ease the pain considerably: It fingerprints remote content on download and re-verifies the remote content before auto-uploading. If someone else has edited

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Designing a Highly Reusable HTML Component

The UF College of Education uses a header/footer template designed to be applied to any page, and we use this across several applications such as WordPress, Moodle, Elgg, and Drupal. Changes can be propagated quickly to all sites, and adding the template to new PHP apps is trivial. If you need to create an HTML component that can be

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Decouple User and App State From the Session

When building software components, you want them to be usable in any situation, and especially inside other web apps. The user of your component should be able to inject the user ID and other app state without side effects, and similarly be able to pull that state out after use. That’s why, beyond all the standard

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Elgg Plugin Tip: Make Your Display Queries Extensible With Plugin Hooks

If you’re building an Elgg plugin that executes queries to fetch entities/annotations/etc. for display, odds are someone else will one day need to alter your query, e.g. to change the LIMIT or ORDER BY clauses. Depending on where your query occurs, he/she may have to override a view, replace an action, replace a whole page

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My Moodle Page, Now With 99.6% Fewer Queries

My work recently upgraded from Moodle 1.9 to 2.3, and some users were experiencing slow page loads while the site was zippy for others. Today we discovered that, for some users, the My Moodle dashboard page was requiring several thousands of DB queries. For one user, enrolled in four courses, the page required over 14,000 queries.

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In Support of Bloated, Heavyweight IDEs

I’ve done plenty of programming in bare-bones text editors of all kinds over the years. Free/open editors were once pretty bad and a lot of capable commercial ones have been expensive. Today it’s still handy to pop a change into Github’s web editor or nano. Frankly, though, I’m unconvinced by arguments suggesting I use text editors

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Define namespace constants using expressions

Since const is parsed at compile-time, you can’t use expressions in namespace constants, but you can use define as long as the name argument is the full name from the global scope (run this): namespace Foo\Bar; const CONST1 = 1; define(‘CONST2′, 1 + 1); // global define(__NAMESPACE__ . ‘\\CONST3′, 1 + 1 + 1); //

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PHP RFC Preview: Dynamic Callback Expressions

I’m posting this to get some initial feedback on this idea before I officially submit an RFC. Background Even with PHP’s growing object-oriented and functional programming features, the callback remains widely-used and useful. However, forcing authors to create callbacks via strings and arrays presents difficulties: Most IDEs do not recognize callbacks as such, and so

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Convert Google Maps embed HTML to Street View URL

You can use the form below to convert the HTML embed code Google Maps gives you to a usable Street View URL loading… Why do I need this? The new Google Maps layout has a chain-link icon on the left that gives you a URL to what you’re looking at. If you’re in Street View, sometimes

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ElggCollection Proposal

An ElggCollection entity would store an ordered set of integers optimized for filtering and/or ordering SQL queries of entities, annotations, or other tables with integer primary keys.

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String Subtypes for Safer Web Programming

Valid HTML markup involves several different contexts and escaping rules, yet many APIs give no precise indication of which context their string return values are escaped for, or how strings should be escaped before being passed in (let’s not even get into character encoding). Most programming languages only have a single String type, so there’s

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RotURL: Rot13 for URLs

RotURL is a simple substitution cipher for encoding/obscuring URLs embedded in other URLs (e.g. in a querystring). Also, common chars that need to be escaped (:/?=&%#) are mapped to infrequently used capital letters, so this generally yields shorter querystrings, too. /**  * Rot35 with URL/urlencode-friendly mappings. To avoid increasing size during * urlencode(), commonly encoded

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Validate Private Page Bookmarklet

ValidatePrivatePage <– validates in current window ValidatePrivatePage <– validates in new window (your pop-up blocker may complain) If you need to validate the markup of a page that’s not public (e.g. on localhost), you can now use this bookmarklet to auto-submit the current page source to the validator (instead of viewing source, copying, opening the

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NetBeans Love & Hate

For those cases where you have to work on remote code, NetBeans‘ remote project functionality seems to put it ahead of other PHP IDEs. It pulls down a tree of files and uploads files that you save. Having a local copy allows it to offer its full code comprehension, auto-complete, and great rename refactoring for “remote”

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Helping Netbeans/PhpStorm with Autocomplete/Code-hinting

Where Netbeans can’t guess the type/existence of a local variable, you can tell it in a multiline comment: /* @var $varName TypeName */ After this comment (and as long as TypeName is defined in your project/project’s include path), when you start to type $varName, Netbeans will offer to autocomplete it, and will offer TypeName method/property suggestions.

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Firefox 5 Shibboleth Issues

If you manage a Shibboleth SP and have been receiving complaints from Firefox 5 users, you may be running into an issue due to FF5′s more compliant caching of Location headers in 302 redirects. While this is a step in the right direction for front-end performance, even tiny HTTP handling changes can affect existing sites.

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Bookmarklet: Horizontally invert HTML5 videos

My demands for “reverse” glasses have gone unserved, but I made a bookmarklet that provides the same effect: “flopping” a video horizontally. Install the SwitchStance bookmarklet, for which you’ll need a modern browser that supports CSS transforms on video elements. Opt-in to YouTube’s HTML5 trial Load up any video without ads (here’s one of Matt

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