tips

Git: How to run a command on a specific folder

15 October 2012
git How to tips

I recently needed to be able to run a regular git task on a folder and I didn't want to have to CD into that folder first. Annoyingly, there didn't seem to be an optional "path" parameter to git remote update, until I looked at the help file for Git.

How to remove Setaga from X-Notifier for Chrome

23 August 2012
tips

I am a huge fan of the X Notifier extension for Chrome, however recently the developer has added an advertising component called Setaga. I don't recall agreeing or opt-ing into this, but its possible I did without thinking. In any case, I hate this and wanted to remove it.

Select 5 most recent items from some categories

14 September 2011
mysql tips Drupal

Ever needed to build a list which "sub-selects", say, 5 items from a given list of categories? This snippet should help.

Batch Revert Views

16 February 2011
Drupal code tips

Isn't it a pain when you have dozens of Views setup and they are all marked as "overridden" because you just pulled in an updated feature file from somewhere. Features doesn't always notice when the Views on your site aren't up to date.

The following snippet (which you should use with caution) will batch "delete" (or Revert, once the view is in code) all Views which are marked as Overridden. This took a few seconds to run on our development machine.

Thingy Ma Jig - Now brought to you by Drupal 7

16 January 2011
Drupal How to code tips

So, Drupal 7 is out. Have you heard? It was a bit of a quiet launch really. ;-)

When it came to upgrading by blog, I decided (eventually) that I needed to do a cleanup as the Database had been upgraded from 4.7, to 5 and then to 6 - with many modules added and removed in between. New year, new drupal, new blog (kinda)!

Fixing Dos Line Endings

25 November 2010
tips linux How to geek code Drupal

Sometimes, when you're running coder on a module, you'll get a lot of errors complaining about Windows line endings. This is because you should set your editor to use Unix Line endings to be consistent with all developers. See the Drupal Coding Standards for more details.

Below is a handy bash script which will help you batch convert many files from DOS to Unix line endings.

MySQL: How to upper-case words

30 September 2010
tips programming mysql How to code

 I recently needed to clean up a MySQL Table which contained people's names. Upon searching the MySQL commands, I was surprised to find there was no equivalent of PHP's ucfirst or ucwords. There were commands to convert entire strings into upper or lower case, but not just the first letter.

Drush Cron & XCache can cause var_size errors

14 April 2010
Drupal performance tips

I use a cron script on this server which fires up Drush to run Cron (rather than the standard wget method). There is nothing wrong with using wget, however it does tie up an apache or lighttpd process while cron is running. It also means it's harder to control process priority. Drush, on the other hand, runs in CLI mode, so controlling process priority is easier (using nice). But then I started seeing odd errors…

XCache Variables, Drupal Page Cache and page_cache_fastpath()

24 February 2010
tips programming performance How to Drupal

I run XCache on the server that powers this site. XCache is cool. Out of the box, it allows caching of PHP compile code in memory, after all once a file is compile you shouldn't keep needing to compile it on every page load, should you?

Vim Tips: Replace 0px with 0

23 June 2009
vim tips programming Drupal

I like little wins. I was just looking through the CSS file for this site and noticed that - for some reason - I'd used 0px instead of 0 a LOT of times. Most values need numbers (10em, 10px, 10% and 10pt are all very difference sizes) however 0 is one of the few valeus which is the same in all cases (0px, 0pt, 0% and 0 are all zero!). This adds up to wasted data and bandwidth; admitedly not a lot, but still Every Little Helps!

So I fired up Vim. Initially, I just did: