code - 1001 untold stories

How to file a bug report

Since I waste lot of time on interpreting bug reports, I'd like to give a little guidance on how to file it correctly. I would claim that I spend at least 10% of my time on guessing and asking the reporter what the bug

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PNG Image Optimisation

I did some research at work for PNG image optimization, to find out what are the best tools to compress PNG RGBA to paletted png with alpha channel, that would also fit into a good workflow. In previous projects it was common to compress

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Workaround for Zend_Dojo_Form when you render elements individually and dijit.byId() returns 'undefined'

Problem: When you render the form as a whole (i.e: <?php echo $this->form ?>), everything works fine, but when you render each element separate, the zendDijit {"id":"yourFormId","params":{"dojoType":"dijit.

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The one and only correct way to use sprites.

In this post I'll show you the one and only correct way to use sprites and the very little benefit if you use sprites the wrong way. It's in everyones mouth but a lot of people do not understand fully what sprites are supposed

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Permission denied in Unknown on line 0

if you install apache/php and get the following error: Warning: Unknown: failed to open stream: Permission denied in Unknown on line 0 Then consider to check the permissions. What user/group has the apache? ps -ef | grep apache Who owns the files in

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tech-stuff-bla-bla-and-then-some

I've installed today a new svn, trac and a websvn at work on a ubuntu machine with plesk on it. Actually it's really easy but there seems to be no instant-setup guide, so I had to google quite extensive. Well I haven't configuered it

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work around for zend validate's markAsError respectively addError

Yesterday I ran into a problem with zend form and zend validate which was quite confusing. I wanted to check if a multiCheckbox has less or equal 2 selections. I really thought there would be some "shipped" validator but there isn't. Then

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Saturday things

I'm currently trying to get some multi step/wirzard forms in Zend done and it seems to work as far as I can tell. I've used this little class as inspiration and it works so far. I really like multi step forms as user

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flickr.groups.pools.getPhotos and php_serial

If you try to get a serialized array (php_serial) from the flicker api from a group (flickr.groups.pools.getPhotos), you may find your self a little bit lost, because you do not get the photos you want, only the amount of how

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simple method to add a safari css

There are some selector hacks out there, but I don't like them - ie: (@media screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio:0) {}). My personal favourite is done with Prototype because I use it a lot and it is pretty simple: <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"

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new theme

it was time for a change - so I've made a new theme for my blog. Nothing special but it looks quite ok (haven't tested it in IE, I don't care bout it - but in safari, firefox, chrome and opera it looks good)

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new protosafe released

just in time. One of our clients requested it (minified + packed) last week and today I found an updated version and it seems t work fine: http://code.google.com/p/protosafe/

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how to cut a string with regex (the neat way)

It is fairy a common task to cut a string - ie when a teaser text should not be longer than n characters. A lot of people use substring() or substr(), depending on their favourite language. However with regex it is really easy and

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MySQL EXPLAIN aka DESCRIBE for UPDATE/DELETE

Ever tryed to "explain" a delete or an update statement? It will fail. It took me nearly an hour to figure this out. Actually I've never needed to explain a simple DELETE statement, but in todays case I did and was wondering

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Pass Phrazr

Passwords are sometimes hard to remember, or at least hard to read, because good passwords are cryptic. That’s a fact and I am still fine with it, because I pay attention to obvious security flaws or risks. However, there are some situations when

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areal-records.com finally online

It took us quite a while until we were all satisfied but now it's done and you can view it over here: » http://areal-records.com/ The site relies on prototype, some web 2.0 gimmickry, scriptaculous and the pear framework, a wonderful combine script

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Thursday

My neighbours just had sex - uhh, ahhh, uuhhhh - well for about 4 minutes - not much longer - then they were done. So I'd call it a quickly. I was quite tempted to have a look but I thought that would be

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urgent update

I had to update WP, because someone managed to exploit a security hole in my blog. I guess it was the draft exploit - but I am not sure. Also I've decided to use the open_base_dir restrictions, because the guys who tryed

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email regex

if you need a very easy regex, to validate emails - here's some I wrote: ^((?P<localpart>([\w\-_]+)([\w\-_]+([\.]{1}[^\.\.]+))([\w\-_]+)) @(?P<domain>([\wäüö]+[\w\-\._äüö]+[\wäüö]+)) \.(?P<tld>([a-z]{2,6})))$

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caught a disease - the IE!

once again I have to do stuff for the IE "only" (omfg!) and it's a not just a pain in the ass it's like a heart attacking nightmare horror movie. The IE's debugging capabilities - uhm wait, what debugging capabilities? - are

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CSS 2.1 - some interesting things about specifications

According to the Specification (4.1.3 Characters and case), identifiers can contain only alphanumerical characters [a-z0-9] and - big surprise - ISO 10646 characters U+00A1 and higher, plus the hyphen (-) and underscore (_). That's totally new to me and I've never ever

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most webdeveloper should better grow weeds than...

... writing bad and unforgivable code. There are lot of good looking sites out there and a lot of good looking (w)CMS front and backends but most of the so called cool CMS sucks. WP ist cool - I like it - it's a

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nightmare osCommerce + php5

Why: do people code in medieval style? do people ignore the signs of the time? I guess I need to find a quick and easy solution to make osCommerce work on php5. phew -- 10 minutes later -- here's some quick stuff which seems

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Joomla

It looks good. Which means it has a nice UI but for somehow some things seems to me me irrational or not logic and besides that I am disappointed by the amount of table layout stuff. Hello Joomla developer: We are in the mid

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Metakeywords Update

Find the updated version + explanation right here.