Web Developer in Boulder CO The Blog

The most common shortcuts for code editing | OSX

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on April 1st, 2016

Most Common Text Editor Hot Keys For Programmers Here are a list of hot keys that work the most universally as possible for text editing. There are so many hot keys and yet so little time. Which hot keys should you learn? If you work in the command l...

How to open multiple Iterm windows on startup

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on February 10th, 2016

Find your self having to run a server or turn on some sort of process every time you open up your development environment? The script bellow will help you set up your own custom default tabs in iterm running what ever scripts you want when the window i...

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Backing up and restoring S3 from a versioned bucket

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on March 29th, 2015

Here is a set of scripts used to manage backups. You can back up a bucket to another and then restore the source bucket to a certain snap shot in time as well as a few other things. Example: //to run back up (see script at the bottom) prompt> bkupToBu...

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Make your XAMPP site on your Mac accessible to Windows on VMware

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on March 26th, 2015

How to run a site on a Mac host machine and then access it from Windows? You may find your self here because you want to test IE browsers on the Mac. I have provided information on how to vet this issue along with the VM issue. How to test IE on a ...

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Remove all versions from S3 bucket using AWS tools

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on March 26th, 2015

This will help you answer any of the following questions: Delete all deletion markers for every object in a bucket. Delete all objects and versions for every object in a bucket. Delete a bucket that has had versioning turned on. This article will wal...

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Running different ANT tasks depending on the operating system

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on February 2nd, 2015

How to run a different series of tasks inside of a single target tag based on the operating system so that your build script will work on all operating systems. There are three ways to do it: 1.) The first way is to have a different task for each ope...

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Load a class with Zend_Loader_Autoloader by name | without namespaces or prefixes

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on December 29th, 2014

The web is filled with examples of using Zend Autoloading using the fancy namespace and prefix features of the Zend_Loader_Autoloader, but what if all you want to do is auto load a class based on its name corresponding to a file name? //For example wh...

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Installing xdebug in XAMPP 5.5.19 on Mac OSX

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on December 29th, 2014

This was tested on OSX Lion. Please let me know if it works on Mountain Lion or later. Here is what we will be doing in a nut shell. You will need to download the correct source code for your version of xdebug and then you will need to use the correct...

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Replace a token with a variable using ANT

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on November 15th, 2014

You may be looking for the following: How do you replace a string in a file using a property in ANT? How do you replace a string using a variable in ANT? There are a few ways to do this. First question is what do you mean by a variable? Do you mean ...

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Parsing unevenly spaced columns from text in PHP

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on August 23rd, 2014

If you want to parse unevenly or jaggedly spaced columns out of a text file in PHP, below are two functions that will help you do it. Let's say that you have the following text output: col1 col2 col3 ==== ==== ==== ...

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Don't insert when maximum is reached

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on May 9th, 2014

How to control if a record is inserted based on a condition? Don't insert a record if certain conditions are not met. There is a way of using pure MySQL to stop inserting records when a certain number of them has been reached. Let us say that you have...

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MySQL CONCAT limitation

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on April 12th, 2014

So you're trying to concat two large strings and it keeps resulting in a truncated or empty string? The problem may be that CONCAT can only result in a string of length 1024 bytes long. Worse is there is no setting in MySQL that allows you to increat...

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Loading a different JavaScript library based on the browser.

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on February 27th, 2014

This article could be used for any libraries, but we are going to talk about a specific case study using jQuery as an example. First you should know that this is frowned upon in the development community and you should use modernizer.js to do feature d...

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Title case function in PHP based on grammatical rules for capitalizing the words in a title

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on February 10th, 2014

Creating a Title Case Function with PHP Based on Grammatical Rules. The common way that programmers implement title case is the most simple way, they capitalize the first letter of every word. But what about titles like the title above where the "on" a...

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Javascript private and public members | Dynamic name spacing

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on February 10th, 2014

The following is how to scope an object (called an object literal) with private and public members: myApp is the class id is private next and reset are public functions //create class var myApp = {}; (function(context) { //private member v...

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Installing xdebug in XAMPP 1.8.3 on Linux

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on February 10th, 2014

If you have installed XAMPP 1.8.3-0 for Linux and you want to install x-debug here is how to do it using PECL. 1.) Check to make sure /bin is in your path echo $PATH; if :/bin: is in the path then bin is in your path. This makes sure that when you c...

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Overload an array in PHP | Overload a multidimentional array in PHP | On set array call a function in PHP

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on February 9th, 2014

If you wanted to overload an array so that you can put your own logic inside of the get and set actions for an array using the syntax $array['property'] try starting with the class bellow and build off it. Example: //create array $obj = new CustomArra...

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GB vs. GIB | 1024 vs. 1000

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on February 9th, 2014

Looking for answers to these questions? Why are there two types of GB? Why is a KB 1024 and not 1000 bytes? Did you know there are two types of Gigabytes (GB)? What if I told you that they are not the same amount of bytes? That manufacturers list th...

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Get size of database in bytes and rows

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on February 9th, 2014

How to get the size of the database in MySQL? Replace database_name with the database name from which you want the size in bytes and rows: SELECT t.table_schema,SUM(t.table_rows) AS row_count,SUM(t.data_length) AS data_volume FROM information_schema.t...

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Script that installs an RSA key on the local machine and a remote machine

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on February 9th, 2014

Run this interactive bash script, if you want to set up an RSA key on your local machine and then have the script automatically install the key on a remote machine. The script is tested to work on Linux, Unix, AIX with bash. Here is an example of how ...

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Convert decimal to base 36 alpha numeric in Bash | Linux

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on February 9th, 2014

Here is a custom bash shell script function you can use to convert a decimal to a base 36 number in all capital alpha numeric. Example: your_digit=65; decimal_to_base36 $your_digit; Output: 1T function decimal_to_base36(){ BASE36=($(echo {0..9}...

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Ipoint interface | ActionScript 3.0 AS3

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on February 4th, 2014

It amazes me that ActionScript (AS3) does not have interfaces listed for all its classes. Often you want to create a class that inherits from something like MovieClip and MovieClip inherits all the way down a long list of classes. So you are left with ...

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Expected to find it in c:\program files\adobe\flex builder 3\lib\tools.jar

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on February 4th, 2014

##ANT Error with Flex Builder 3 and Windows XP command line## ##Unable to locate tools.jar. Expected to find it in C:\Program Files\Adobe\Flex Builder 3\lib\tools.jar## Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Right? But never fear, I eventually found the solution and that...

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Using Table Names With Spaces in PHP and mySQL

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on January 2nd, 2014

The key to writing SQL queries using table names that contain spaces is to make sure you use the correct quotes.This is wrong:SELECT * FROM tablename ORDER BY ''field name'' ASCThis is correct:SELECT * FROM tablename ORDER BY `field name` ASCThese (`) ...

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Unix style options and flags with command line PHP

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on December 24th, 2013

Looking for a more intelligent way to parse in options from the command line into your PHP script other than $argv? For example, you may want to be able to place options in any order like the following: php somescript.php -pv -o value or php somescr...

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Parse a date by a specific date format in PHP

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on November 22nd, 2013

In the name of code readability and functionality, if you want to parse a date of a certain format you should do it in a way so that other programmers that look at your code can tell what you were doing. Here is a way as of PHP >= 5.3.0 to parse a st...

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Pad a string with a character | Fill in empty space with repeating character in bash

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on June 25th, 2013

If you want to pad a string so that the string is always the same length, but if a string that is smaller than the required length is used the excess space is filled with a defined character so that the string maintains the correct spacing. For exampl...

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Change Apache/XAMPP user that runs PHP | Fix PHP exec permission issues

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on June 11th, 2013

When you install XAMPP the user name is set to 'nobody' by default in the Apache configuration (httpd.conf). If you are are suffering from permissions issues in PHP then the problem might by the ownership of the files by Linux and the user under which ...

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Back up pear configuration | restore pear configuration | transfer pear configuration

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on May 20th, 2013

Here is how to back up your pear configuration to a script so that it can later be transferred to another installation of pear or so that you can restore a previous configuration. user@localhost the_directory> pear config-show | grep -viE "^([=]+|.{0,...

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Get all versions of PHP installed on the system

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on May 15th, 2013

This will list (all) the PHP(s) on the system and then grep the version number(s). whereis php | tr ' ' '\n' | grep -E "^/.*?php$" | xargs -I {} echo {} -v | sh |& grep -v "is a"

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Strange error in PHP | number zero (0) evaluates to true against a string in PHP

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on March 27th, 2013

Reproducing the error (see solution below): Take a look at this weird error below: $int_zero="reset";$str_zero="0";$int_zero=intval($str_zero);if ($int_zero == "reset"){ echo "equals reset\n"; } else { echo "equals something else\n"; } echo $int_zero...

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Design your code to be grep'ed or searched

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on March 14th, 2013

Seriously. So that future developers who work with your code can reverse engineer your code. 1.) Store code in flat text files When you are looking for a variable you want to refactor you should not have to find it in some code stored in a database...

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Increment date by one day | < PHP 5.2

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on March 6th, 2013

If you want to increment a date by one day you need to do it using the PHP DateTime function so that you can account for leap years. date_default_timezone_set('UTC'); $time_stamp = strtotime('0000-00-00 00:00:00'); $date = new DateTime(); $date->setTi...

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Generate a list of dates between two dates in PHP

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on March 6th, 2013

If you want to create a list of dates between two different Unix time stamps, here is how to do it: //2001-09-09T01:46:4 $starting_unix_timestamp = 1000000000; //now $ending_unix_timestamp = time(); date_default_timezone_set('America/Denver'); $star...

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Installing PECL command on a Linux box

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on March 5th, 2013

PECL is a command that comes with PEAR. PECL allows you to load PHP extensions which are programmed in C. to install it use the package manager that comes with your brand of Linux: apt-get install php5-pear or yum install php-pear or... rpm php-pear

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Set up Squirrel to connect to a MySQL database.

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on February 13th, 2013

We are assuming you have already installed Squirrel In order to set up Squirrel Database Client to connect to a MySQL database you must: 1.) go to http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/j/#downloads 2.) select your platform, if you are running it on...

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Convert string to list of ASCII codes in bash

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on February 10th, 2013

If you want to take a string and get the ascii code for each character in the string using a bash script then use the following function: function string2ascii_codes { str=$1; list=($(echo $str|sed 's/$.$/\1 /g')); ascii_result=''; ...

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Boulder apps - tech blog

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on December 31st, 2012

Hello, My name is Nicholas Dunbar. I am a web app designer and developer who lives in Boulder, Colorado. This is where I collect my thoughts on programming, design and entrepreneurship. My code and solutions are copied and pasted into hundreds of appl...

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Cubic bezier using beziersegment | ActionScript 3 AS3

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on December 27th, 2012

Fast Cubic Bezier in AS3 Because we use the machine code to do the calculations instead of doing them our self in interpreted AS3 this runs very fast. When you look up Cubic Bezier on the web you find a ton of math and a bunch of libraries for Act...

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Truncating a number | Setting the precision of a float | ActionScript 3. AS3

Published by Nicholas Dunbar on December 27th, 2012

Truncating a Number or Floating Point in ActionScript 3.0 The Efficient Way I have seen a few solutions for truncating a Number. Many of these solutions used to truncate a float or Number in ActionScript 3.0 (AS3) are just plain over complicated and ...

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