InfoEntropy Web blogs

Step-by-step to build a facebook app with CakePHP

jeff — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 04:14:08 -0700

this post is a good hands-on for setting up a facebook app in CakePHP.

If you have never used CakePHP i suggest you go through the 15 minute blog tutorial

After you do the the tutorial the facebook tutorial will make a lot of sense.

Enabling CakePHP 1.1 on Lighttpd 1.5

jeff — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 19:29:40 -0700

Somebody wrote an excellent post on how to make CakePHP work on LigHTTPD. It didn't work for me right away because for some reason mod_rewrite or my CakePHP settings are different from the "default" behavior.

Most blogs say that their URL arguments for non-tidy URLs are like this: /cakedir/index.php?url=pagename. However, for some reason my URLs are like this: /cakedir/index.php/pagename. I'm not sure why that is.

Nevertheless, you can follow the instructions in the blog post but if you have the same URL path rewrite setup as I do you will need to make a critical change to the url.rewrite-once statement:



#this is the original
   url.rewrite-once = (
    "^/(css|files|img|js|stats)/(.*)$" => "/$1/$2",
    "^/(.*)$" => "/index.php?url=$1"
   )

#change the index.php part
   url.rewrite-once = (
    "^/(css|files|img|js|stats)/(.*)$" => "/$1/$2",
    "^/(.*)$" => "/index.php/$1"
   )

Enabling CakePHP 1.1 on Lighttpd 1.5

Install and configure PHP5 and lighttpd on mac os x 10.4

jeff — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 16:28:54 -0700

I was having trouble getting PHP 5 fastcgi to work with lighttpd on my Mac OS X 10.4 laptop. The core of the problem is that the default port install of php5 on the mac does not include CGI support.

The command you are looking for is



sudo port install php5 +fastcgi

#use this command to see what options are available
port variants php5

I believe this is the Mac equivalent to ubuntu's command



sudo apt-get install php5-cgi

PHP 5 and LightTPD on Mac OS X

lighttpd as a startup item on os x

jeff — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 14:08:28 -0700

I've been having a lot of trouble figuring out how to configure general mac startup services. I've also had tons of trouble figuring out how to configure lighttpd.conf files. I came across this TextSnippets website that seems to have a lot of good examples for configuring all this crazy server and OS X related stuff.

Lighttpd launchd item for OS X 10.4

Mac tips for Unix users

jeff — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 13:57:43 -0700

I just got used to using Ubuntu Linux over the past couple years and now we use Macs at work. The trouble is that the Mac flavor of UNIX is quite a bit different from the way Ubuntu works. I found this to be a helpful introduction to understanding the similarities and differences between Mac OS X and Ubuntu Linux.

Top Ten Mac OS X Tips for Unix Geeks

Moving your cursor in a terminal with bash shell (Mac OS X, and Ubuntu Linux compatible)

jeff — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 23:10:49 -0700

Tired of pressing delete 1,000 times to move around in your terminal window? Use these handy shortcuts and spare yourself the repetitve stress inducing, carpal-tunnel-flaring effects of using the command line in Macs and Linux.

My current favorites:

ctrl-a: move to front of line
ctrl-e: move to end of line
ctrl-w: delete word before cursor
ctrl-r: search past command history
up/down arrow: page through previous commands
alt-b / alt-f: move backward/forward one word (without deleting)

Bash shell keyboard shortcuts

linux user management commands

jeff — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 13:44:59 -0600

I couldn't figure out how to do view or change groups in Linux for a while. This page tells me most of the user management commands.

Link

Setup LigHTTPD virtual hosting by hand

jeff — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 03:00:22 -0600

This is a handy resource for setting up your LigHTTPD virtual hosts by hand. Nothing fancy here, I just can never remember how to do it without referring to this page.

Link

Reload your hosts file in Mac

jeff — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 11:13:46 -0600

For some reason Mac OS X does not reload, restart, or re-initialize your hosts file (at least not the one at /private/etc/hosts) when you've altered it. Windows and Linux usually do.

To reload the Mac OS X hosts file, run this:


sudo niload -v -m hosts . < /etc/hosts

The author at the Holy Shmoly! blog led me to the promised land.

Detailed link

Using MochiKit doXHR

jeff — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 11:46:47 -0600

The doXHR() function in MochiKit is pretty handy for doing AJAX FORMs. It is a shorthand function for do XMLHttpRequest. Here is some basic usage of doXHR(). I was using this code to save position of a Google Map marker via AJAX POST. The URL called returns a string that gets stuffed into responseText of the result object.



saveMapLocation: function( ) {
  //values that i am passing are latitude and longitude
  var qry = queryString({lat:latitude.value,lon:longitude.value});
  var d = doXHR(url, 
    {
      method:'POST',
      sendContent:qry,
      headers: {"Content-Type":"application/x-www-form-urlencoded"} 
    });
    //this callback fires when the XHR returns successful
    d.addCallback(function (result) 
    { 
      log('save successful');
    });

    //this callback fires when the XHR fails
    d.addErrback( function (result) 
    { 
      log('save failed');
    });

MochiKit Async documentation