Category Archives: Tools

Error: invalid XML tag syntax and Extplorer

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A client of mine uses standalone version of Extplorer as Client section of his website. Because they are Studio for Printing materials, it’s normal, that their “production” is quite large as file size.

Recently they asked me to increase the max_upload_filesize to more than 4-5Gb. In the php.ini I’ve set max_upload_filesize=60G, but when someone try to login, it hangs and in the Firebug console it says “invalid XML tag syntax”.

The solution was to replace 60G with 6000G which is equivalent to ~6Gb. After that change the extplorer start working normally.

Hope this will help someone.

Online html to pdf tool

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html to pdf converter I just want to present a new tool for converting HTML to PDF – html-2-pdf.com. It’s basically an online converter which could transform any* web site to a PDF document. Generally it could be useful if you want to print a website, or for example if you want to save the content of the website for offline reading.

The site is really simple – just insert the address of the web page which you want to be converted and few seconds after that it is ready to be downloaded. The site is just an interface of the amazing wkhtmltopdf library.

I am open for suggestions about the functionality of the site.

* – for some reasons there are web sites which are not converted correctly. This is because of HTTP headers which these sites restricting.

Web based CakePHP Project generation tool

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Yesterday I found a tool which could be handy for rookie CakePHP developers. Atlas is a web code generator based in CakePHP. As a glance it’s a web alternative of CakePHP bake console which is a nice idea indeed.

My first impression was that tool is like diamond in the mud and I was wondering how I didn’t hear about this tool till now, but after installing I realized that it’s not so good as it looked like.

Why?

The first problem occurs in the generation of my first project – I’ve got a error message in Spanish which I couldn’t understand. I had to use Google translate for it, but after the translation, the message still doesn’t say much – “Failed to generate project skeleton”.

After debugging the code figuring out why this error means, I found that the application uses backslash as directory separator (\) ?!? and of course this lead to directories and files with strange names like /var/www/ctest\app\controllers directories where ctest\app\controllers was the full name of the directory :). I am on Ubuntu Desktop machine where backslash is not a directory separator.

Pros and Cons about this tool:

Pros:

  • Very nice interface – really big point for Atlas
  • It should work properly on windows environment and based on the features list and screenshots it quite intuitive.
  • I like web based development everything is in your web browser, so another big plus.

Cons

  • Not working as expected – the backslash problem described above
  • If you are not Spanish speaking person – you are in the middle of nowhere when you see error like this: Error: no se ha podido generar el esqueleto del proyecto
  • No documentation at all. I had to look in the code in order to get idea why I cannot create a project – Not clear labels (or at least no hints). Probably a hint like: Directory (enter a full path to the empty directory under htdocs) or similar could help a lot.

The conclusion:
Atlas looking like promising tool, still it’s far from the final version, but it’s worth to try it in Windows environment. 🙂 I definitely will follow that project in the future, so hopefully I could use it one day 🙂

New plug-in for spam protection

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Today I found quite nice plug-in for WordPress pretending that it will block at least 90% of the spam attempts. Quite ambitious indeed, but the time will show.

The general idea is that this plug-in adds a stylesheet to your blog’s html source code. When a browser loads that stylesheet a cookie is dropped. If that user then leaves a comment the cookie is checked. If it doesn’t exist the comment is marked as spam.

Installation is just plug-activate-play. Let’s see what will happen.

The plug-in details page: Cookies for Comments
The authors page: Donncha O Caoimh

Autocompleter plugin v 1.2

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Autocompleter Plugin 1.2Hey guys,

today I’ve released a new version of the WordPress Plug-in “Autocompleter”.

What is the change?

The new version contains ability to display number of matches per word or phrase in the drop-down. The example is available in this blog (top/left search field). Of course in order to activate this you should go to Admin under the Settings section, where there is an option “Autocompleter” 🙂

Bear in mind that ‘number of matches’ are not the posts in the blog, but number of times where the tag or category is used. I would provide small example of this.

Let’s imagine that in your blog you have 3 posts all tagged with WordPress and one of them is in the WordPress category, while other 2 are in another category.

The result in matches for wordpress would be 4, because there are 3 tags attached to the posts and 1 of the posts is attached to the wordpress category. Hope this make sense to you.

There is also ability to change the word ‘matches’ with your own, or even word in your language.

If you want to play with position of the matches, you could change autocompleter.css from the plug-in directory.

That’s it. I hope you like this plug-in.

The last post for 2008

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Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all readers of this blog!

This is my last post for this year and I could say I am pretty happy with the results achieved. There are 42 posts and 311 comments on them. Hopefully some of the posts helped someone, which is the main goal of this blog.
So, next year I hope they will be at least 1.5 times more. (at least I am thinking for stable growth) :).

Ok, the main reason for this post is completed, now it’s time to show you what brought me Santa Claus … a second monitor as well as good Video Card with 2 outputs, so now I am working on dual monitor machine. Here is the picture of my new work place:

Dual screen

Adding second screen on Ubuntu is really piece of cake – I was ready to go after 15 min including the HW mounting 🙂 Hopefully this addition will increase my productivity 🙂

That’s all folks. See ya next year! Happy New Year to everyone!

UPS shutdown script

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No, this is not CakePHP code snippet! 🙂

So, I had experience with an UPS Inform GUARD Standby SERIES 1500AP recently. It took me a while to understand that this is not the right model for the server ups solution, but anyway, this give me opportunity to understand something for this part of the hardware which I haven’t had change to touch.

The whole problem is that this ups doesn’t have Auto restart functionality, so if the power is down I can shutdown it, but on the power-on it doesn’t start up automatically, so the next power crash the server is doomed.

According with this I couldn’t manage to find single package which could work properly with this UPS. The nut package clam to support it, but in fact the driver recommended as working was not working at all.

Finally I managed to get signals from the ups with powstatd which is quite low level software. Ok, there are some additional files, but they cannot work with the upstart in Ubuntu. What I managed to get from it was status change in a file with following states: OK, FAIL and LOW.

So, in order to turn these states in actions I just wrote a small bash script, which doing different things on each state change.
Continue reading →

CSS Menu builder

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Today I found a new service which could help to designers and developers while they creating the menus for their projects. The site is: www.cssmenubuilder.com and as far I can check from the site’s blog it’s quite new – about a month, but it provide very good service to it’s visitors.

So what is it? As the domain says it’s an online menu generator. The site provide 3 main types of menus: Horizontal and Vertical Menus as well as Breadcrumbs bars. The combinations are unlimited – see what the author said:

Please check out our 30+ horizontal menus, our 700+ vertical menus combinations and our breadcrumb menus that consist of more than 200+ combinations, in total the site offers more than 1000 menu combinations not including the endless color combinations.

Briefly what I like and what I miss in that site:

  • Great service for people which are too busy to spend hours for building menus. I could say I am one of them 🙂
  • It’s free, no need to register.
  • Ability for live preview of the menu while doing it.

There is only one thing which missing and it’s multilevel menus, let’s hope this functionality will be available soon.

I definitely will use this service for my future projects. Why don’t you try yourself?
The site: www.cssmenubuilder.com

Ubiquity Plugin for Firefox

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Yesterday I’ve seen the presentation of this new plug-in and I think it’s quite good! I’ve installed of course and indeed it’s very good! The part which I like is that it’s possible to be extended. Take a look of the video, it’s very good.

Here what the author of the original article say for Ubiquity features:

The overall goals of Ubiquity are to explore how best to:

  • Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)
  • Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)
  • Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.
  • Extend the browser functionality easily.

Link to the original article: Introducing Ubiquity


Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Yet Another Multicolumn Layout (YAML)

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Today I found a nice CSS framework which claim to solve the multi-column layout issues which everyone of us meet during the construction of the web site design.

Actually I am speaking about YAML – Yet Another Multicolumn Layout. At first time I mix it with Yaml.org, but actually it’s a different thing. It’s a set of CSS files + few image files which would sort the issues with multi-column layouts.

The benefit is the availability of good documentation and nice examples.

Hope you found it helpful.