Geekality

JavaScript: Delayed keypress event (sort of)

Torleif — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 17:48:18 +0000

Wanted to do an AJAX call whenever the content of a field was changed. This can be done simply with the onchange event, but the problem is that you have to tab out of the field to make it fire. You can also do it with the keypress event, but then you’ll get one AJAX call for each and every keypress, which is just silly.

Found a nice and easy solution, and here it is slightly changed.

It’s a bit sneaky, but you should be able to deduce how it works Working sample over at samples.geekality.net/delay-check.

Nice font for code

Torleif — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:56:15 +0000

Don’t remember where or how I came over this font… Might have been a tweet linking to this post… Either way, it’s a very nice font I think. Sure looks a lot better than the default Eclipse font anyways

The font is called Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, and you can download it for free at dafont.com/bitstream-vera-mono.font. Go try it out!

Unicode test strings

Torleif — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 13:21:17 +0000

Some strings you can shove into your application and see if you at least sort of handle Unicode correctly. For example, if you have a form which stores a text value in a database and then shows it later on a webpage, you can try to stick these in the form and see if they come out correctly in the other end.

Iñtërnâtiônàližætiøn
Ādam

First one includes many non-ascii characters. Second one starts with a multi-byte character.

Convert windows-1252 to utf-8 on Windows

Torleif — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 10:28:28 +0000

Tried to find out how to convert windows-1252 code files to utf-8 without messing up Norwegian characters today. Couldn’t really find anything good other than linux tools and php stuff. Finally, *facepalm*, I remembered it might be possible using Notepad… And sure enough, seems to work great. Just open up the windows-1252 encoded file in Notepad, then choose ‘Save as’ and set encoding to UTF-8.

Hopefully I won’t forget this the next time I need it… *sigh*

PHP: One way of differing between DEV and PROD environments with Kohana

Torleif — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 22:22:49 +0000

Usually when I develop websites, they will be deployed to a domain, for example www.geekality.net. But when I develop this site locally, I usually want it to be in some sub-folder of localhost, since I usually have more than one website going on, and I don’t want the trouble with virtual-hosts. So, to solve this for my Kohana websites I do the following simple thing. This technique would work for other websites programmed in PHP as well, but the PHP part would probably be a bit different.

Apache httpd.conf

First of all, I add this to the end of my httpd.conf.

# Custom htaccess file
AccessFileName .htaccess.local .htaccess

Make sure to check if there is already a line with AccessFileName though, and if it is, just edit that instead of adding another one

Environment variables

With that done, you can have one regular .htaccess which would be used in production and a local one for your machine.

#.htaccess
SetEnv KOHANA_ENV production
SetEnv KOHANA_BASE /
RewriteBase /

#.htaccess.local
SetEnv KOHANA_ENV development
SetEnv KOHANA_BASE /geekality/
RewriteBase /geekality/

These two files can now live side by side, checked in to source control, and not cause any trouble. Alternatively you could set the local one to be ignored so that other developers could create their own setup.

Kohana bootstrap

Now comes the Kohana specific part. In my application/bootstrap.php I have the following (among other stuff of course).

if (isset($_SERVER['KOHANA_ENV']))
{
Kohana::$environment = constant('Kohana::'.strtoupper($_SERVER['KOHANA_ENV']));
}

Kohana::init(array(
'base_url' => $_SERVER['KOHANA_BASE'],
'index_file' => '',
'profile' => Kohana::$environment !== Kohana::PRODUCTION,
'caching' => Kohana::$environment !== Kohana::DEVELOPMENT,
'errors' => TRUE,
));

And that’s pretty much all there is to it. This way I don’t have to worry about not overwriting the .htaccess on my production server or stuff like that. The .htaccess is untouched and just for the production environment

Oracle: Finding all constraints and their affected columns

Torleif — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 17:18:28 +0000

Found an SQL script to list all constraints in an Oracle database together with affected columns. Putting it here in case I need it again… Took a while to run, but sure beats having to look through all the table definitions to find what exactly is preventing me from deleting a row…

SELECT UC.OWNER
, UC.CONSTRAINT_NAME
, UCC1.TABLE_NAME||'.'||UCC1.COLUMN_NAME "CONSTRAINT_SOURCE"
, 'REFERENCES'
, UCC2.TABLE_NAME||'.'||UCC2.COLUMN_NAME "REFERENCES_COLUMN"
FROM USER_CONSTRAINTS uc
, USER_CONS_COLUMNS ucc1
, USER_CONS_COLUMNS ucc2
WHERE UC.CONSTRAINT_NAME = UCC1.CONSTRAINT_NAME
AND UC.R_CONSTRAINT_NAME = UCC2.CONSTRAINT_NAME
AND UCC1.POSITION = UCC2.POSITION -- Correction for multiple column primary keys.
AND UC.CONSTRAINT_TYPE = 'R'
ORDER BY UCC1.TABLE_NAME
, UC.CONSTRAINT_NAME;

If you’re just looking for one particular constraint you can of course also add and UC.CONSTRAINT_NAME = 'SOME NAME'

How to change or remove file extensions in Windows

Torleif — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 18:14:05 +0000

Say you have a bunch of files and you want to quickly change or remove the file extension of all of them. Turns out that’s very simple to do with the command-line in Windows. I had no idea…

Change

ren *.old *.new

Will change all files with ‘old’ file extension to have the ‘new’ file extension.

Remove

ren *.old *.

Will remove the ‘old’ file extension.

Simple!