Posts

Making MCrypt Work In OSX CLI Terminal Apps

OSX Terminal runs a different version of PHP to Apache by default, so smashing "php blah.php" into the command line can have different results to the same script run via browser. You might notice this if you get an error such as "Call to undefined function mcrypt_decrypt()". Frustrating. Edit your .profile file (or maybe .bash_profile) and add the betterer  php binary folder to your path: export PATH=.:/usr/local/php5/bin:$PATH

How To Get Around Annoying New SMTP Server Requirement In Gmail's "Add another email address that you own"

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In their esteemed wisdom, Google have changed the process for adding an alias. It used to be SO SIMPLE: Just click the: then smash your new shiny domain specific e-mail address in. Gmail emailed you to make sure you actually had things at your registrar forwarding mail to you, then when you entered their verification code it was all good. 3 minutes tops. For some reason they are now requiring that email address is ALREADY set-up with an SMTP server etc. BUM. You can get around it though, by filling in gmail itself as your mail send server: Set the SMTP server to smtp.gmail.com Username gmail is your full email address (e.g. spannerboy@gmail.com) Password is your gmail password Port = 465 TLS/SSL required = yes Ta! Don't forget about gmailtable.com - that invaluable complementary gmail tool.

½ Connection Wi-Fi

Future Wi-fi standards should have the concept of a ½ connection; a way to distinguish "open" gatekeeper connections. This would prevent a) constantly connecting to fake "open" networks as you walk about any city (effectively destroying your connectivity) b) your crappy BT Home Hub "open" version connecting in favour of your real one. ALSO Android / iOS  please only connect to known secure networks, ASSUMING for now that any open connection is a gatekeeper. OK? Thanks.

jQuery showHide() Extension

Clicking to either show or hide something gets coded all the time, and it's a nause, so here is a one line jQuery extension to toggle show/hide. 1. Smash this piece of javascript in your header or somewhere useful: $.fn.extend({ showHide: function() { if ($(this).is(':visible')) $(this).hide('slow'); else $(this).show('slow'); }}); 2. ...it extends jQuery so that you can do: onClick='$("#someDivOrSimilar").showHide();'

Adobe's biggest mistake...

...was skimping on dev resource for the Mac Flash player. If that decision - which probably saved a developer (or at most two) had not been made, the memory leaks that caused most crashes on Macs could have been avoided, deflecting Steve Job's ire and the subsequent exclusion of Flash from the mobile web (and further down the line the whole web as it unifies)

Programming And Human Progress Are Becoming Intertwined (but we need more than AngularJS and it's Hipster friends)

Come on DEV world; let's have some proper innovation in programming. Hipster coding paradigms of the last couple years (Angular, Ruby, etc I'm looking at you) have exponents spouting "look, I've written no Javascript!". Yeah, well you've written a TON of Angular. In fact, I could have done it with less code in standard javascript & HTML. Incremental benefits in some areas (usually academic, along the lines of "better" practice coding structures) are too often negated by added complexity; legacy nightmares (out-of-fashion code is not pleasant 5 yrs later) & increased dev time when the real-world doesn't match the ideological utopian world envisaged by the creators. This is why we're all still programming C/Javascript/HTML/Perl using slightly better text editors. Occasionally genuinely useful new tech is added to the list (jQuery for example) - but where is the game-changing development system that allows for an order of magnitude i...

How To Make A Table In Gmail Messages

This (embarrasingly) simple online tool allows you to make tables in gmail messages. The lack of this feature in googlemail has annoyed me for some time, so I went to Google Campus London and constructed this one-page-wonder. If I was to slap a couple AdWords ads on it would that make it the fastest ever startup from conception to monetisation I wonder? www.gmailtable.com