Lunarbuggy.com

Authorising your Google gadgets

Dan — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 15:54:44 +0000

Just a quick post for those who may be having issues authorising your Google Gadgets. While going through the process of creating and verifying my Gadget for Orkut, Google asks you to put a comment inside one of the Content tags in your gadget XML file. I tried this in a few different ways with the same result:

We were unable to verify that you are an owner of the gadget located at: [your XML file location]
The verification token was not found in any tag in the specified gadget.

It was there, dammit. It was there! Anyway, it turns out you need to pop the code within CDATA tags for Google to pay attention e.g.

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G’luck.

“Oh jesus”

Dan — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 14:01:01 +0000

Ben: “If you’re gonna call out for the help of a fictional character, at least make it batman or someone who could actually help”

Our friend Jase

Dan — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 15:54:30 +0000

“It’s sad he went back to N.Z. What a guy. William Wallace would’ve traded Scotland for him.”

She’s a disaster

Dan — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 11:30:53 +0000

“She’s like pinocchio running through a world beaver convention”

Cups. They know what you’re drinking.

Dan — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 10:28:12 +0000

I like these. If I could, I’d buy 10 for my apartment.

http://relogik.com/cipher

Why 10? My friends and family can attest to the fact I’m pretty anal about having matching…well, anything. There’s nothing I hate more than having the slightly-different glasses mixed up with my, what I could call, primary set of glasses. Nor plates, bowls, wine glasses or anything else. I figure if I’ve invested in a nice apartment, everything should have its place. Remember this if you want to buy me anything for my birthday.

Enter the Test Tube

Dan — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 16:38:13 +0000

And look at everything a slightly different way.

http://interactive.nfb.ca/#/testtube

To explain it simply…

Dan — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 13:21:10 +0000

I just read a post by one of the few writers I subscribe to, which was short, but overall emphasised how much he hates things (in some instances, himself). One of the comments he made was:

“I asked a parking enforcement agent if his parents are proud.”

Now, this guy isn’t the most rational of people from what I’ve gathered from reading his posts for a few years, so I guess I could forgive these kinds of comments as a brain fart. However, you and I both know an disproportionate percentage of people have disjointed and likely unfair views of some people that enforce law: namely police, or parking enforcement agents. Why they don’t treat other enforcers of the law like lawyers and judges absolute crap in front of their peers, family and friends for being caught doing something they shouldn’t be doing is beyond me, but that’s for another story. This story is about explaining how absolutely childish and disconnected it is to get angry with someone who enforces parking-space rules.

The simple explaination is this:

If he doesn’t do his job, you’ll never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever get a car park. Ever. Of course, if THAT happened, it’d be someone else’s fault, like the government for not policing car parks. With some people, you never can win, and unfortunately for people that keep our world ticking on and on, they likely get abused.

I love humans.

WordPress status, visibility and publish posts not working?

Dan — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 12:25:15 +0000

Check your .htaccess file. I found that until I had one for the website, these parts of the edit/add post pages in the admin area just weren’t working.

IMAP, POP and iPhone iOS4

Dan — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 10:02:18 +0000

UPDATE: Ignore me, this has absolutely nothing to do with my POP settings. It turns out it’s simply gMail getting confused with my computer and phone logging in at the same time. It’s still a pain in the ass, though.

Every now and then, my iPhone would exclaim without reason that the username and/or password for my gMail account was wrong. Which is great, except I’ve had the same username and password for the best part of two years (no brute-force attacks, please). It also eats battery life like crazy (I assume from trying to get email every few minutes), causing a couple of unexpected and unplanned sleep-ins. Going into the settings, and re-entering the password on my ‘phone did the trick, but it is immensely annoying.

After doing some research online, I found that POP accounts don’t handle multiple requests from different clients well. Indeed, if conflicting requests for email from a POP server occur, the server will send “Bad username/password” headers to both, and be done with it. Now, that sounds familiar. Another pattern that emerged was that this issue would happen when I logged out of my gMail account, usually when logging into a clients’ Youtube or Analytics* account, pointing even stronger towards a [email] client conflict.

Looking through my iPhone settings, there didn’t seem to be anything relating to the protocol used to grab emails. Looking through my gMail settings, IMAP is (and always has been) switched on, but still the issue occurred.

~~Finally, I tried just turning POP off completely on my gMail system to see what would happen. Evidently, that forces** my phone to use IMAP to connect to gMail, and that looks like it did the trick.~~

* Yep, I know. They can set my Analytics account up as an additional user on theirs. Don’t ask.

** Please do correct me. Like most things, I have no understanding of the inner workings of computers, protocols and programming languages. I liken myself to non-techy people who use phrases like “so, that computer over there is talking to this computer and saying ‘print this document’?”, and “just move that box on this webpage over to this side. How hard can it be?”

Testing your PHP applications in different versions

Dan — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 15:31:28 +0000

One of our clients recently expressed their intention to upgrade their server versions of PHP. To make sure the projects we delivered for them worked in the intended versions, I was stuck with the task of testing them in both 5.2.9 and 5.2.13.

Now, the versions themselves are not important, but I was in a position where I needed to find a pretty quick way of deploying their software in an environment that would give us confidence it will work, but in a temporary way. I’m not setting up a new server for it. I was lucky enough that our staging server was already running 5.2.13, and the client signed the project off on the staging server, so that one was done for me. Finding an environment with exactly 5.2.9 was a bit trickier.

So here’s what I did, and it may help you if you ever need to test your projects on a version that you don’t normally develop on. As always, alternative methods and approaches are most welcome.

Get a virtual environment. If you’re doing a lot of experimental development work that tends to get out of hand, or are working on a large selection of platform-varying projects, having a virtual environment you can set up once and copy when you need, and the ability to blow it away when you’re done is very useful. My experience of doing this with some languages (see: Python) has been very painful and disruptive unless you’re a proper *nix nerd, but otherwise it’s got its place. I’m developing on a Mac at work, and I use Parallels. So I set up an XP environment for this
Grab a copy of XAMPP. Of course, the latest version of XAMPP will be running the latest version of PHP, which is no good. So head off to OldApps and track down the release of XAMPP that was released for the PHP you’re looking for. I’m not sure if all versions of PHP were released with their own version of XAMPP, but I found mine was. Bonus.
Install, set up your application and DB, and test

I’m not sure this is the best way to do this, but it was quick, painless and worked a charm. Job’s a good ‘un.