Archive for the ‘Tools’ Category

Emulate sendmail on your Dev Machine

February 8, 2011 by marco · Comments Off
Filed under: Linux, Serverstuff, Tools 
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In order to prevent email delivery during development and log all email messages that would have been delivered, you can actually do a simple trick: Replace the file /usr/sbin/sendmail (on Ubuntu, use ‘locate sendmail’ to find it if it lies elsewhere) with this little shell-script, or rather make a _bak of the original and save [...]

Drawing Lines Using Google Static Maps API

November 2, 2010 by marco · Comments Off
Filed under: Links, Read-Write-Web, Snippets, Tools 
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If you are looking for a simple way to display lines like a roundtrip on a map, Google’s Static Maps API might be for you. Documentation and examples: http://code.google.com/intl/en-US/apis/maps/documentation/staticmaps/ Limits: – There is a query limit of 1000 unique (different) image requests per viewer per day. – URLs are restricted to 2048 characters. Here are [...]

Clean your PHP4 Legacies using sed

October 19, 2010 by marco · Comments Off
Filed under: Linux, Snippets, Tools 
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If you have to deal with very old PHP4 legacy code containing every syntax crime you may know from the early years, how would you handle it? Give it to your junior people to fix it manually? I like to have at least some handy helpers for the first rough corrections. I found sed to [...]

MODx Revolution Links

April 6, 2010 by marco · Comments Off
Filed under: Links, Tools 
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I have recently been playing with the new MODx (‘Revolution’) and I must say, I love the concept and it’s flexibility. Just to make things easier for folks starting out with MODx or who migrate from MODx Evolution here are some recommended links. General: Download MODx Revolution:  As of 06.04.2010 there is MODx Revolution 2.0.0-rc-1 available. MODx [...]

Add a PHP Post-Commit-Hook to your SVN

November 10, 2009 by marco · Comments Off
Filed under: Snippets, Software development, Tools, Tutorials 
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This is just a link to a very good tutorial on how to make your own SVN post-commit hook using a PHP script. It sends the following information via email: Committer name Commit message List of files edited Diff of changes made http://techchorus.net/writing-php-script-send-svn-commit-changeset-email-notification

Quick PHP Hack to Tidy up Trashed HTML

September 21, 2009 by marco · Comments Off
Filed under: Snippets, Tools 
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I just hacked together the following quick and dirty PHP-script to use the tidy-extension from the command line. Maybe somebody else needs something like this somewhere. Check the comment for details: <?php // // (a) Save this as tidy.php // (b) Call it from commandline like this: $ php tidy.php trashed.html > tidy.html // to [...]

Install PEAR on OSX

September 9, 2009 by marco · Comments Off
Filed under: Snippets, Tools, Uncategorized 
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Here is how you install PEAR on Mac OSX: sudo mkdir /usr/local/temp; sudo chmod -R 777 /usr/local/temp; sudo mkdir /usr/local/share/pear; sudo chmod -R 777 /usr/local/share/pear; curl http://pear.php.net/go-pear | sudo php; Set /usr/local as path prefix and install. You should then be able to use pear, e.g.: pear help. In order to install modules you also [...]

Consistent Development Environments using VirtualMachines

July 30, 2009 by marco · 2 Comments
Filed under: Linux, Software development, Tools 
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As a development team we always run into situations where we have trouble setting up a proper development environment for each of the team members to get going or add new staff on the go. It annoyed me every time since it causes a lot of unnecessary communication and friction. I often heard of virtualization [...]

Free XSD Editor – Generate XSDs from XML

June 28, 2009 by marco · Comments Off
Filed under: Software development, Tools, Tutorials 

From an old post: To start out with XML-Schema this might be of interest to you: XSD-Tutorial: http://www.liquid-technologies.com/XsdTutorial_01.aspx Free graphical Tool: http://www.liquid-technologies.com/LiquidXMLStudio.aspx [2009-06-27] Update: A very cool feature is the generation of a Schema, based on example-XML files you give Liquid XML Studio! I discovered this when I built a Schema that would not validate [...]

Bulk Image Resize using Conditional Width

April 4, 2009 by marco · Comments Off
Filed under: Linux, Productivity, Snippets, Tools 
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I am currently working on a project in which we have lots of images from an old CMS waiting to be migrated into a new layout. Of course there are restrictions so it should not happen that certain image types exceed a certain max. width. OK, we have many many images… So I took a [...]

Frameworks…

March 13, 2009 by marco · Comments Off
Filed under: Articles, Software development, Tools 
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Find out interesting thoughts and experiences about the selection and usage of a frameworks for your projects in this set of slides ‘Living with Frameworks‘ by Stuart Herbert, Technical Manager at www.gradwell.com. You will learn about: How frameworks save you time (=money) and ensure quality but can also waste resources if applied in another way the [...]

A Simple PHP Google Sitemap Generator

February 26, 2009 by marco · Comments Off
Filed under: Read-Write-Web, Snippets, Tools, XML 
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I just hacked together a very simple class and CLI script to help me generate Google sitemap XML on a daily basis using PHP. If you have not yet heard of it: Google sitemaps help you promote your content if you have certain deep links that only show up if a visitor for example performs [...]

Etherpad

February 15, 2009 by marco · Comments Off
Filed under: Productivity, Tools 
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EtherPad is a free webbsased editor which lets people remotely and simultaneously edit the same text document. Just click ‘Create new Pad‘ and you see the URL which you can send to your remote friend(s). Use it for group development on code snippets, catch realtime meeting minutes, brainstorming ideas and many things more… Thanks AppJet [...]

Frontend Tool- and Hint-Collections

January 29, 2009 by marco · Comments Off
Filed under: Articles, Layout, Tools 
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I have just discovered the tools section of the Smashing Magazine with very interesting articles like these ones: 50 Extremely Useful PHP Tools 75 (Really) Useful JavaScript Techniques 15 Helpful In-Browser Web Development Tools 50 Useful Design Tools For Beautiful Web Typography 15 Useful Project Management Tools And there are many more!

Hippie Completion in Eclipse

January 24, 2009 by marco · Comments Off
Filed under: Productivity, Tools 
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I was using a factory like this $factory = new Object_Factory(); $curr_object = $factory->create(‘brand’); to generate instances of objects I needed and wondered why Eclipse could not auto-complete e.g. getters and setters in my code for me later on for the $curr_object. My productivity and my motivation to type all that stuff were seriously suffering… [...]

Planning Poker for better Estimates

January 11, 2009 by marco · 1 Comment
Filed under: Articles, Software development, Tools 
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There are many essays and articles on ‘Planning Poker’ out there. So I do not need to repeat the principles here. By checking out the recommended links (and folloups and others from your own research) you need to understand the following: What a story point of a project looks like and how you generate those [...]

Subversion Repository on Samba Share

December 22, 2008 by marco · Comments Off
Filed under: Linux, Tools 
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I use a Subversion repository which sits on a Samba share in our LAN. Most of the times I used it from Windows machines where I simply assigned a drive letter (N:\) to the filesystem of the network share (//TERASTATION2/share) hosting the repository. A SVN checkout including URL looked like this: svn co file://N:/_repos/projectname/trunk . [...]

Alternative du – gt5, visual harddisk usage

October 29, 2008 by marco · Comments Off
Filed under: Linux, Tools 
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gt5 is a handy shellscript that extends the linux command du (disk usage). It can be run from the console or remotely over ssh. Nothing to be installed. It uses GNU tools like head, sed, awk and lynx. It generates html which is then passed to lynx to be displayed. You can install it via: [...]

Browsershots

October 27, 2008 by marco · Comments Off
Filed under: Software development, Tools 
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Browsershots loads a given URL, using different browsers on different OSses and generates a screenshot for each one. You can also specify window size, JavaScript-ing and Flash version. Simply enter your URL and wait until your ‘job’ has been processed. Finally you will see a screen like the one on the left. http://browsershots.org

Import .dbf File Contents into MySql

October 23, 2008 by marco · Comments Off
Filed under: Snippets, Tools 
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I had a bunch of .dbf (source was Lotus Approach) files, at which I wanted to shoot SQL-like queries to generate some meaningful reports. So there were 2 tasks to be accomplished: Read the data into a tool or database and formulate and perform the queries to generate results to base your reports on. As [...]

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