Prefixing every key in a hash ref in Perl

I needed to prepend some text to every element in a Perl hash ref, so I came up with: $hashref->{"prefix_$_"} = delete($hashref->{$_}) foreach (keys %$hashref); which prefixes each key of $hashref with "prefix_". After talking it over with Cliff, he was concerned with modifying the list in place while simultaneously iterating over it and suggested this solution: %$hashref = map { +"prefix_$_" => $hashref->{$_} } keys %$hashref; One interesting thing about this solution is the… continue reading.

Posted on 8 July 2014 in Perl

Z-Ray for Zend Server 7

I see that Zend Server 7 has now been released. I've been running the beta for all my development work for a while now and the main reason is the new Z-Ray feature. Z-Ray is a bar that is injected into the bottom of your page showing lots of useful information. This is what it looks like in its closed state when run on my development version of joind.in: At a glance, I can see… continue reading.

Posted on 2 July 2014 in Software

Privilege

If ever there was a word to make someone defensive, it's privilege. You are brought face to face with the fact that someone else doesn't have the same experiences in life as you and that their experiences somehow make their life harder than yours. I am one of the most privileged people I know. I am a well-educated European white man. I was raised in a loving, stable home. I have a loving, stable relationship… continue reading.

Posted on 13 June 2014 in Me

Missing mime-info database for use with File::MimeInfo

A requirement I have on a current project means that I need to determine the mime type of a file I load from disk. One way to do this is to use the File::MimeInfo::Magic CPAN module like this: use File::MimeInfo::Magic; my $mime_type = mimetype($path_to_file); However, on OS X, an error was raised: WARNING: You don't seem to have a mime-info database. The shared-mime-info package is available from http://freedesktop.org/ . The easiest way to solve this… continue reading.

Posted on 2 June 2014 in Perl

Speaking at DPC & OSCON

Two conferences are coming up that I'm speaking at: The Dutch PHP Conference takes place in Amsterdam and this year is between June 26th and 28. I'm giving a tutorial with Matthew Weier O'Phinney on Apigility which will provide you with a full day's teaching on creating web APIs with Apigility. I'm also giving a talk called Creating Models discussing the options available when creating the model layer of a typical MVC PHP application. DPC… continue reading.

Posted on 29 May 2014 in PHP

Styling a Chosen select to fit Bootstrap 3 better

One project that I'm currently working on is an internal business application that's using stock Bootstrap 3. I needed a searchable select box and Chosen fitted the bill, so I'm using that. However, the default styles for the Chosen select box differ slightly from Bootstrap. The most noticeable being the height of the control.

Posted on 13 May 2014 in Software

Perl syntax highlighting in Sublime Text 3

I'm currently writing a project in Perl for a client and have discovered that the default Perl syntax highlighting in Sublime Text is terrible. Fortunately, the community has stepped up and Blaise Roth has created the ModerlPerl package. Install via Package Control. To get all Perl files to open with the new syntax highlighter, use View > Syntax > Open all with current extension as… and select ModernPerl from the sub-menu.

Posted on 6 May 2014 in Software

Injecting dependencies into your ZF2 controllers

When starting working with Zend Framework 2, it's common to copy the skeleton and put your controller definitions in module.config.php like this: 'controllers' => array( 'invokables' => array( 'Application\Controller\Index' => 'Application\Controller\IndexController', 'Application\Controller\Blog' => 'Application\Controller\BlogController', ), ), The controllers keyword is picked up by the ControllerManager which is an instance of the ServiceManager which means that it creates the controller instance for you when the dispatcher needs it.

Posted on 23 April 2014 in Zend Framework, Zend Framework 2

Sharing host VPN with Vagrant

When moving a project into Vagrant, I realised that I needed the vagrant guest to share my OS X's VPN. I'm using a separate IP address within a private network like this: config.vm.network :private_network, ip: "192.168.101.101" So, after some Googling, I added this provider configuration setting: config.vm.provider :virtualbox do |vb| vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "–natdnshostresolver1", "on"] end and now my VM is sending data over the VPN. Note that this will not work when using the… continue reading.

Posted on 16 April 2014 in Computing

Some (disjointed) notes on provisioning Vagrant with Ansible

I've been playing with Vagrant over the last few days, using Ansible to provision it. These are some notes to remind myself for next time and are very disjointed! Configuring Vagrant to provision using Ansible is easy enough: config.vm.provision "ansible" do |ansible| ansible.playbook = "provisioning/playbook.yml" end

Posted on 14 April 2014 in Computing