My Quick Fix

Problem: I want a quick way to restart my macbook and boot to the Bootcamp partition with one or two clicks, for the next boot only. The two existing ways are:

• Restart OS X then hold the option key after the startup sound to bring up the boot options. This can be a pain if you miss the sound, or if you want to initiate a reboot and then bog off and make a cup of tea.
• Go to System Preferences > Startup Disk > select the Bootcamp partition > Click Restart. This sets the default boot disk, so needs to be un-set next time you want to boot back into OS X.

Solution: Mac OS can be rebooted with the shutdown command, and boot partition can be set with the bless command. like so:

sudo bless -mount "/Volumes/BOOTCAMP" -legacy -setBoot -nextonly; sudo shutdown -r now

(Assuming your bootcamp partition exists at /Volumes/BOOTCAMP)

As is probably obvious from the command, the -nextonly part means that the boot partition is being changed for the next boot only. The -r part of the shutdown command means it will reboot again, and the ‘now’ command means just that.. do it right NOW.

Running from an icon: The command above can be run with a small script like so:

• Run AppleScript Editor.
• type the following into the editor window:

tell application "Terminal"
	do script "sudo bless -mount \"/Volumes/BOOTCAMP\" -legacy -setBoot -nextonly;sudo shutdown -r now"
end tell

• Save this script as an ‘Application’ to your desktop and give it an obvious name like ‘Reboot to Windows’.
• Double-click the icon and Terminal should run, asking you for a password. Much quicker (if you want to cancel the process, use CTRL+C to exit the script as you usually would)

Problem: I have lots of legacy php code on old sites that uses eregi_replace to format up an HTML email body. As eregi_replace is now depreciated it can be replaced with preg_replace. This is tricky sometimes because the formatting is quite different.

Fix: Here’s a common line from class.phpmailer.php scripts:

$emailBody = eregi_replace("[\]",'',$emailBody);

To convert that you’ll need to do this:

$emailBody = preg_replace("/\\\\/", '', $emailBody);

Wondering why there are so MANY escaping backslashes there? I asked that question and got this answer:

“..the backslash needs to be escaped once for the php string’s benefit, then again for the interpretation of the regular expression engine, as escaped characters like \d indicate a digit in regular expressions. So a pattern of \\d would match a digit, but \\\\d would match a backslash then a d character. PHP strings are lenient on backslashing when it isn’t necessary, so:
- setting a string to “\d” will give it a value of \d (the same as setting it to “\\d”).
- but setting it to “\”" will give a value of “.
- and setting it to “\” will return a syntax error.

- PHP double quoted strings will consume the (first) backslash for \\ \n \t \r and \”.
- PHP single quoted strings will only consume the first backslash for \\ and \’ “

There.. clear as mud!

Problem: The other day I was trying to type two hypens (–) in a post, and when I saved/published the post, WordPress reformatted the hypens to display as an ‘en dash‘ (–).

More Info: After some searching about, and some helpful info provided in the WordPress Codex, I found out about a WP function called ‘wptexturize’ which is applied each time a post is rendered. The function – which can be found in ‘wp-includes/formatting.php’ – replaces quite a few things, like ™ to ™ etc.

Fix: You could stop this happening a number of ways i.e. editing the function to stop it doing the replace altogether, or install a plugin that does it (maybe this one, haven’t tried it!). I decided to use WordPress’s remove_filter function to stop the reformatting taking place.

To do this, open the ‘functions.php’ file within your theme. If one does not exist, create it.

Add the following code to the bottom of the file, taking care not to end up with too many or too few <?php tags:

<?php
remove_filter('the_content', 'wptexturize');
remove_filter('the_title', 'wptexturize');
?>

Then save the file (or ‘update’ if you’re doing this via the theme editor in WP admin) and view your post. That should do it! (proof is here, you can only see those double and triple hyphens in this blog post title because I’ve just added the code above to this sites functions.php also!)

Problem: A client sent me 164 images with incorrect extensions on them. I needed to change them all from .jpg to .png.

Fix: Open up terminal, navigate to the directory containing all the images and type:

ls *.jpg | awk '{print("mv "$1" "$1)}' | sed 's/jpg/png/2' | /bin/sh

..that should do it! This one-liner makes use of sed and awk unix utilities.

Problem: There is no ‘drafts’ view filter in the Shopp (>1.1.9) Product Manager, i.e you can’t quickly list all the products that have ‘draft’ status in one go.

Fix: I made this mod to answer a question in the Shopp Helpdesk forum, it’s not very tested, but seems to work perfectly!

Open ‘wp-content/plugins/shopp/core/flow/Warehouse.php’ and replace this:

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$subfilters = array('f' => 'featured','p' => 'published','s' => 'onsale','i' => 'inventory');

With this:

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$subfilters = array('f' => 'featured','p' => 'published','d' => 'draft','s' => 'onsale','i' => 'inventory');

Then in the same file replace this:

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$subs = array(
'all' => array('label' => __('All','Shopp'),'columns' => "count(distinct pd.id) AS total",'where'=>'true'),
'published' => array('label' => __('Published','Shopp'),'total' => 0,'columns' => "count(distinct pd.id) AS total",'where'=>"pd.status='publish'",'request' => 'p'),
'onsale' => array('label' => __('On Sale','Shopp'),'total' => 0,'columns' => "count(distinct pd.id) AS total",'where'=>"pt.sale='on'",'request' => 's'),
'featured' => array('label' => __('Featured','Shopp'),'total' => 0,'columns' => "count(distinct pd.id) AS total",'where'=>"pd.featured='on'",'request' => 'f'),
'inventory' => array('label' => __('Inventory','Shopp'),'total' => 0,'columns' => "count(distinct pt.id) AS total",'where'=>"pt.inventory='on' AND pt.type!='N/A'",'grouping'=>'pt.id','request' => 'i')
);

With this:

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$subs = array(
'all' => array('label' => __('All','Shopp'),'columns' => "count(distinct pd.id) AS total",'where'=>'true'),
'published' => array('label' => __('Published','Shopp'),'total' => 0,'columns' => "count(distinct pd.id) AS total",'where'=>"pd.status='publish'",'request' => 'p'),
'draft' => array('label' => __('Draft','Shopp'),'total' => 0,'columns' => "count(distinct pd.id) AS total",'where'=>"pd.status='draft'",'request' => 'd'),
'onsale' => array('label' => __('On Sale','Shopp'),'total' => 0,'columns' => "count(distinct pd.id) AS total",'where'=>"pt.sale='on'",'request' => 's'),
'featured' => array('label' => __('Featured','Shopp'),'total' => 0,'columns' => "count(distinct pd.id) AS total",'where'=>"pd.featured='on'",'request' => 'f'),
'inventory' => array('label' => __('Inventory','Shopp'),'total' => 0,'columns' => "count(distinct pt.id) AS total",'where'=>"pt.inventory='on' AND pt.type!='N/A'",'grouping'=>'pt.id','request' => 'i')
);

Hopefully this will be included in a future version of Shopp.

Problem: When re-fitting the ARB to the GT6 with new U Bolts, I found the new ones were too wide, and forcing them in would have resulted the badly seated washers and nuts:

Old and new U Bolts, too dissimilar

Fix: The new U Bolts could be bent to shape in a metalworking vice, but there’s an easy way to make sure they remain parallel:

Put the U Bolt in the Vice and protect the threads a little

Find something exactly the inside-size of the old U Bolt

Tighten the new U Bolt against the chosen spacer

Keep checking against the old item until it's correct

Once it's right, note the flats are still perfectly parallel

Problem: I left orange juice in my CamelBak for about 3 months! It went black and gunky and was seemingly impossible to get out of the clear drinking tube.

Fix: The credit for this excellent idea has to go to my Step-Mother. She said “Can’t you pull a bit of string through it with somethign tied to it?”. Well… that was quite a good plan, but I thought a better plan was to use a steel brake cable, and a small round piece of towelling threaded onto it, held in place by the pressed thingy on the end (if anyone knows what this thingy is called, please leave a comment!). Then just pull it through the tube backwards. I found that doing this twice after soaking the tube in Milton got all the scum out.

Towelling on a brake cable

Problem

I have a ton of date strings in the stupid US style dd/mm/yy format. i.e. 12/24/09 being 24th September 2009. I need to convert them to the UK style dd/mm/yy.

Solution 1

As a string in PHP is really just an array of characters, the simplest fix was to address the individual number characters by their positions within the sting, and rearrange them into the format I wanted:

$d = "12/24/09";
$d = $d[3].$d[4]."/".$d[0].$d[1]."/".$d[6].$d[7];
echo $d; // displays "24/12/19".

Solution 2

I posted my solution on twitter (@hutchings) and asked for comments and @londonhackspace organiser Jonty came back with the following elegant (and much cleverer) suggestion:

$d = "12/24/09";
$d = preg_replace('|(\d+)/(\d+)/(\d+)|', '$2/$1/$3', $d);
echo $d; // displays "24/12/19".

So provided you know that your original string is in US format, both these solutions can be used. In my testing I found solution 1 executed more quickly, but isn’t as pleasing to look at Cheers Jonty.

Problem

I’m doing some freelance Flash development, and it’s been a while. I have just created a dynamic text field that I wanted to fill via actionscript, then fade in via an alpha tween. This wasn’t working, even if I set _alpha = 0 on the movieclip containing the text field.

Solution

You can only set _alpha on a Dynamic Text field if the font has been embeded (with the embed button).

Works now! wohoo! Simple stuff that I’ve known in the past, but forgot.

Problem

I’ve just had to convert a Photoshop visual to a WordPress template. The designer wanted a bulleted list where the bullets themselves were very close to the list items, and were small dashes. Cross browser support for list item and bullet styling is ropey at best, and to make things perfect I’d have to resort to browser specific styles.

Solution

The solution I think I’ll be using for the rest of my ‘web’ career will be this. JUST FORGET THE BULLET ITEM, and use positioned background images instead.

In the stylesheet, add styles for both the ‘ul’ tag, and the ‘li’ tag like so (explanations inline):

ul {
margin-left:0px; /* Set the indenting back to far left. */
padding-left:0px; /* Set the indenting back to far left. */
}
 
ul li {
list-style-type:none; /* Switch the list bullet off altogether. */
background-image:url(dashbullet.gif); /* The replacement bullet image */
background-position:0px 4px; /* Place bullet 0px from left and 4px from top */
background-repeat:no-repeat; /* Stops bullet tiling, important */
padding-left:7px; /* separation from li txt and bullet */
}

Then just create the list as you usually would, with ‘ul’ and ‘li’ tags. Here’s what it looks like in use:

Here’s a bit more detail so you can get your head around the spacing. It’s incredibly simple, but still, nice to have a diagram or two sometimes:

Detail showing some dimensions and spacing

This style works perfectly (by my testing, but I’m not perfect) on:

• Internet Explorer 6, 7 & 8+
• Firefox 2.*+
• Opera 9+ (not tested 8, but bet it works!
• Google Chrome (all versions)
• Safari (Mac and PC versions)