My mad ramblings
Stopforumspam_moo
Nov 21st
If anyone has ever had to do contact forms, or registration forms, even with CAPTCHA in them, you’ll know that you still get stupid emails and registrations. On one of my forums (IPB) it got so bad that I had to install a 3rd party hook to help defend against this, which uses the awesome service from http://www.stopforumspam.com/ In fact it’s been so good that I’ve written a CodeIgniter library to use their API and check email addresses entered in my forms against now. I may post it soon, but as some douche bags like to host other peoples code on GitHub, without contributing anything to them, then offering you a position of admin to your own code… i’m in two minds if I should not just start releasing my plugins as paid!
Sorry!
Oct 25th
My lack of updates recently has been due to the amount of work I’m currently doing 
I really wanted to spend some time on Image_moo, and to put up Structure_moo and Facebook_moo scripts I’ve written (Facebook_moo is a CodeIgniter facebook addon, Structure moo will show differences of tables in a database with some code to update them).
A lot has happened since I last posted, I bought an Ipad 2 – oooh, shiney! and now considering an iMac so I can play with some ipad development. I’m still contracting to The Purple Agency as a developer and working on private projects in the evening on my own projects (and client projects).
I recently changed my business phone to an IP phone, so pay far less than I used to, to BT just to have a line in the house, and get a load more functions, rather cool actually. I went with Soho66 who where helpful and so far cheap!
Part of my office
Aug 9th
Just for the sake of it, here is some of the equipment I currently work with on my Tapewise application. Couple of Fibre channel switches, and old STK L40 with 3 lto and 1 sdlt drive in, an IBM 3590, some fibre scsi bridges and various other bits of equipment. On the top is a LTO-4 and an LTO-2 drive and lots of rubbish! I also have a small 250GB NAS backup drive (for local backup, also have offsite SVN and USB disk backups). There is a 24 port 1GB network port in there as well that most the equipment is plugged into, as well as my new IP phone powered by Soho66.
On the side my flattened box from the LOTR sword I bought that is currently on display in our lounge 
and a few cables (easy to access, you don’t want to see my cupboard!)
Windows Live mesh rant
May 28th
Ok, sorry for the rant, but I’ve had a couple of shots and now feeling a tad tipsy! There is a really annoying bug in Windows Live mesh that causes the first letter of the sync folder to be dropped (e.g. select d:/my folder and it tries to sync as d:/y folder). This only effect those of us that have changed their my documents folder to a drive (I think) but has now been a bug/issue for over 6 months! How can it take over 6 months to create a simple patch for this issue! The affect it has on my work flow is huge, as I used to be able to sync no problems with Xp and the old Windows Mesh. Come on MS I do like your products but get your thumb out your arse on this one!!!
WordPress admin / wp-admin 404 – AAARRRGGG
May 24th
Man oh man, this install of WordPress has been running fine for the last year, till last week! I recompiled Apache on the server to include PDO support in PHP. Didn’t think anything of it till I went to respond to a comment, BANG! No admin… POO POO… recompiled Apache again removing PDO, still didn’t work (After trying 4 other installs of WordPress on this server which all failed). Did the usual searches on the net and found LOADS of solutions, but none of them worked til…
http://www.webmasterfamily.com/f12/wordpress-solution-500-internal-server-error-8.html
admin section was accessible anymore, Problem: PHP is running out of memory. Solution: Create a text file and name it “php.ini” and with a single line of code in it: memory=20MB This file has to be placed into the directory /wp-admin/ within your WordPress installation.
So my hearty thanks go out to Vita who posted that!
VitaVta
MySql table names, case sensitive
May 13th
I’ve been building a script to compare mysql databases so I can better see what tables need updating/adding. All was going well till I started copying data and structures form my local pc (running under WAMP) to my UNIX server. I was using PhpMyAdmin to get a dump of the table, then adding to the main server, however I was then getting table not found! After much frustration I have found out that my local copy had been turning all the table names to lowercase, so when I recreated them on the server the table names where not consistent. The fix? Add lower_case_table_names=0 to the my.ini (access on WAMP menu) in the [wampmysqld] section, table name are now kept the same as the backup file or entered value. Personally I tend to only use lower case for table names, but this website has a lot of legacy data which has mixed case table names! Hope it helps!
Codeigniter 2.0.2
May 9th
Just in case you don’t visit the CI site (Would be surprised!) there has been a new release to Code and Reactor which includes a security fix which patches a small vulnerability in the cross site scripting filter. Not a big one but worth updating!
Ever been in a position where your dev site DB tables have changed, and you *cough* forgot to write down what changes would be required on your live site?! Well it has for me, and consequently I’ve been trying to find a tool/script to show me the database changes, but with no luck. So after a bit of experimentation I’ve written a small script that does this! Click here for details
Codeigniter 2.0.1
Mar 16th
Nice to see CI having more regular updates via Reactor As you can tell I don’t write many blog entries on here, mostly because I blog directly from my phone to my personal blog. Image_moo has been serving me well, however I have had to make a couple of minor modifications for the update of the Printfetti.co.uk website, so I’ll be posting a new version soon.
Recently I’ve been doing a lot of work in ExpressionEngine and while there are a couple of things I don’t like, on the whole it’s a nice bit of web software (webware?). Because EE uses CI as a base it’s quite easy to work with, using active records etc. It’s just a shame that the documentation is not up to the same quality as CI and you need a high post count before you can even contribute.
On a personal level I’ve been contracting at http://www.purple-agency.com/ for the last few months, working in a team of 4, Matt.B, Matt.T, Paul.C and myself, so 3 Matts!
I’ve recently been playing with the FTP module of CI and have found it a bit weird in the way it works, so will be posting in the reactor forums. So I’ve ripped it and made ftp_moo which I might publish as well.
Image_moo update
Dec 7th
Recently I had a comment about the quality of watermarks via the image_moo library. Now I’ve been aware that there was some limitation, but it lead me to experiment a bit more. The issue is that imagecopymerge does not support alpha channel correctly, so I’ve had to add some additional checking to check this, and process watermarks as needed. For watermarks using alpha (e.g. PNG32) the results are far better than before, but still it iwll do JPG/GIF etc. watermarks as well.