I have to say, I love the Google April Fool this year. I didn’t even go looking for Google Nose today, but I found it on the search results page when looking for recent News.
Google Nose – Great idea, even for an April Fool…
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Disable Firefox’s Inspect Element because Firebug is better
I recently updated my version of Firefox at work to find that some helpful developer had created a version (be it slightly limited) of the inspect element tool from Firebug within Firefox. This is OK I thought, maybe I can get rid of Firebug and use this. Ummm, no. After about 10 minutes I found it was no where near as useful, and continued to use the Firebug option in the menu when I right clicked on the page.
Simple Authentication for Symfony using Facebook Login
Following on from an earlier post, facebook changed the way you authenticate with their site.
The steps to authenticate have not changed too much, and the only change is to part 4.
- Create a new facebook application
- Add your website URL to it
- Add the facebook Login link to your page
- Process the return visit from facebook
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Functional test helpers for symfony 1.4 code
We you come to write functional tests in symfony 1.4 you can end up with a lot of duplicated code when testing basic things like the routing. To make life easier you can add helper functions to your tests to reduce the amount of duplication, and speed up test writing. So let’s start with the routing example.
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Fast User Switching from the command line on a Mac
It seems that some IT departments like to lock out the fast user switching option on company laptops in a lot of companies at the moment. This became a problem for me as I have a local admin account on my work machine, and I have to switch to it whenever I want to install from a dmg file. This got me thinking, is there a command line argument or tool that I could run to do this? Sure enough there is. The only thing you need to look up is the UserId for the user that you want to switch to.
How to clear DNS cache on a mac running OSX
Clearing the cache on Mac’s seems to change with every other release these days. In all cases though you need to use Terminal, but not always the same command. Back in the 10.4 days you would use lookupd, then in 10.5 and 10.6 you would use dscacheutil, but now in 10.7 you need to now use a killall command.
When svn merge doesn’t quite cut it
Anyone that works with subversion will know that merging 2 branches is not always easy. Most of the time there is no issue, and you can merge one or multiple changes from one branch to another, but sometimes you end up with conflicts left right and center. This is done with the standard merge commands:
Quick one-liner to set up a new SVN project with a trunk, branches and tags
When creating a new project in SVN one recognised standard is to set up a trunk, branches, and tags directory structure. Where I’m working at the moment, we also have a release directory placed under tags and branches. Which I’ve also started to do on some of my other projects out side of work as well (those that are under SVN anyway)
Fast Find in Vim
People keep telling me to get with the times, and stop using vim as my primary text editor, but today I found a nice easy way to fast-find something. All you need to do is move the cursor over the piece of text you want to find and press Shift + 8; when you are not in INSERT mode.
Easy Camel Case conversion in PHP
I was looking at a couple of classes the today from a very old piece of code and found a little gem of a function to convert variable names into CamelCase function names that I wrote a while back and thought I should share it.