James McDonald

X-Recruiting – Who would have thought

Was just checking a 301 redirect I've set up, and while looking at the the server output from the wget -S command I noticed that etsy.com has an X-Recruiting header. Etsy I hope your innovation brings all the coders to the yard.  

C Struct Loses it’s Settings

A while ago I blogged about a Control system that commits a C Struct to a file on a disk and then reads the file and enters the C Struct data back into the control system. The operators started noticing inconsistent behaviours. And so I have had to investigate. After...

Struct is 652 Bytes Fwrite writes 656 Bytes

I am not a programmer but I had the need to write a C struct to disk When I then tried to write another of the same files to try and work-a-round a problem with the system they are used on I got a slightly large (by 4 bytes) file I was compiling the C program with my...

array_merge – And the winning key is!

Just a note to self about PHP array_merge The later array passed into array_merge overwrites the former, also if it's indexed with numerical keys then the values will just be appended. <?php $option_array = [ 'element' => 'ooa1', 'optionb' => 'ob1',...

Netbeans Removes Indent from // Comments

Been using netbeans for PHP development and discovered that it will remove the leading whitespace from comments and then the comments inside a block of code are hard up against the left margin which looks weird. Not sure if there is a setting to stop this behaviour...

CakePHP 3 Changes To Date/Time Formatting

The new date objects have different formatting strings http://www.icu-project.org/apiref/icu4c/classSimpleDateFormat.html#details $this->Time->format($assigned_part->start_time, 'h:mm') $this->Time->format($mtg->date, 'eeee MMMM d') The old ones here...

I have no idea what the problem is PHP CLI

Trying to do some PHP tutorials using vim and running php from the command line and I get.... nothing back. If it's a syntax error (e.g. a missing line ending ; ) then no reply at all. If the syntax is correct and it's something else then the error isn't displayed...

CakePHP POST Failing

I was just trying to submit about 10 x 15 records... and found that cakephp was failing with a validation error. Found out it was due to the following in the php error log. [09-Jun-2016 19:16:22 Australia/Melbourne] PHP Warning:  Unknown: Input variables exceeded...

Adding new fonts to TCPDF

Less agony way of doing it. Download your fonts and then run the following cd  /Users/jmcd/Sites/clam/vendor/tecnickcom/tcpdf tools/tcpdf_addfont.php -i /Users/jmcd/Downloads/liberation-sans/LiberationSans-BoldItalic.ttf cd fonts/ Bulk Load Multiple TTF's for i in ls...

CakePHP 3 – TCPDF Install and Usage

In your CakePHP top level folder (the one that has composer.json, src/, vendors/, config/, webroot/) run: composer require tecnickcom/tcpdf You should now have vendor/tecnickcom/tcpdf Now in a controller src/Controller/<ControllerName>Controller.php create an...

CakePHP 3 – Escape to the Global Namespace

This code in CakePHP 3: <?php $date = '31/01/1973'; $ymd = DateTime::createFromFormat('!d/m/Y', $date)->format('Y-m-d'); Causes this error Error: Class 'App\Controller\DateTime' not found This code fixes it: <?php $date = '31/01/1973'; $ymd =...

Checking for port errors on Cisco Switches

Recently had a macbook pro which had a network dongle that was very hot and the network connection stopped working. Found that the dongle was sending garbled signal down the wire and the Cisco switch shutdown the port. # all status show interfaces status # port...