Yahoo! Tech is closing
Is there anything left for Yahoo to close ? After shutting down Photos, Geocites, 360 and whatnot now they’re closing Yahoo Tech! too. A sad company Yahoo became.
The website of the first romanian DrupalCamp is live
As you probably know already between 5 and 6 June 2010 the first romanian DrupalCamp will be organized in Timisoara, Romania. But you might not know that the website of the event went live yesterday and registrations are open now.
There are already a few people who registered to the event and sometime soon the organizers will start accepting session proposals.
So go ahead and register if you want to participate to a historic event for the Romanian Drupal community.
A few tips for TYPO3’s HtmlArea RTE configuration
I worked this week with the HtmlArea RTE from TYPO3 more then i ever did on a project before. And i learned some tricks that are very useful when you try to make this RTE to work as you want it. I’m sharing these with you, maybe someone needs them.
All these settings need to be entered in your rootpage’s TSconfig field (on the Options tab of the page edit form)
How to allow embedding of Flash (YouTube videos for example) in the TYPO3 RTE
RTE.default.proc {
allowTags := addToList(object,param,embed)
allowTagsOutside := addToList(object,embed)
entryHTMLparser_db.allowTags < RTE.default.proc.allowTags
}
How to get rid of those annoying images inserted before links
RTE.classesAnchor {
internalLink.image >
externalLink.image >
externalLinkInNewWindow.image >
internalLinkInNewWindow.image >
download.image >
mail.image >
}
How to insert larger images without beeing resized or in other words maximum image size for RTE
RTE.default {
buttons.image.options.magic.maxWidth = 1000
buttons.image.options.magic.maxHeight = 1000
buttons.image.options.plain.maxWidth = 1000
buttons.image.options.plain.maxHeight = 1000
}
In this case you just need to modify those values (1000’s) to your desired max width and max height
How to disable entering of paragraphs when pressing on Enter key
RTE.default{
disableEnterParagraphs=1
}
After you enable this setting you will get br’s inserted instead of p’s when pressing the Enter key
How to turn off Google Buzz
Google Buzz arrived in our Gmail accounts this week. I must say i’m not a fan of this thing. I like Gmail because it has a fairly good spam filter and because i can easily filter and categorize my mail. My email is very important to me so i like to keep it organized and i’m very careful to whom i give my email address because i really don’t like to get all kind of stupid emails.
Now that Google Buzz is here the quiet little place that my Gmail account was is no more. I’m getting followed some people with whom i communicated god knows when and how. But yes they are in my contacts, i’m in their contacts and Google wants to make us friends.
Let’s make it clear:
1) I’m not friends with fellows i changed an email or two ages ago. Maybe i don’t even want to communicate with them and especially i don’t want my address to be suggested to them.
2) I don’t like things forced on me. And this is what Google does. It forces Google Buzz down on our throats. “Hey we have Google Buzz, here it is take it. Maybe you don’t like it but we will make you use it anyway”. The don’t be evil mantra is gone forever.
If Google wanted to take market share from Facebook or Twitter they should have launched a standalone service and who wanted to use it would have used it. Oh but i forgot they do have Orkut. But i also forgot that Orkut sucks, as generally Google suck at social apps. So if they can’t make us use it on our own they are forcing us.
Thanks but no thanks. So for those who came here for the title of the post: You can turn off Google Buzz from the footer links in Gmail. There is a “turn off buzz” link right above the “Privacy Policy” (good position, it must be Murphy’s working).
Typoscript snippet for creating breadcrumbs
A nice little Typoscript snippet that demonstrates how a simple breadcrumb can be created with TS. The last element of the breadcrumb will not be linked.
lib.breadcrumbs = HMENU
lib.breadcrumbs.special = rootline
lib.breadcrumbs.special.range = 0
lib.breadcrumbs.1 = TMENU
lib.breadcrumbs.1 {
noBlur = 1
NO.linkWrap = <li> | > |*||*| |< /li>
NO.stdWrap.htmlSpecialChars = 1
CUR = 1
CUR.allWrap = <li>|</li>
CUR.doNotLinkIt = 1
}
New TYPO3 book on the block
I’ve learned today about a new TYPO3 book – the TYPO3 4.3 Multimedia Cookbook written by Dan Osipov and published by Packt Publishing. They were kind enough to provide me a free copy for review. I will be receiving a copy in short time and will publish an extensive review of this book. I just wanted to mention it before my review so those who don’t make buying decisions based on reviews or don’t need a review to buy this book can order it asap.
How to style your htmlArea RTE in TYPO3
The default htmlArea RTE in TYPO3’s backend renders the textarea content in a pretty ugly fashion. It looks like in the HTML 1.0 ages. But you can change that using just a few lines of code and a css file. How to accomplish this you might wonder. Its easy.
Go edit your root page (or some other page if you want to do this only on a page) and in the Options tab there is a TSconfig field, now just paste the following code there:
Now you just be sure to have a rte.css file in the specified location (fileadmin/templates/styles) and you can put there your css definitions for the RTE text. This way you can match the RTE’s look and feel with your site’s design.
Example:
Before using CSS for RTE
After using CSS for RTE
Fatality: Google drops IE6 support in 2010
Just received it on email from the Google Apps team:
“In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.
Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.”
The text continues explaining the drop of support for IE6 on the 1st of March 2010 in the case of Google Docs and Google Sites and “later” in 2010 for Google Mail and Google Calendar. Also users will see a warning message if they using some of the older browsers. The warning message will be displayed starting this week and will urge users to upgrade their browser.
This day should have come earlier. But finally someone is taking a side on this matter.
Apology letter to Firefox
I must apologize to you for my thoughtless action to embrace Google Chrome so swiftly. I was wrong. I admit that now.
I never had any issues with you besides your appetite for memory. You really like eating all the memory you have available. But after all i bought 4 gigs of RAM for you. I should have just let you eat as much as you could.
But you know some new guy named Chrome (from Google) came and he was full of promises. He promised me that when he will crash he will do that only with one of his tabs, the faulty one. So my other work won’t get lost. He promised that he will be the fastest browser i’ve ever seen. And he promised many other things. He managed to fulfill some of his promises. But he failed miserably with others.
Just minutes ago i was writing my weekly article batch, and opened up a pdf document in another tab. And Chrome froze … needless to say that all his tabs froze. And after waiting 30 minutes he didn’t recover. I had to kill it. But he took away all my tabs!! Even that one with the article being written. So my work got lost (no recovery). This wasn’t the first time that Chrome hang on me with a pdf file (i cannot even count how many times he did that), but this was the first time when he managed to loose about one hour of my work + half hour waiting after him. And this was the thing i was always afraid of. Yeah… maybe is Chrome somewhat faster then you … but if he looses my work and wastes my time that doesn’t matter anymore. I will come back to you.
But there is a good thing about me using Chrome. Did you know that Chrome managed to raise my blog’s number of visitors to new heights ? Yeah, remember when i complained that Chrome’s popup blocker sucks ? Well it seems that many people think that.
That article become the most popular post on this blog, on daily basis people end up here using queries like: chrome popup blocker, disable chrome popup blocker, chrome popup blocker sucks. Well i guess the guys from Google should focus more on fixing bugs and implementing basic browser features before they roll out new versions every few days.
I can’t promise you that i will uninstall Chrome, after all i have to test sites in it from time to time. But i will be using you more to do my work.
I cannot rely on a browser that
- is having issues with opening a pdf file or running some heavier flash
- displays the popup blocking notification for like 3-4 seconds and then hide it when i try to allow it.
- is just refusing to log me in with my current password on some sites that work perfectly on other browsers
- for some weird reason runs Plesk in slow motion compared to other browsers
- and countless other little annoying things
Sincerely yours
The user
Twitter fail
Too many tweets ? I guess they should have built it with PHP.
Importing large files into a MySQL database
From time to time i have to insert really large files into MySQL. And sometimes there are problems because you don’t have access to the mysql command line utility from the server to issue the source command (this lets you import dumps or sql files). So you have to use phpMyAdmin or some other web based utility.
But also too often one runs into the barriers set by PHP, specifically the configuration directives from php.ini: upload_max_filesize, memory_limit and post_max_size. If these are not set to a decent value you won’t be able to upload really large files and phpMyAdmin will fail. If you have access to these then you can modify them and you will have the ability to upload the files.
But if not there is another solution. Open your config.inc.php from the phpMyAdmin directory and search for the following setting:
$cfg['UploadDir']
If it is present then modify it to point to a directory within the phpMyAdmin directory (you can call it “uploads”) or if not you can add it. Something like this:
$cfg['UploadDir'] = ‘uploads’;
Then you have to make sure that the directory “uploads” exists in your phpMyAdmin installation directory.
That’s all, now when you want to import a file just upload it there (with an ftp client) in that folder and in phpMyAdmin at the import screen there will be a select with the sql files that exist in the directory. You can import this way really huge files.
Powermail file upload size
TYPO3’s Powermail extension has the ability to upload files. That’s cool. But what if you need to specify a limit on the file size so you don’t get 5 MB large pictures for something that should just be a profile photo and should be fairly small.
There is a solution. Go edit your root TypoScript template setup and insert the following code into it:
plugin.tx_powermail_pi1.upload.filesize=2048
This will allow the uploading of files up to 2048 kb’s in size (2 MB)
Facebook and Farmville. Give me a break
I would like to see all those people who send me Farmville gift requests working one week at a farm! I bet they wouldn’t like farming so interesting anymore. When you have to work all day long on the crop fields or have to clean the crap of the farm animals (btw farmville fans … that smells if you didn’t knew) i bet you will forget Farmville in an instance.
Ok, i understand that we all need to disconnect from work but when you play don’t bother with that all your friends. And Farmville takes friend harassment to the next level. Yeah i play occasionally some StarCraft or some other little strategy game but did i ever sent you messages asking for God knows what ?
And now there are other “little animal” petting games on Facebook. They seem to grow like mushrooms after a good rain. If things evolve this way i guess i will have to quit Facebook and delete my account.
Weekly article batch 2
Here is the second edition of my weekly “press review”
Interesting articles last week:
- Gartner report on PHP – published by Danne Lundqvist on dotvoid.com – writes about a report by Gartner (here) that makes it clear that more and more companies discover the benefits of PHP and adoption is increasing among major companies.
- A case for table-based design – published by Evert Pot on rooftopsolutions.nl – i could not agree more, table based designs are useful in some situations.
- ASP.NET for PHP developers – published by Chris Taylor on net.tutsplus.com – does a great introduction to ASP.NET using C# for PHP developers. I’m even tempted to do a site in ASP.NET just for educational purpose
- Why is reusable code so hard to secure ? – published on devcentral.f5.com – some aspects of this article are subject to debate but others do present us with a valid issue when developing reusable code
- How to speed up your Wordpress sites – published on devwebpro.com – as page speed is becoming a ranking factor for Google its nice to know what could i do with my blog if overnight would become hugely popular.
- 40+ essential Drupal Modules – published on nicklewis.org- well most of these should be familiar to every Drupal developer but its nice to have a place where to look up if you search for something specific and proven for the task at hand.
Thinking about switching to CentOS
Recently i’ve been playing with CentOS at work, setting up a server and configuring stuff on it. I used Linux a long time ago, when Mandrake was my OS of choice and i had plenty of time. But i had to switch to Windows because of some GIS software i’ve been using in school that wouldn’t run on Linux and as a student i had a computer with limited hard-disk space. So i couldn’t run them both.
After a while i got so comfortable with Windows that i didn’t switch back to Linux. It was hard to get music and movies to play and there was always something to configure for which i didn’t have enough time.
Now that i’ve seen what CentOS is capable of and how easily it can be configured , i’m seriously considering switching permanently to this OS. I’m not lazy but i don’t have time to waste on digging after configuration parameters and all that stuff. And i would like Linux because its free and its safer to develop web apps on a Linux machine when in 99% of the cases the application will be deployed on a Linux server.
What other Linux distros are you using and what would you recommend for someone who wants to do web development but also wants some entertainment on his machine (music, movies) and has no time to waste on figuring out how to install some weird driver or configure a new hardware added to the machine ?