If you run any WordPress blogs, be sure to upgrade your software to the latest version (2.8.4 as of this writing) to avoid an exploit which may place your blog or web site at risk. See the article at “Lorelle on WordPress” for more info. Either use the upgrade link on your WordPress blog’s control panel, or download and install the latest stable version.
Category: General
2009-09-08
2009-04-05
NetBeans: Opening a Non-Project File
As I discussed earlier, I’ve been playing around some with NetBeans 6.5 for PHP IDE. While overall I have liked it a lot, one thing that was holding me back was that it did not seem to be possible to simply open a file for editing unless it was part of a defined project.
I figured it must just be my ignorance, so today I did a little googling and found out that there is a “Favorites” window you can open and use that for “random file access.” To access it, either select the “Window” menu item and then “Favorites” in the drow-down menu, or just type Ctrl+3. This adds the Favorites window in the left pane (at least in my NetBeans configuration).
2009-03-16
NCAA Tourney Results Generator
Just because I could, last night I cobbled together a PHP script to generate randomized results for this year’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament. Though randomized, each game result is weighted in favor of the lower seed via some questionable mathematics.
Some day if I clean up the code so that it’s not too embarassing to be seen, then I’ll post it here. In the mean time, enjoy, don’t gamble more than you can afford to lose, don’t blame me if you do lose, but do be sure to share with me if you win.
2009-02-15
Stupid Windows Update Reboot
This has practically nothing to do with PHP, other than it could save you some grief should you be editing a PHP file when Windows finishes auto-installing an update and decides to automatically reboot. (What idiot at M$ decided that any upgrade could be so important that it should ever reboot a PC without the user confirming that action?)
Anyway, I got tired of Windows Vista rebooting automatically on me again, so I added a registry setting as described at pctools.com to stop this ridiculous and potentially destructive behavior. Now when it finishes an update it instead prompts me to do the reboot or to postpone it:
The registry setting info:
- System Key: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU]
- Value Name: NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers
- Data Type: REG_DWORD (DWORD Value)
- Value Data: (0 = no effect, 1 = do not automatically reboot)
Here’s hoping someone else finds this useful.
2009-02-15
A Song In My Heart
Inspired by a PHPBuilder.com forum thread, I came up with this additional verse to Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?“:
Where have all the programmers gone?
Long time parsing
Where have all the programmers gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the programmers gone?
Gone to Starbucks every one
When will they ever earn?
When will they ever earn?
Maybe you have another verse to add?…
2008-10-25
Sub-Domains on Windows localhost
I find it useful when working on a web project to set up a sub-domain on my development PC’s “localhost” Apache installation. This allows me to test the project by accessing pages via that sub-domain, treating the directory being used as the root of that sub-domain as if it were the web document root directory (i.e.: $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] in your PHP scripts will point to that directory when the page is launched via that sub-domain).
Setting up a localhost sub-domain in an Windows/Apache environment is fairly easy. You just need to set up a few lines of text in three files, then restart Apache. First, make sure that your Apache httpd.conf file has the following in it, adjusting the path to the “httpd-vhosts.conf” file as appropriate for your installation:
2008-09-03
Google Chrome Beta
Note: See the comments section regarding the change in the EULA.
As I posted at PHPBuilder.com, Ghrome, Google’s entry into the browser wars, now has a beta version available for public download (Windows XP/Vista only, for now).
My initial impression is that it works just fine and seems pretty “peppy”. For me it has one bug so far: I cannot scroll up via the touchpad on my notebook PC, though it scrolls down just fine. (I’ve submitted a bug report on it, and it appears others have had the same problem.)