Archive for 2009
December Desktop
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009How customer service should be
Monday, December 14th, 2009Awesome and entertaining customer service from IWOOT!
I’m sorry to hear about this, but thank you for letting us know.
I’ve just sent a request for a new one to be sent out to you, so you should receive it soon.
There’s no need to return the broken one, we wouldn’t want the posties to be carrying around broken pottery in their bags – they have enough to complain about! Just take care and dispose of it safely.
I hope this helps a wee bit?
PHP function: is_serialized()
Friday, October 23rd, 2009I needed a way to detect if some values were serialized or not, annoyingly PHP does not provide a method for this. I’d also rather not perform unserialize() on everything to check for a serialized string in the name of efficiency, so instead I came up with a simple function to detect serialized data. The result of my endeavours is a function that checks a string for basic makers of the PHP serialization form, it only checks the variables type and not any deeper values inside arrays or objects, if this preliminary testing is successful then unserialize() is invoked to provide the final proof. The unserialized form is available as an option argument passed by reference and the return value is a boolean, true for boolean or false otherwise. You can find the function on Gist or below. (more…)
Vacuum Firefox on Ubuntu
Thursday, October 15th, 2009It was suggested to me to use vacuum places to improve my Firefox awesome bar performance, as I’m still using Firefox 3.0 which is packaged with Jaunty; I do have 3.5 installed I just use it for testing sites at the moment. However realising that I didn’t need an addon a single line of bash will probably do what I want I headed to Google and found an explaining it all and a suitable one-liner to optimise all my Firefox SQLite DBs.
You will need the sqlite3 package installed and you should close Firefox prior to running the command.
for i in ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/*.sqlite; do echo "VACUUM;" | sqlite3 $i ; done
September 2009 Desktop
Tuesday, September 8th, 2009
HP strikes back
Friday, July 31st, 2009Hewlett Packard, and others, strike back with ever more excessive cardboard gluttony; the Register has the details.
BT’s feeble attempts at a cardboard indulgence.
June Desktops
Tuesday, June 16th, 2009
On the old desktop I used temporarily:
May Desktop
Wednesday, May 13th, 2009
Home Office Gaffe
Monday, April 27th, 2009The UK Home Office published a consultation paper on the 24th April detailing their plans for draconian data retention and access rules, which will see ‘communications data’ retained by ‘communications service providers’. As concerning as the whole thing is, there was an interesting mistake I noticed.
There is a right to complain to an independent tribunal if a member of the public believes that their data has not been acquired unlawfully.
Protecting the public in a changing communications environment
Lovely double negative!
Another phpBB Hook
Sunday, April 5th, 2009Further to my entry last month about a phpBB Hook to disable the post queue for certain users, I’ve written a really quick one to enable phpBB’s debugging mode for founder users. Debug mode is usually enabled by using the constants DEBUG and DEBUG_EXTRA in the configuration file but these can be defined anywhere. The only downside debugging information will only be available after the hook is included, however this is sufficient to get the page generation time, memory usage etc. in the footer which is what I was after. (more…)
