log(p)

Custom Google Maps Marker Maker

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 12:23:02 +0200

Very nifty: upload your custom marker image, and it creates a shadow file, and the shape coordinates. Even creates a sprite containing the marker and shadow.

How to disable logging in a Symfony2 application

Tue, 15 May 2012 11:25:38 +0200

Symfony’s logging component is great: it provides a highly customizable way to log exactly what you want, where you want it, the way you want it (even with FirePHP support). By default, a lot of information is being logged on development environments: both the kernel and DBAL do a great job of granulized logging.

On production environments, the default log setting is changed to a fingers crossed strategy, which means: don’t log anything until a certain severity threshold is reached. Really smart since you don’t really need to log successful requests, but do want to inspect logs when something went wrong.

There are situations however, where you want to minimize (or completely disable) logging. In my case, I had a large import which I implemented in a Command. Everything was working fine on my dev environment, but I got memory_limit errors on production. I figured this was because of the fingers crossed strategy, which requires every logged message to be stored in memory.

So I dug into the Monolog internals, and figured out that disabling the log is really easy. You just push a NullHandler on the stack, which catches every message that is logged, preventing other handlers to log it. I found two services being responsible for almost all logging:

foreach (array('monolog.logger.doctrine', 'logger') as $service) { 
    $logger = $container->get($service); 
    $logger->pushHandler(new \Monolog\Handler\NullHandler());
}

After doing this, nothing was being logged anymore, at least not in my case/configuration, YMMV.

What is Symfony2?

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 12:51:37 +0200

What is Symfony2?:

Great article, describing two things:

1. The web is not MVC

This is something I have been thinking about for years now, but I never fleshed out my thoughts about this. This pretty much sums up all my thoughts about this subject:

the MVC word is so overloaded and because nobody implements exactly the same MVC pattern anyway. The separation of concerns is all I care about.

[…]

I don’t like MVC because that’s not how the web works. Symfony2 is an HTTP framework; it is a Request/Response framework. That’s the big deal. The fundamental principles of Symfony2 are centered around the HTTP specification.

2. Why Symfony2?

Why use Symfony2 as opposed to other frameworks out there? Because it’s awesome: the Doctrine ORM is awesome, the template engine is awesome, the console is really awesome, the documentation is very extensive, the performance is superb…I’ll stop here, just read it and try it for your next project, I highly recommend it.

MacPorts vs. Homebrew

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 15:20:35 +0200

The past few months I saw more and more mentions of Homebrew, as an alternative to MacPorts. When setting up a new Lion install, I figured it was worth checking out, see if all the positive posts were true. The supposed benefits of Homebrew:

Homebrew installs packages into their own isolated prefixes and then symlinked into /usr/local.
It uses the libs that are already installed on your mac.
Way better command line user interface
Homebrew and it’s installation scripts are hosted at Github
The installation scripts (aka recepies) and Homebrew itself are written in ruby.

Some benefits can be discarded right away:

The installation scripts are written in Ruby: So? It’s easy to understand a portfile. Maybe easier than Ruby even (if you don’t happen to know the language).
Packages are installes into an isolated prefix: Ports are installed in /opt/local/, which on my machine only has MacPorts, pretty isolated I’d say.
It’s hosted at Github: granted, I love Github, but MacPorts is still available on apublic repository.

The command line user interface of Homebrew is colored, which is an advantage over MacPorts, but other than that, I have no problems with MacPorts’ CLI: it’s just as easy to type port install php than brew install php.

That leaves one advantage: it uses the libs that are already installed on your Mac. Clearly, this is a benefit, and MacPorts should look to adopt this behaviour.

Given that Homebrew has no apparent disadvantages as opposed to MacPorts, I gave it a try. While it’s a bit faster, and I’m a sucker for a colored terminal, I ran into one dealbreaking issue, when installing a server:

The mcrypt extension is missing. Please check your PHP configuration.

OK, no problem. I ran into these types of issues frequently with MacPorts. Most of the time they were solved by running port install php5-mcrypt. But not on Homebrew: I googled the issue and came across two posts with solutions. Both solutions require me to manually download, configure and compile the extension and PHP itself. Wait, what? On MacPorts this is a one line install, but for Homebrew, this has to be described in a long post?

If this is the Homebrew way of doing things, count me out. I did a search for available PHP extensions, and found only Solr. MacPorts has about 110 extensions, and all for PHP5.

There is one very critical requirement for a package manager: a extensive list of available and up-to-date software. And by that standard, at least for now, Homebrew has its ass handed to it by MacPorts.

"To me, this suggests that while Microsoft is confident that they did their homework, they’re not..."

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 20:22:33 +0200

“To me, this suggests that while Microsoft is confident that they did their homework, they’re not actually confident in the product itself. Nor should they be, given the reaction.”

- http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/30/we-need-an-invert-selection-button/

parislemon: Apple’s vision for the future of computing versus...

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 09:26:54 +0200

parislemon:

Apple’s vision for the future of computing versus Microsoft’s vision for the future of computing.

Any questions?

Want a "Create ISO" item in your Finder context menu?

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 14:37:00 +0200

I did.

launch Automator
create a new Service
add a Shell-script task
make sure input is passed as arguments (not stdin)

paste this code:


DVDDIR=$1
OUTDIR=`dirname "$DVDDIR"`
DVDNAME=`basename "$DVDDIR"`
hdiutil makehybrid -udf -udf-volume-name "$DVDNAME" -o "$OUTDIR/$DVDNAME.iso" "$DVDDIR"

At the end, you should have something like this (mine’s in Dutch, sorry):

Save the workflow, and you should have a new item in your context menu.

Subversion: Ignoring directory contents in Eclipse

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 12:10:59 +0200

Sometimes you want to have a directory in your repository, but you don’t want that directory’s contents to be committed. A cache directory is a perfect example of this: when you want to make sure that checkouts/exports have that cache directory, but you don’t want developers to commit their caches.

You can use the svn:ignore property to achieve this. In Eclipse, right-click the folder and select Team > Set Property. Set the property to svn:ignore, the content to an asterisk, and make your you check the recursive checkbox, like this:

That’s it! Don’t forget to actually commit the folder to make this change effective.

Recursively delete .svn directories

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 09:58:23 +0200

Recursively delete .svn directories:

Also created a gist for common delete operations like this:

Cleaning up MacPorts

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:10:15 +0200

Cleaning up MacPorts:

tl;dr:

sudo port clean --all installed
sudo port -f uninstall inactive

Float or double for a MySQL column?

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 14:05:58 +0200

This is one of those things I keep forgetting, no matter how many times I look it up. So I thought I saved myself the trouble of finding the same resource again and again:

tl;dr

If precision matters (say, with currency and/or calculations), use decimal; floating point numbers are approximate numeric data values
If you don’t have too many digits (say, max 5), use float
If you have many digits, use double

The longer version

From the always excellent StackOverflow:

“They both represent floating point numbers. A FLOAT is for single-precision, while a DOUBLE is for double-precision numbers.

MySQL uses four bytes for single-precision values and eight bytes for double-precision values.”

And if you really want to go all out: here’s a detailed explanation of single-precision vs. double-precision.

The Ultimate 'PNG for web' Guide (including tools)

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 13:07:27 +0100

The Ultimate 'PNG for web' Guide (including tools)

CouchDB won't start after upgrading via MacPorts

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 11:29:23 +0100

After doing a ‘port upgrade outdated’ 2 days ago, I found out CouchDB wasn’t running anymore after rebooting the next day. I’ve spent hours of debugging this, which was hard considering the fact the logs stopped being appended to the day of the upgrade.

After hours of Googling, I finally found this ticket which states that Erlang is no longer built with SSL enabled, which causes CouchDB not to start up (and not to log any errors why it doesn’t).

And so the solution is:

Uninstall erlang: port uninstall erlang
Install erlang with ssl: port install erlang +ssl
Reinstall couchdb: port uninstall couchdb && port install couchdb

Hopefully this will save someone else the time and trouble I went through…

Which character set to use when sending emails

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 14:59:21 +0100

Which character set to use when sending emails

HTML5 Decepticons

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 16:44:17 +0100

HTML5 Decepticons

Perfect inline links with separators

Wed, 29 Dec 2010 11:22:00 +0100

Designers love this design: a couple of links, next to each other, separated by a character like a pipe symbol, or a dot, like this:

While designers and clients love it, developers mostly sigh, because of two reasons:

The last separator is missing. To accomplish this, we often have to resort to a class="last" ‘hack’ which - while semantically correct - is rather superfluous markup.
Using a border does not give the wanted look, it is too high, even when used on an inline element (like an anchor).

The following snippet might help you in your projects when you come across this typical design:

li { display: inline; }
li:after { content: '|'; }
li:last-child:after { content: ''; }

Simple, right? The one caveat is the use of the :after and :last-child pseudo selectors, which won’t work in some browsers (the usual suspects). Progressive enhancement teaches us that this doesn’t matter; just provide enough margin between the links, and I’m sure IE < 8 users think it looks fine.

Your client however, perhaps doesn’t. Which is why I highly recommend the use of the selectivizr script. This won’t solve the lack of :after support on IE versions lower than 8, but will fix the :last-child selector, as well as enabling you to use this at other places. If that still doesn’t satisfy your client, you’re stuck to using extra markup or (background) images, sorry.

Caching WebFonts in Firefox

Mon, 13 Dec 2010 12:47:35 +0100

Two things I stumbled upon when trying to figure this one out:

Firefox needs a Content-Type header: it won’t cache without one. The application/octet-stream type doesn’t work. Officially, the woff file format doesn’t have a mimetype, according to the IANA, but Wikipedia lists it as application/x-woff.
The net panel in Firebug indicates that the file isn’t cached; on every page load the font is seemingly requested with a HTTP 200 OK response. This is not the case however, as I saw when monitoring the access logs of my server.

So, in conclusion, if you want to cache your woff font: send a Content-Type header, along with a far-future-expire header, and you should be fine.

Why my CouchDB LaunchDaemon didn't work

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 17:38:10 +0100

Because I ran the couchdb binary as root, that’s why.

Apparantly this “mucks up all the file ownerships so you can’t run it as the couchdb user again”. I did this because I needed to (re)start CouchDB manually for whatever reason (not knowing the MacPorts install comes with a daemon might be one of them).

When my CouchDB was no longer running after booting, I inspected the CouchDB log and saw a huge stack trace, without any helpful error message. The CouchDB wiki mentions this stack trace however.

Their solution is rather dirty: just reinstall CouchDB and never run it as root. If you’re not comfortable with that - like me - you can also set file permissions to user/group couchdb. These are the files I changed:

  /opt/local/etc/couchdb
  /opt/local/etc/default/couchdb
  /opt/local/etc/logrotate.d/couchdb
  /opt/local/bin/couchdb
  /opt/local/bin/couchjs
  /opt/local/lib/couchdb
  /opt/local/share/couchdb
  /opt/local/share/doc/couchdb
  /opt/local/var/lib/couchdb
  /opt/local/var/log/couchdb
  /opt/local/var/run/couchdb

It is ok to set the checked property of a radio button / checkbox

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 11:03:59 +0100

This is one of those things I keep asking myself when I’m writing some javascript that checks/unchecks radio buttons and/or checkboxes. The checked property seems like a hack, because the markup for checking an input is checked[="checked"]. This excellent answer explains the difference. Once again, kudos to StackOverflow.

The value attribute of input type="text" and the checked or selected attributes of input type="checkbox", radio and option correspond to the initial value of the form field, not the current value the user or script has set. Consequently changing the checked property does not alter the attribute value, and setting the checked attribute does not alter the real visible value that’s going to be submitted with the form.

The checked="checked" attribute corresponds to the defaultChecked DOM property, not the checked property. Similarly, the value="..." attribute corresponds to defaultValue.

(Note there are IE gotchas here due to IE not knowing the difference between a property and an attribute.)

Female nerds

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 09:28:12 +0200

Female nerds