llynix.com

The One Line Template Engine

Llynix — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 00:17:54 +0000

Bought to you by vincevincevince over at webmasterworld.

The engine itself:
print preg_replace(“/\{([^\{]{1,100}?)\}/e”,”$$1″,file_get_contents(“template.tpl”));

Format of template.tpl file:
{title}

`{header}`



{text}

Setting variables:
$title=”Example page”;
$header=”My Examples”;
$text=”See the placeholders replaced?”;

“/\{([^\{]{1,100}?)\}/e”,”$$1″
I’m delimiting the regular expression with / / and using the modifier ‘e’ which causes the second argument to be evaluated by php.

Explanation

The pattern looks for an opening curly-brace ( \{ ) – the end of the pattern is a closing curly-brace ( \} ).

In between the two braces I look for any character which isn’t an opening curly-brace [^\{], avoiding mistaken nesting of tags.

I match between 1 and 100 of these non-{ characters by writing {1,100} and then I make the match non-greedy (try to find the shortest strings between { and }, not the longest) by adding a?. (? after *, + or {a,b} expressions changes them to non-greedy – in other situations? means 0 or 1 of the preceding).

The full string of non-{ characters is matched and stored as string $1 by surrounding that part of the pattern with brackets ().

Finally, the second argument of the preg_replace is “$$1″, using variable variables. If the pattern encounters “{title}” then the matched string $1 is “title” and so $$1 is $title.

Facebook Farmville HTML Fail

Llynix — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 11:32:11 +0000

Found this while playing on Facebook.

iPhone Slowing Down

Llynix — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 02:54:34 +0000

Today my iPhone got stuck. I went to unlock it and it took what seemed like minutes to respond. I had voicemail but after fifteen minutes of waiting I gave up.

The solution was simple. The iPhone just needed a quick reboot. I held down the power button for about five seconds and then slid the block to shut down. After I turned it back on my iPhone sprang back to life.

Migrating PuTTY

Llynix — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 01:55:51 +0000

Transferring your PuTTY settings to another computer turns out to be surprisingly easy. Simply run this command to extract the settings.

regedit /ea settings.reg HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SimonTatham\PuTTY

Transfer the file this creates to your new machine. There double-click on the file to merge your settings into your new installation.

.htaccess Under Construction

Llynix — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 01:55:13 +0000

Maybe your site needs to undergo maintenance, or you want to put up a placeholder page while you build a new website. Whatever the reason here is a great way to implement it using your web server’s .htaccess file.

First you should create your temporary page. Make note of any outside images or files that you link to as you will need to add an exception for them later. Finally modify and merge the following code into your root directories .htaccess file. Replace the X’s with your IP address and include any auxiliary files you may need.

# Turn on mod_rewrite RewriteEngine On # If not your IP address RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^XX\.XX\.XX\.XX # and not the temporary page and logo RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/construction\. RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/images/logo.gif # redirect to under construction RewriteRule /*$ /construction.html [L]

iTunes First Impressions

Llynix — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 11:46:09 +0000

I’m off to download iTunes, the first thing I notice is that Apple wants to send me special offers and updates via email.

No thanks, I wonder if they really need my email address or if a dummy one would suffice. I toss in my actual one and click the button.

Eighty eight frieken megs? I could fit an entire operating system in there. I’m already worried about bloat and I’m wondering if I’m getting more then I bargined for.

It takes awhile to download. While it does I play with the four buttons on my phone. I still don’t know what the up/down button on the side does.

Finally the download finishes and I click on the installer. I learn that I also will be installing quicktime.

I start reading the EULA, but really.. who reads them. I quickly click accept. On the next page it wants to put icons on my desktop to which I choose ok. It also wants to take over my audio files, which is certaintly not ok and it wants to auto-update. Which I choose no because I have no idea what the mechanism is. Will it install a program in the background constantly looking, or will it just check for updates when I load iTunes. Better safe then sorry. I should be able to turn back on the auto-update if the program is written well.

It also asks for a location to install and a language. I keep these at their defaults and click next. I’m greeted with a slideshow of features while the installer writes out eighty eight megs of software. So far I’m not impressed with anything in the slideshow. I was already able to import CD’s play my library and enjoy my collection without iTunes.

The installer seemed to get stuck. And only after a little hunting did I find that there was a second windows authentication to click yes on. Soon it’s finished. Sure I’ll open it up.

Once again I’m greeted with a software agreement. Maybe I should actually read this thing. After agreeing a wizard pops up to prepare me for my journey. I hate wizards.

It states it’s going to check my “My Music” folder for files. I don’t keep anything in there so I deselect those options. Next iTunes asks me if it should rename my files. Hell no. I’ve spent countless hours orginizing my collection. Don’t touch my files.

It mentions creating a store account so it can download artwork. All my music already has artwork. No thanks.

Next it asks to sync up with various applications. Nothing about Firefox in there.

Suddenly my phone actually works. Or so it seems.

——–

It did actually work, and for the last few days I’ve been playing around a lot. Still not completely happy with it’s marriage with iTunes but the ipod itself has been a wet dream.

Top iPhone Complaints

Llynix — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 11:38:40 +0000

Absolutely need a computer + iTunes to ‘unbrick’ the phone so to speak. This leaves linux users in the dust. Also what if you don’t have a computer and just want a cool phone?
App store EULA stated I could use paypal for payment, yet the signup asked for a credit card and had no way to enter paypal information. I found later I could go through iTunes and set this up but still a disapointment that I couldn’t do it via the phone. And to be honest I’m not sure it worked because it still displays my credit card under payment information.
No easy way to delete default apps. Follow the previous link to learn to do it the hard way.
Touch pad sometimes doesn’t work at all! Wait, that’s because my fingers are big and are triggering the pad at the sides when I normally hold the phone.
My refurbished iPhone did not come with any instruction manual. Not sure if there even is an instruction manual for the iPhone.
Did a search, and nope can’t get a bluetooth keyboard to work for the iPhone. In fact apparently you can’t get anything but mono headsets to work.
In order for me to program my own apps, I need to pay $99 at least to sign up with the iPhone Developer Program.
My flubby fingers hate hitting the M button on the keyboard. Keeps thinking I hit the delete key.
Sometimes the keyboard is smart, displaying a .com button for web addresses and defaulting to they numerical keyboard when you need to insert numbers. Sometimes it’s dumb, just giving you the standard keyboard.
iPhone does not import contacts from SIM cards. I had to manually type in every phone number.
I’ve been able to find tutorials to do most everything above and much much more. All these tutorials seems to start with… ‘I’m assuming your iPhone is jailbreaked.’

Don’t get me wrong. I’m loving my iPhone and it’s miles above my Nokia brick phone I had previously. But there do seem to be some gotchas.

Iphone Woes

Llynix — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:14:57 +0000

I got an iphone yesterday.

Although currently it’s not activated, for that I have to wait a few days. So I thought I’d see what I can do with it in spite of that.

So far it turns out I can’t do anything.

Upon loading up the iphone I’m greeted with a picture telling me to plug the phone into iTunes. On the bottom it says slide here for emergency, which I suppose allows one to make emergency calls despite the fact it isn’t activated.

I really didn’t want to install iTunes. I wanted a more agnostic approach to controling my iphone so I hit the net. My first idea was to try to get my iphone synced with foobar2k. I quickly found a plugin called foo_pod but then was disapointed to learn it isn’t available for the latest version of foobar. But that led me to an alternate plugin called foo_dop.

However the requirements for foo_dop stated I needed to install iTunes in order for it to work. I was back at square one. Googling again I found this comparison of ipod managers on wikipedia. First on the list stated Amarok has iphone support. Maybe I could get this to work on my linux box. But after searching I found not only did it not support my phone. But also amarok 2 doesn’t seem to support any phones at all.

I looked through the list. Trying to find something. I came across floola. But it doesn’t support iphones. I tried mediachest, but it requires java.

I then tried gtkpod. Which in order to use you need to mount the iphone first. So I installed ifuse. It seemed like it worked, although when I plugged in my iphone I got three camera icons instead of one in addtion to the mounted drive. I could see many directories on my iphone. Maybe I was in buisness.

But alas, no matter what I tried and how many tutorials I read I could not get gtkpod to recognize my phone.

And at that I ran out of options as far as I can tell. So I’m off to download iTunes in all it’s glory.

Spellcheck your Websites with Firefox

Llynix — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 06:53:44 +0000

Came across an interest bookmarklet to invoke Firefox’s built in spell checker everywhere on a website. It’s quite easy to install. Just drag this SpellCheck bookmarlet to your bookmarks toolbar and presto. With one click the entire page gets spell checked. You can even right click on highlighted words to get suggestions.

There are some limitations. Once you click the bookmarklet links will cease to work. Although a quick reload of the page will bring it back to normal. Also spell check suggestions don’t seem to show up in certain areas of your page which utilize popup content. I haven’t yet figured out how to trigger the popup and then click the bookmarklet because as soon as I leave the popup area to head towards my bookmarklet the popup disappears. Still this simple bookmarklet has already fixed countless errors on my pages simply and effectively.

Strangely Interesting 404

Llynix — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 06:43:33 +0000

Looking through my 404 logs I came across an interesting entry.
404||www.buydentalequipment.com/warning_this_is_english_domain_to_solve_this_problem_submit_site_in_atoall.com.html||66.249.68.11||Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)||2009-09-19 03:49:11

I thought it odd that google was trying to reach a page on my website that seemed to be an advertisement.

I think this is a rather unique and somewhat shady marketing trick. atoall.com seems to have generated a list of bogus links for literally thousands of websites. They did this so that Google would find these invalid links in hopes that more astute webmasters like myself would find them in our 404 logs.

Running a google search for this page results in about 5,500 hits. Every single one of them leading to a 404 page on various websites.

Sneaky Sneaky. Hopefully Google will catch on and put a stop to spamming via their bot.