As I mentioned in my prior post OS X Command-line Dev Tools—Install Shortcut, OS X comes with a variety of built-in tools suited for developers. Unfortunately, Apple has seen fit to hide one of the most important of them: the web server. Despite that, they are easily unlocked if you know how. This applies to Mountain Lion (10.8) and (though I haven’t tried it, yet) Mavericks (10.9). Though you can install separate installations, I don’t like to install anything extra, unless I must. Read the rest of this entry »
Archive for the ‘Technical’ Category
Activating OS X’s Builtin Apache Web Server and PHP
14
Jan
Syncing Github Forks
26
Nov
Github has become the place to manage source code—it’s free, robust, and commonly accessible. Github repositories are owned and access to change them must be enabled by the owner. Still, you can make changes to a Github repository; but a “pull request” must be sent to contributors of the repository and they can accept the change at their discretion. Keeping changes in sync when you don’t have direct change privileges may not be obvious.
One-time Github Changes Read the rest of this entry »
PHP Recipe to Show Source-code
19
Nov
Here is a simple Web 1.5 (static HTML with a little bit of styling and JavaScript) recipe to allow a viewer of your web page to see the PHP source-code, behind it, with a minimal amount of JavaScript and a little CSS manipulation—good for showing the work you’ve done to others. Or for embedding in your own source, in debug mode, so that teammates can see each others’ work.
See the example code at: http://cachecrew.com/sample_code/highlight_file.php and http://cachecrew.com//sample_code/highlight_file2.php.
The PHP and HTML Read the rest of this entry »
OS X Command-line Dev Tools—Install Shortcut
12
Nov
Among those around me, in world of tech startups (even in the vicinity of the world of Windows), MacBooks are used almost universally. I can’t explain the discrepancy between what I see around me and the data you usually read; but I do know that as a technical platform, OS X provides an easier path to development tools. These days, the world driven by web-based applications. A majority of those applications run on Linux-based machines. OS X shares with Linux, a common ancestor, Unix. So, a robust array of common commands come with OS X—ssh, ftp, bash, vi, emacs, etc. But more importantly, OS X comes pre-installed with hottest development tools used for web development, today—Ruby, Python, PHP, Apache, memcache, etc. This means a developer can write web applications without even being connected to the Internet!
There are more tools available with the free download of Xcode, Read the rest of this entry »
Self-documenting Bash Scripts Using Heredoc
22
Jul
It is surprising how quickly we forget how to use scripts we had written, let alone, what they were for. So it is even more difficult for others to know how and whether to use your script. You can avoid wasting the efforts you put into the problems you solved with your script by simply adding some friendly “help” output.
Here is some basic information you should include:
- Summary description
- Form of use—basic syntactic usage
- Description of usage syntax; i.e., input parameters
- More detailed information, if necessary. Read the rest of this entry »
Server Handling of Accept HTTP Headers
31
Aug
When a browser (or any web client) requests content from a web server, it can tell the server what types of content type it can interpret (HTML, text, audio, etc.). The underlying HTTP protocol allows these to be specified via “header” settings—metadata that is sent before any actual content, describing characteristics about the content. The browser can send an “Accept” header—to describe what it accepts—and the server responds with a “Content-type” header. The Accept header can be quite elaborate, but what happens when what happens when these conflict? Read the rest of this entry »
The ccPhp Framework: Installation
24
May
I have a whole series of posts, waiting in draft, describing my evolving PHP framework, I call ccPhp. If you have nothing better to do than play with someone else’s dalliances, then here is a quick installation guide. A little backwards, because I’ve yet to publish reasons why you’d want to. But, if, after my eventual publications describe this framework, you decide to install it, this is the quickest place to see how to do that.
The following describes only one way to arrange the setup. I have designed the framework with few cross-dependencies. After my “standard” setup description, I will describe the few file dependencies so that you easily define your own file organization. (If you are on Windows, you can extrapolate the appropriate things to do there). Read the rest of this entry »
Fixing an Infected PHP/WordPress Web Server
17
Apr
Darn if the ISP serving up our PHP and WordPress content wasn’t attacked with an exploit. So I did a lot of learning as I cleaned up my web server, this past weekend. The goal of this exploit was to infect visitors of the web site with viruses by coercing visitors’ browsers to download malware from predefined third-party sites, seeded with the malware. That means modifying web site code to send visitors to those malicious sites.
After noticing some strange behavior that tripped my anti-virus software on my Windows machine, Read the rest of this entry »
Avoid Objective-C Bugs w/Properties and Instance Variables (ivar)
25
Nov
Objective-C is the programming language of choice for iOS an Mac OSX programming, so becoming proficient in native programming for those platforms is essential to building great applications. Apple emphasizes that programmers must understand the “retain-release” model of how to manage objects. True, but this is not enough. Unfortunately, Objective-C makes it exceedingly easy to inadvertently write code that breaks the retain-release model, leading bugs that cause programs to crash. You can adopt some practices to avoid such problems. Read the rest of this entry »
Buried in PHP Frameworks
30
Sep
With thanks to “moomin lens†via Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/jumpn_around/185876077/
There are 100s of PHP frameworks out there, but I have been so frustrated with so many of them; they are either too complex, not well designed, not well documented, buggy, or all of the above. Also, there is a lot of great technology for PHP that are notfull frameworks. It’d be nice to have a framework that does not try to do everything but, instead, allow easy integration of “best of breed” technologies. And a much more subjectively, only a subset of frameworks out there (though growing) embrace object design as typical of traditional, non-web programming using C++, Java, C#, etc. PHP 5 allows that kind of programming, but not all framework developers have embraced that approached it yet. I’ve spend a non-trivial amount of time with the following (well, I haven’t spend enough time with Kohana, yet): Read the rest of this entry »