beer planet

There used to be a time when you couldn't imagine your life without Microsoft's Outlook – web email clients were pathetic and non-functional, Internet access was scarce, and access to certain advanced features was only possible with a desktop application like Outlook.

Then, Gmail arrived and exploded the whole notion of desktop email clients forever, almost overnight. It was fast, robust, logical, and integrated – many things Outlook still isn't to this day (Outlook 2010 + IMAP is pure hell).

Slowly, Google brought out more and more features that made the fine line between web and desktop emailing thinner and thinner, and today, it finally disappeared, at least for me.

The final nail in the coffin turned out…

Today's snippet is tremendously helpful if you are using an XML-RPC WordPress interface to read and publish your articles and are running into 500 Server Error issues due to running out of memory, manifesting themselves in something like this error message: "Invalid Server Response – The response to the metaWeblog.newMediaObject method received from the weblog server was invalid".

For example, my regular PHP memory allocation is 32MB or so, but if I load up Windows Live Writer, my favorite publishing tool, and ask it to load 1000 of the latest blog posts, I will undoubtedly get a server error back.

One solution would be to increase the memory allocated to PHP to something higher, like 256MB, which is how I…

Updated: February 2nd, 2011

WordPress has a great way of letting you use simple text tags called shortcodes to provide a whole bunch of functionality, including custom PHP code. In this article, I'm assuming that you already know what shortcodes do and how they operate (if you don't, head over here: Shortcode_API).

One glaring omission in the way shortcodes are set up by default is that they only get triggered in the content of your post, leaving the sidebar and comments out. I'm sure this is done for security, so that your readers can't screw something up by posting shortcodes they're not supposed to – after all, shortcodes are PHP snippets on the backend.

However, let's assume you really know what you're doing…

Updated: December 25th, 2011

As a developer, I both love and hate Eclipse for its chaotic nature, buggy and sometimes unusable interface, but at the same time incredible usefulness and ability to serve as a single tool for all of my development, be it C++, PHP, Java, Android, Perl, etc.

One of the biggest problems with Eclipse is that there is no clear upgrade path from major versions, for example 3.5->3.6. What I ended up having to do for years is back up the old release, download and unpack the new release, and then try to migrate all the settings by importing and exporting left and right. Not so pleasant.

Turns out, as of Eclipse 3.3 (though I've only tried it with Eclipse 3.5),…

Updated: September 8th, 2011

Today, I was looking for a quick way to see HTTP response codes of a bunch of urls. Naturally, I turned to the curl command, which I would usually use like this:

curl -IL "URL"

This command would send a HEAD request (-I), follow through all redirects (-L), and display some useful information in the end. Most of the time it's ideal:

curl -IL "http://www.google.com"
 
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2010 03:58:55 GMT
Expires: -1
Cache-Control: private, max-age=0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
Server: gws
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

However, the server I was curling didn't support HEAD requests explicitly. Additionally, I was really only interested in HTTP status codes and not in the rest of…

Today I have 2 tips for Total Commander users:

• how to display hidden local directories and files and
• how to display hidden FTP directories and files

Really, Total Commander should just control this setting in one place but, unfortunately, it is not the case.

I usually prefer when my file manager shows me everything I have, so that I can be more in control and see the hidden directories, such as .svn or $Recycle.Bin, and files, such as .bashrc or pagefile.sys.

How To Display Hidden Local Directories And Files

• go to Configuration -> Options… -> Display
• put a check next to the "Show hidden/system files (for experts only)"

How To Display Hidden

…

This tip can also be filed in the "post with the longest title that kind of makes sense but needs more explanation" category.

If you use a VPN (Virtual Private Network), this tip is for you.

The Problem

• you connect to a VPN to get access to your work/whatever network
• your connection is fast but the VPN connection is balls slow
• you try to stream a bit of online radio, go to a website, watch a video, or do anything, which is automatically routed through the VPN connection but everything TAKES AGES because the VPN connection is the limiting factor
• so not only are you frustrated by hiccupping radio, stuttering video, and

…

Updated: July 26th, 2010

This is a quick recipe that I found pretty interesting and relatively unknown.

Everyone who uses SVN knows that most repositories are set up to allow viewing of their contents via a web browser. For example, here's the trunk of WP Plugins SVN: http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/ and here is the current trunk version of a specific file, let's say http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/stats/trunk/readme.txt.

The Problem

However, what if you wanted to view a specific revision of a file or directory in your browser?

Let's say I wanted revision 100,000 of http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/stats/trunk/readme.txt

Normally, on a command line, you'd do something like

svn co http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/stats/trunk/readme.txt stats
cd stats;
svn up -r100000 readme.txt

or simply

svn export

…

The Problem

If you use the Recent Comments sidebar widget in your WordPress installation, it's possible that you want to customize this widget's style.

You will quickly find, however, that as soon as you add the widget to your sidebar, it injects the following inline, hardcoded CSS into the containing page (using !important to make things worse): 

<style type="text/css">.recentcomments a{display:inline !important;padding:0 !important;margin:0 !important;}</style>

The code above comes from recent_comments_style() (found in wp-includes/default-widgets.php), which is in turn called by WP_Widget_Recent_Comments() in the same file (this is just an old-style PHP4 constructor – same as PHP5's __construct()), which is triggered when the Recent Comments widget is used:

add_action( 'wp_head', array(&$this, 'recent_comments_style') );

This leaves a bad taste in my…

Updated: November 13th, 2011

Introduction

In this tutorial, I am going to introduce a WordPress technique that I believe was unpublished until I raised the question a few days ago on the WordPress forums.

In short, the problem I was trying to solve was plugins unnecessarily loading their JavaScript and CSS on *every* page of the blog, even when doing so would achieve absolutely nothing and the plugin wouldn't do any work.

I briefly mentioned this approach here but but Scribu…

Don't you just hate it when you visit somebody's blog, see an embedded Youtube video, play it, and find that the player is missing the full screen button.

Yeah, this one: .

Well, I hate it too, so please, try not to be that guy. I realize sometimes you copy the embed code wrong or, on a larger scale, you add the wrong embed code to your generic template.

Not a problem. If your Youtube embeds are missing this button, here is how you can easily fix it.

The Problem

Here's an example video that doesn't have the button (it's really good too, if you haven't seen…

There are undoubtedly a lot of wallpaper sites. Even more undoubtedly, most of them suck, both in content and filtering capabilities (by resolution, theme, etc).

My preferred way until recently was Deviant Art, because it had a lot of content and very nice filtering – I could specify my exact resolution.

However, as of some time ago, Deviant Art browsing by resolution disappeared, as evident from trying to find it on their site and from the comments on this post announcing the capability in the first place.

The Solution

Sometimes the solution lies right in front of our eyes – we just have to open them to see it.

A while ago, Google Image Search…

ExpanDrive (formerly SFTPDrive) is a very handy Windows and Mac application that lets you take any SSH connection and mount it as a local drive. It saves me countless annoyances because I don't have to use a proprietary sftp uploader – in fact, I can simply open any file with my favorite editor, directly on the newly mounted drive.

The Problem

The problem with ExpandDrive is – it's quite simplistic. So simplistic that it doesn't offer an easy way to export its drive list and the associated settings. Because of that, you will have to enter all the drives all over again in case you reinstall Windows or want to replicate them to another computer.

Of course,…

Ever since the introduction of the official Retweet button, I've wanted it to be a little more interactive. I usually want to add my 2 cents into the tweet I'm about to retweet but the default RT button just doesn't allow for it – Yes is the only option:

Troy's Twitter Script

Enter Troy's Twitter script for Firefox that I reviewed in detail a few months ago.

Troy's script added the RT button to my stream (along with inline picture and video embed, auto url expander and shortener, name autocomplete, and other things) way before Twitter introduced it.

It also allowed me to add a couple of words or rephrase the retweet to make…

As a backend developer, I don't get to work with JavaScript much anymore. However, from time to time, a project would come along that uses JavaScript (specifically, AJAX) to load some backend data on the fly. Of course, nothing works 100% right away*, so I would often have to tweak this JavaScript and massage it until it does what I need.

Here's where Firebug comes in with its JavaScript debugger. I'm used to using a debugger in every language I deal with, so using Firebug is a no brainer. Since it supports breakpoints, stopping execution and inspecting local variables and the rest of the scope generally beats alerts and console.logs for me.

Here's what a typical breakpoint looks like…