Pragmatism in the real world
I've been setting up a Vagrant VM for use with some client projects and picked Ansible to do this. Firstly, I played with the Ansible provisioner, but found it a little slow and then I realised that Ansible doesn't run on Windows. Rather than migrate what I'd done to Puppet, Evan recommended that I look into running Ansible on the guest instead and provided some hints. This turned out to be quite easy. These are… continue reading.
No matter what I want to do with an array, PHP usually has a first class method that does it. I was therefore surprised that in_array() didn't handle substring matches. (I was sure there was a flag, but apparently not!) No doubt everyone has their own version of this, but here's mine so that I don't have to recreate it next time: /** * A version of in_array() that does a sub string match on… continue reading.
It's that time again; Apple has shipped a new version of OS X, 10.10 Yosemite. Apple ships PHP 5.5.14 with Yosemite and this is how to set it up from a clean install. However, if you don't want to use the built-in PHP or want to use version 5.6, then these are some alternatives: PHP 5.3/5.4/5.5 for OS X 10.6/10.7/10.8/10.9/10.10 as binary package by Liip Homebrew has PHP. Zend Server 7.x (Paid for) Let's get… continue reading.
I have a couple of projects where I need to push to more than one repo all the time. I have been using this command line to do so: git push origin && git push other-remote However, I recently discovered that I can create a remote that points to more than one repository using these commands: git remote add all git@github.com:akrabat/projectname.git git remote set-url –add all ssh://example.com/path/to/projectname.git I now have a remote called all that… continue reading.
Today is Ada Lovelace day which celebrates the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths. I have many role models in my technical life and many are women who inspire and encourage me to do better. There are too many to list, but I am thankful every one of them, both men and women. I want to talk today about one person who inspires me: Kim. Kim is relatively new to development. Fortunately… continue reading.
I use rst2pdf to create my presentations and noticed that the syntax highlighter wasn't highlighting instanceof. rst2pdf uses pygments for syntax highlighting, so I wondered what was going on. A short investigation led to me realise that the current stable version of pigments is 1.6 and they are working on 2.0. It seems that 2.0 has a number of changes to the PHP lexer, which aren't in 1.6. While I'm waiting, I modified my local… continue reading.
One change I made recently to my .profile is this: # up & down map to history search once a command has been started. bind '"\e[A":history-search-backward' bind '"\e[B":history-search-forward' These two bind command change the way that the up and down arrow keys work once you start typing a command to only search the history for lines that start with what you've typed so far. This means that I type, say, git and then press ↑… continue reading.
I keep forgetting the correct command line syntax for the PHP build-in server, so I've now made an alias for it in my .profile: alias phps='php -S 0.0.0.0:8888' Now I can simply type: phps public/index.php to start the built-in web server.
I've recently been changing joind.in's Vagrant system to use Debian and one issue I came across was getting Mailcatcher to start on boot and integrate property with the service command. To do this, I created an init script which is based off the skeleton and then stored this in /etc/init.d and then ran update-rc.d mailcatcher defaults to set up the correct links in the various rc.d directories. This is the init script: /etc/init.d/mailcatcher: #! /bin/sh… continue reading.
As my mind turns towards the conferences that I'm attending this autumn, I came across Why you want a code of conduct & how we made one by Erin Kissane. I highly recommend that you read it and the links within it. The part that struck me most was the thoughts on a plan of action. It's all very well to have a code of conduct, but if the event's organisers haven't got a plan… continue reading.
