24
Jan
2010
Microsoft
This handy little folder makes access all system settings a breeze. The control panel can get a little annoying sometimes, so to avoid this and point everything in one location just create a new folder on your desktop, then rename it with the following:
Everything.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}
“Everything” can actually be anything you want to name the folder. Once you hit enter on the rename the folder name will change.
30
Oct
2009
Apache

I had to create a couple virtual hosts on a windows 7 machine running XAMPP for development purposes. This is typically a simple task. XAMPP has an Apache virtual host configuration file in <xampp installation>\apache\conf\extra\httpd-vhosts.conf
There are some basic containers already set that you can use as reference, but in the end you have something like this:
NameVirtualHost 127.0.0.1:80
<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1:80>
DocumentRoot D:/www
ServerName localhost
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1:80>
DocumentRoot D:/www/mysite
ServerName mysite.dev
</VirtualHost>
You then just configure your hosts file to point to your local IP address:
127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.1 mysite.dev
You can add more directives to the virtualhost, but this was just the basic setup to get urls working without having to use subdirectories like http://localhost/mysite. Instead, I can use http://mysite.dev.
Restart apache and everything should be golden, but no, never quite that easy. I kept getting a blank screen for mysite.dev, but localhost was working. I would ping mysite.dev and get 127.0.0.1 like I would expect.
Well, long story short, I’ve behind a proxy/firewall and didn’t tell my browser to ignore the .dev domain. So, for my own purpose when I forget this again in a year or so, or anyone else behind a corporate network that may have a similar issue, this was why.
26
Oct
2009
Wordpress

Wordpress widgets allow you to dynamically add content to sidebars directly from the wordpress control panel. I think this is a great option. The reason I’m using a Blog CMS is to reduce the amount of code I have to write, so this means less markup in my theme. I’m using only one sidebar on this site with a few widgets, including search, categories and links.
There are a few tricks to get widgets to work how you want, but it is relatively quick and painless. I’ll give an example of how I made this theme widget ready.
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15
Oct
2009
FileMaker Pro

The built in scripting engine for FilemakerPro is actually pretty decent, but people design some pretty clunky interfaces. What I wanted was a button that the user could click which would open a dialog box with some search field inputs. There are a few tricks to get this to work properly.
The first step is to open the scripting engine. This is found under “Scripts” > “ScriptMaker”. Click on “New” in the dialog window to create a new script. The dialog window allows you to use up to 3 fields. Why you can’t select more is beyond me, but that is fine for my purpose.
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15
Oct
2009
CakePHP

I’ve been using CakePHP for my last few projects and recently ran into a problem that was driving me nuts. I have a few pages that don’t require any authentication. You can allow pages to be viewed by calling $this->Auth->allow(’function_name’) in your beforeFilter() method. So, I set up my app_controller class with a before filter that looks something like this.
< ?php
class AppController extends Controller {
var $helpers = array('Html', 'Form', 'Javascript');
var $components = array('Auth');
function beforeFilter() {
$this->Auth->autoRedirect = false;
$this->Auth->loginAction = array('controller' => 'users', 'action' => 'login');
$this->Auth->allow('display');
}
}
?>
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13
Oct
2009
Uncategorized
If you are seeing this it is because I’m trying to create this site pretty much in real time. I started creating this minimalistic theme and decided I’d upload changes as I go rather than only testing from my development machine. This theme will have nothing very fancy, but I do plan to actually start blogging about things I do as an IT Pro and Web Developer. Hopefully the majority of this blog will be completed over the next week or two.