Code

Include comments in search in The Bug Genie

4th April, 2013 - Posted by david

Back in July, I was given the task of finding a decent, preferably PHP-based, bug-tracking system and opted for The Bug Genie, as it had pretty much everything we wanted: email notifications, tickets grouped by project, various levels of user access and more. One thing we noticed however, was that when you searched all issues […]

Read more...

Beanstalkd, Pheanstalk and Daemontools on Ubuntu

20th March, 2013 - Posted by david

On the website I work for, when a user uploads an image for an ad, we generally keep 3 versions of that image, each a different size, simply referred to as ‘small’, ‘main’ or ‘large’. At the moment, these resized images (I’ll call them ‘thumbnails’ for simplicity) are generated the first time they are requested […]

Read more...

Safari and long lines in Google Maps Javascript API Directions Service

11th October, 2012 - Posted by david

I’ve been working on building the mobile version of CarsIreland.ie lately and one of the features we want is to offer directions from a user’s current location to any of our car dealerships, assuming we have their latitude and longitude co-ordinates. Getting the directions and displaying them on a map are ridiculously simple, thanks to […]

Read more...

php, error_log and newlines: a solution

15th May, 2012 - Posted by david

When it comes to coding and debugging, I generally keep things simple, opting for a basic text editor (Sublime Text 2 with Vim key-bindings being my current choice) and simple debug output statements when trying to track down a bug. With my current job, I deal with an API over AJAX so it’s not easy […]

Read more...

window.onload firing too early in IE

12th May, 2012 - Posted by david

The Problem Where I work, our tool supports 6 different languages, where translations are contained in various sets of language files. One of these sets consists of the translations stored in Javascript files as JSON blocks

Read more...

oAuth with the Twitter API in Ruby on Rails without a gem

15th December, 2011 - Posted by david

This post is a follow on from my previous post about the oAuth protocol in general in Ruby. Here I detail how to let a user authenticate themselves via Twitter to your web app, request a list of people they’re following (a GET operation) and how to follow a specific user (a POST operation). As […]

Read more...

oAuth 1.0 in Ruby without a gem

10th December, 2011 - Posted by david

Recently I decided to figure out what the oAuth 1.0 protocol was all about and try to implement it in Ruby, as part of a way a) to practice by Ruby on Rails, b) have a look at the Twitter API and c) use both to get an understanding of how websites let you log […]

Read more...

MySQL reached max integer limit

23rd August, 2011 - Posted by david

Whenever anything generates a MySQL error at work, the whole technical team gets an email about it, with full debug info. We recently got one for an area that I look after, so it was up to me to investigate. The title of the error was a slightly cryptic Error: Duplicate entry ‘0’ for key […]

Read more...

jQuery Mobile and Dynamic Data

23rd May, 2011 - Posted by david

UPDATE: I’ve recently been asked by entertainment.ie to stop scraping thier licensed data, to which I’ve duly agreed. Thus, the app is no longer live. However, the lessons learned below are still valid. END Haven’t posted for a while, mainly because I’ve been busy trying to teach myself Ruby on Rails, so haven’t created anything […]

Read more...

Regular expression (regex) to remove double encoding of html entities

30th March, 2011 - Posted by david

When you have users copying and pasting in data to forms on your website, which then gets stored in your database, you invariably end up with all sorts of ways of encoding and storing special characters. Ideally, these will end up in your database as the correct characters (such as € for the euro symbol), […]

Read more...