Stuff and things

…coding in (mainly) PHP and MySQL

Fixing Selenium typing errors in Firefox

January 20th, 2010 by tommy 1 comment »

I recently updated our Selenium Remote Control (RC) testing tool to v1.0.1 so that we could test our site on Google Chrome (and, somewhat tentatively, IE8). We have been using this tool with varying success for quite some time now, with our tests written in PHP. The update process was generally smooth but one annoying bug persisted – Selenium would no longer type the ‘y’ key in Firefox (2 and 3). As a result many of our tests broke simply because the input typed into a text box did not match what was intended.

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1 comment »

Posted in Uncategorized

Triple J’s Hottest 100 2009 Song List Previews

January 6th, 2010 by paul 1 comment »

When it comes to voting for Triple J’s Hottest 100 I always struggle to think of the songs I want to vote for. I know the songs if I hear them, but can’t think of the artist or title in most cases. A really useful thing would be a list where I can see all the songs I can vote for, with a preview of each next to it.

I haven’t been able to find anything like this so far on the ‘net, so my friend, Tommy, and I went ahead and made one! This is a list of all songs you can vote for in the 2009 Hottest 100, along with a YouTube video preview of each one.

Check it out here: Hottest 100 Song List with Preview. Hope you like it!

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1 comment »

Posted in Useful

Tags: Triple J

iPhone Development

January 5th, 2010 by paul 1 comment »

Ok, so I’ve started learning how to make iPhone applications – exciting stuff! » Read more: iPhone Development

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1 comment »

Posted in iPhone

Tags: iPhone Wanna be startin' something'

Why is the MySQL Blackhole storage engine useful?

December 22nd, 2009 by paul 3 comments »

When reading about the different MySQL storage engines, I was wondering why on earth anyone would want to use the Blackhole engine. » Read more: Why is the MySQL Blackhole storage engine useful?

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3 comments »

Posted in MySQL

Encoding an object in XML with PHP

November 10th, 2009 by paul 2 comments »

Why is it so hard to deal with XML in PHP? Why can’t there be a simple ‘xml_encode()’ and ‘xml_decode()’ like there is with JSON??
» Read more: Encoding an object in XML with PHP

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2 comments »

Posted in PHP

Tags: XML

Installing Facebook Open Platform on Fedora 8

October 3rd, 2009 by paul 8 comments »

This is a step by step I wrote ages ago whilst installing Facebook Open Platform on Fedora 8. I did the FBOP working in the end, although found little to no use for it – there were parts missing (mainly the fbml form parser) so I couldn’t get it set up to create a local facebook testing environment, which is what I wanted to do. I haven’t developed a Facebook App for a while, so I’m not sure if they’ve made any ground releasing a more complete version of the open platform.
» Read more: Installing Facebook Open Platform on Fedora 8

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Posted in Uncategorized

Tags: Facebook

Ordinal Suffix PHP Function – Convert integer to ordinal suffix

October 3rd, 2009 by paul 14 comments »

Here’s a function to get the ordinal suffix of an integer in PHP.
» Read more: Ordinal Suffix PHP Function – Convert integer to ordinal suffix

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14 comments »

Posted in PHP

Tags: php-functions

Efficiently Truncate InnoDB Tables

October 1st, 2009 by paul 11 comments »

I was sent a great article today on performance tuning for MySQL’s InnoDB Storage Engine.

I thought the last point was particularly interesting – I always thought that a TRUNCATE TABLE was always better than a DELETE FROM as it can just drop all the data without looking at each individual row – apparently that’s not the case and they’re pretty much equivalent for InnoDB.
» Read more: Efficiently Truncate InnoDB Tables

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11 comments »

Posted in MySQL

Tags: Efficiency InnoDB

Joomla 1.5 User Import Script

August 12th, 2009 by paul 6 comments »

A while ago I wrote a script to bulk import users into a Joomla 1.5 installation… I was surprised (and still am) that there was no good Joomla component to import users from CSV or Excel Spreadsheet. It might be outdated with the newest Joomla builds, but the core might still be a useful starting point.

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6 comments »

Posted in PHP

Tags: Joomla