Back in March when I was working on my Wordpress-to-Zola exporter I'd written some PHP to generate a .zip file with my markdown site in it, but there was a problem. Although the file size was correct, opening it with Windows Explorer revealed that there were no files in it, but opening it with 7-zip showed that all the files were there as expected. Baffling!

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I had to write some PHP to tell me when to put out my bins because my council doesn’t follow their own rules for collections. Every week my council organises the collection of our 5 bins – but there is a pattern to how they are collected. This is a pretty simple pattern,...

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I am a long time Java programmer. It was what I used to write my final year project at university, and it was my first, second and third jobs. That third job lasted more than a decade and, alongside a huge amount of other things, I got to deliver a number of projects in both PHP and Ruby. PHP was interesting and I’d happily work in it again, but Ruby was fun. Terse, expre...

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Right then, back to Apache for a bit until I can find time to discover what on earth is wrong with my fastcgi install! Hopefully everything works now!

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At the end of last week I upgraded my server from Ubuntu Intrepid to Jaunty (and have since gone all the way up to Lucid, a process that was not as simple as I would have liked). As far as I could tell, everything had gone smoothly, but my blog was unavailable (which I discovered very quickly thanks to the automated Pingdom emails). My blog runs on php-fastcgi b...

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The practical stuff first. In February 2009, inspired by Pete Prodoehl, I set up my own version of scuttle, an open source del.icio.us clone, and hacked it to auto-post my bookmarks to my del.icio.us account using

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Bug 1212662: Don’t unescape html entities in ‘description’ or ‘content’ Currently, when MagpieRSS (otherwise marvellous general-purpose feed parser) encounters escaped content, it unescapes it, thus turning hard fought-for “...

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If you‘re subscribed to my RSS feed then STOP! Move to my Atom feed. My RSS feed doesn’t have proper titles, doesn’t tell you when items were published and is the result of five minutes of PHP. I won’t be turning it off any time soon, but please—think of the children.

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The Abyss Web Server is tiny, fast, and pretty goddamn amazing. The Windows installer is 144k, and sets itself up, providing a web interface to all of its configuration. Despite its tiny footprint (for example, the executable file size of the Windows version is less than 112 KB); it supports HTTP/1.1, dynamic content generation ...

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I saw this article a few months ago and promptly lost it again; the wonders of Google. XUL: rendering GUIs with PHP The important part of the article isn’t actually the PHP bit (I know very little PHP), but the fact that it shows you can deliver an enhanced browsing experience to people using Gecko-base...

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