» 2007 » June

I spend so much time in a text editor, its hard to get my head around a word processor sometimes. Text and formatting at the same time?

Moving some content around I found myself with a ton of links formatted in an unordered list. I only needed the plaintext of the name and link separate for the current project. My trusty BBEdit with Grep search and replace support yield the following search and replacement patterns to make quick work of the list.

Search Grep Pattern

Replace Grep Pattern

Turned this

into this

I always keep an empty BBedit window for text processing like this. Its easy to paste a chunk of text, process it and then paste it back into your word processor.

Note:
I’m almost good enough at Grep search patterns to make this viable in all situations. It used to take me 5 minutes to debug and expression that would have taken 2 minutes to cut and paste manually. I had this one whipped out in much less time than it would have taken to manually cut and paste a hundred of these.

Popularity: 22%

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Has anyone seen this error on a MacBook before:

This is a real pain in the ass when it happens. The only thing that seems to fix it is to reboot.

The only thing I could find was on Apple’s support forums. But there is still no solution there.

Popularity: 21%

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I have been working on a new Wordpress theme for this site and have noticed on several occasions that Wordpress has reverted back to the default theme.

Google turned up a few helpful pages:

• Wordpress Theme Resetting Problem posted by Scott Burkett
• Wordpress defect #3907

The problem boiled down to the fact that I was editing the file remotely via SFTP. If I happened to save the file at same time as someone was trying to access a page it the file exists check would fail as there is always a split second while the file is being saved that it technically doesn’t exist. The code suggested in the bug report above worked well for me.

Popularity: 24%

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Credit card slamming is the practice of trying hundreds or thousands of card numbers and security code combinations to find the few in the batch that will actually work. I have discussed credit card slamming here and over at the ZenCart forums several times in the past.

The code snippet below can be used in modules/checkout_process.php to automatically log a user out after a set number (6 in the below snippet) of payment attempts.

Place in between this code near the top of the file:

I found six attempts to work well on the sites I implemented on. You do not want to adversely impact normal users but you do want to make it harder on abusers so that they just go away.

BE WARNED

Improper use of this code could prevent anyone from checking out. The two things that will save you when trying this out are:

1. MAKE A BACKUP
2. FULLY TEST BEFORE CALLING IT COMPLETE

Popularity: 22%

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I recently started toying around with CodeIgniter on a new project where I need a simple user login and administration system. I was initially attracted to the first two features listed:

1. You want a framework with a small footprint.
2. You need exceptional performance.

This is the first framework I have ever stayed with after a day because it didn’t feel constricting.

CodeIgniter is an open source Web Application Framework that helps you write kick-ass PHP programs.

While looking at the products made with CodeIgniter I found this cool invoicing application:
BambooInvoice: Simple, Open Source, Online Invoicing

Works very similarly to Blinksale buy you own it and can fully customize it. If I only had time to customize it… I think for now Blinksale will work for me.

Popularity: 14%

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For a new client project I was provided with database of users consisting of names, email addresses and managers.

The name column contained both first and last names formatted last name first like:

MySQL’s http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/string-functions.html” rel=”external”>TRIM() functions allow us to make quick work of this data manipulation. Using the query below and a new table similar to the first except with separate fields for first and last name we can copy the data to the new table and split the names in the process.

Popularity: 14%

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