January 16, 2012 at 7:59 am · Filed under Programming
I spent some time working on a plugin to convert px to em and percentages for the upcoming Wordspot site.
The problem lies in the fact that measurements are based on the element they are attached to. Thus, to convert any CSS property (i.e. “5em” or “20%”) to pixels, one must determine what the relative height of a single line of text is in pixels.
This tool creates an invisible child element, measures a single line of text, and uses that for measurements.
Thus, to convert 90% (or any measurement, for that matter) to pixels, you could do the following:
var borderRadiusPixels = $.UnitConverter.px( $('#mydiv').css('border-top-left-radius') ); |
Here’s the source.
For more advanced operations, you can do things like this:
// create a new unit conversion
var measurement = new $.UnitConverter( $('#mydiv') );
// load a value to be examined
measurement.load( $('#mydiv').css('border-left-width') );
// add 10% to the height
measurement.add( '10%' );
// convert the measurement to various output types
var pxs = measurement.px();
var ems = measurement.convert( 'em' );
var pct = measurement.convert( '%' );
// determine what the measurement would be in another element (i.e. with a different line height)
var clonePxs = measurement.clone( $('#nudderElement') ).px(); |
Hopefully this will give you a good head start on conquering similar issues, without having to invent any wheels!
January 6, 2012 at 1:48 pm · Filed under Programming
I was teaching a good friend a bit about regular expressions and wrote up a regular expression tester. It was a blast to write and simple to implement. It’s all in one HTML page so you can download it and fiddle away. Hope it helps someone else as well:
http://www.zenovations.com/blog/misc/regex.html
July 9, 2011 at 11:36 pm · Filed under Programming
This guide really is a complete resource for understanding bash syntax; very easy to get around and understand.
http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/index.html
July 9, 2011 at 6:16 pm · Filed under Programming, Tools, Web Dev
I struggled for several days to set up remote debugging. I wanted to be able to remotely debug a single virtualhost on my CentOS server using my local IDE (PhpStorm) and xdebug.
Since this took me quite a while to figure out, I thought I’d include the steps here for others.
Installing Xdebug
Over SSH, I ran the following:
Configuring Xdebug in php.ini
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
; Module Settings ;
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
zend_extension=/usr/lib/php/modules/xdebug.so
[xdebug]
xdebug.remote_enable=1
xdebug.remote_port=9000
xdebug.idekey=PHPSTORM-XDEBUG
xdebug.remote_connect_back=1
[Date] |
Note the use of zend_extension; as of PHP 5.3, this is the only one that works (extension=…) will appear to function, but never connect!
Also, I used xdebug.remote_connect_back=1 – this allows connections from anywhere. But since I’ve configured my server to load a separate php.ini for each site (sorry, this is outside the scope of this discussion), and the entire site is under development and protected by .htaccess, I didn’t have to worry about other people debugging remotely.
An alternative to using remote_connect_back is to specify the remote_host to your local ip address:
xdebug.remote_host=0.0.0.0 ;your ip address
;xdebug.remote_connect_back=0 |
Alternative: Loading via .htaccess instead of php.ini
Alternately, I could have dropped a .htaccess file into my root directory for the virtualhost, if the php.ini for each site were too much trouble:
php_value zend_extension=/usr/lib/php/modules/xdebug.so
php_flag xdebug.remote_enable on
php_value xdebug.remote_port 9000
php_value xdebug.idekey PHPSTORM-XDEBUG
php_flag xdebug.remote_connect_back on |
Configuring PhpStorm
I followed these instructions to the letter. Make sure you set up the “PHP Remote Debug” and not the “PHP Server” option if you’re using my list here as a guide (both work, I just chose the remote)
Remember to get those IDEKEY values to match up in the editor and on the server!
Configure Firewalls
On CentOS, I use apf, so I configured my firewall by adding port 9000 into the following settings: IG_TCP_PORTS, EG_TCP_PORTS
Then I restarted apf:
$ /etc/init.d/apf restart |
At home, I opened a connection in my firewall by adding a redirect for port 9000 to my personal PC.
Starting it Up
Remember to reload Apache’s config!
$ /etc/init.d/httpd reload |
Make sure PhpStorm is set to break on first line, or you won’t know if it worked! (you need the debugger to get involved):
Start the PhpStorm Remote Debug:
Make sure to click the “listen for connections” icon!
A quick note on semantics here: It is not technically necessary to have the debug server running and “listen for connections” clicked. Listen for connections will, in fact, start the debugger when an incoming connection is received. However, for initial testing, having the debugger actually ON was very helpful in being sure PhpStorm wasn’t failing to start incoming connections.
Connect to your IP address from the web server to make sure it can talk to your IDE:
Add XDEBUG_SESSION_START=PHPSTORM-XDEBUG in the URL of the site to initiate a connection:
Witness debugging in all its glory!
Browser Plugins
There are browser plugins for Chrome and Firefox that make remote connections a breeze; you no longer have to type the parms into the URL. I’ve used both of these with success and highly recommend this simplification.
April 30, 2011 at 7:59 am · Filed under Programming
I’ve been studying up for a jQuery certification. I created a set of almost a thousand flash cards to prepare. I’ll be adding more for the jQuery UI in the near future.
This is a great site as once registered, you can check any number of the flash cards sets, then say “study 50″ or “study 100″ and it will give you a random cross section of the sets to study for the day. It tracks correct/incorrect and provides charting, as well as some other nice tools (keyboard navigation–yay!)
April 27, 2011 at 11:32 am · Filed under Programming
Hi,
I was able to make this lib work with jQuery 1.2.6 by making only this one-liner change:
//this.element.hover(this.options.onHover);
this.element.hover(this.options.onHover, this.options.onHover); |
July 28, 2010 at 4:30 pm · Filed under Programming
The world of Time Tracking and Project Management is a vast one. For small businesses like ours, there are seemingly endless time tracking solutions and a good number of project management answers. I spent nearly two weeks evaluating options in my spare time, so hopefully this data will help save you some time.
Read the rest of this entry »
June 17, 2010 at 12:59 pm · Filed under Programming
Dustin Diaz wrote a nice, efficient version of getElementByClassName(), which searches HTML elements and retrieves all the items with a given CSS class specified.
Of course, if you use a lib like extjs, jQuery, et al, then you have no need of this. But if you’re trying to hack out a greasemonkey script or insert some minimalist code, here it is.
And here it is, for my own archives:
function getElementsByClass(searchClass,node,tag) {
var classElements = new Array();
if ( node == null )
node = document;
if ( tag == null )
tag = '*';
var els = node.getElementsByTagName(tag);
var elsLen = els.length;
var pattern = new RegExp("(^|\\s)"+searchClass+"(\\s|$)");
for (i = 0, j = 0; i < elsLen; i++) {
if ( pattern.test(els[i].className) ) {
classElements[j] = els[i];
j++;
}
}
return classElements;
} |
Here’s another alternative I found on Glazblog, using xpath to search the document:
document.getElementByClassName = function(needle) {
var xpathResult = document.evaluate('//*[@class = needle]', document, null, 0, null);
var outArray = new Array();
while ((outArray[outArray.length] = xpathResult.iterateNext())) {
}
return outArray;
} |
I don’t really know which is more efficient, though I suspect the xpath search could be taxing in very large documents. I’m positive, based on IE’s fake implementation of key/value pairs in the DOM, that they both suck in IE, even if you specify a specific tag type to search. Obviously, providing a node makes the regular expression search faster, by virtue of having less content to parse.
April 27, 2010 at 7:06 am · Filed under Programming
Here is a great little tut on getting started in Bash. I’d recommend it to anyone trying to hack their way into a shell script.
Here is a quick script for sending an email:
#!/bin/bash
# Subject of email
SUBJECT="Test email with attachment from a bash script"
# Where to send it
TO_ADDRESS="your@email.com"
# Where the attachment is
ATTACHMENT_FILE="/tmp/attachment.txt"
# For fun, let's put something into the attachment
echo "This goes into the file." > $ATTACHMENT_FILE
echo "This appends to the file." >> $ATTACHMENT_FILE
# send the message
/bin/mail -s "$SUBJECT" "$TO_ADDRESS" < $ATTACHMENT_FILE |
February 17, 2010 at 7:18 am · Filed under Programming
Today I needed to manually remove a service from windows. I found this command line approach, which worked great for me. Be sure to use the service name and not the display name:
You can find the service name by going to Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Services, right click the service and choose properties, the service name is shown there.
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