I’ve been invited alongside two fellow phpBB developers to attend Microsoft’s Jump In! Developers’ Campnext month in Switzerland to learn about interoperability between Microsoft’s software stacks and PHP applications. For more information on how to attend this event read on or visit, www.jumpincamp.com.
Archive for the ‘Web’ Category
Jump In! Camp
Saturday, March 13th, 2010One Down
Thursday, February 18th, 2010Well one of my gripes with Ubuntu 9.10 ‘Karmic Koala’ has been cured at least, Firebug 1.5 now works after upgrades to Firefox 3.5.8.
Shame that I’ve found out my bash completion is broken. 
phpBB Hook to remove success messages
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010Time for another phpBB hook, this time the aim is to remove the messages which irritate some people when a post has been made and instead redirect the user immediately to the default choice. A few considerations had to be made with this, firstly the administration panel is off limits as this uses messages for success and failure in some places. Secondly any page which goes back to itself by default is made confusing if there isn’t a confirmation, so these aren’t automatically redirected; a good example of this being the UCP preferences. (more…)
Sharing photos from N900 to Gallery2
Monday, February 1st, 2010I recently treated myself to a new mobile phonecomputer, so I bought a Nokia N900 which eXpansys eventually shipped to me. Now to the point, you can easily share content to Facebook, Ovi, and Flickr but I maintain my own Gallery2 installation and I wanted to upload my photos there as well. Luckily the sharing infrastructure is pluggable, so all I needed was a plugin which I found. 
Configuring it was a bit of a headache so here is how I did it. (more…)
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
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…)
phpBB Post Queue
Sunday, March 15th, 2009In phpBB 3.0.3 we added the possibility to queue posts of users who had a post count lower than an administrator defined threshold, this works very well at keeping spam out of the public eye on your board. But on the board I administer which is primarily for university students who all have their own university e-mail address it penalises new users who I as the board administrator trust. To get around this, I will be applying a small modification to our board during the next maintenance period which I thought I will share with you. (more…)
Firefox 3.0 Address Tweak for SSL/TLS
Wednesday, March 11th, 2009Since Firefox 3 scrapped the yellow address bar for SSL and TLS secured sites (i.e. https) and displays a nice green box for EV certificates I was hinted at a way to get a similar visual for non-EV certificates. You need to enter the FF configuration editor, pop about:config into your address bar, confirm you know there maybe dragons. Put browser.identity.ssl_domain_display into the filter box, double click on the result and then enter the value 2. Bingo! Job done.
