Blog

Linode is my favorite DNS hosting provider

There, I said it. Even though I've moved my day to day server needs to bare metal, I still keep a 1GB Linode instance spun up so that I can take advantage of what I consider to be one of [...]

Upgrade from PHP 5.3 to PHP 5.4 on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

I've previously posted about upgrading to PHP 5.5.x on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS but what about my friends still on the even older Ubuntu Long Term Service release that's still supported, 10.04 LTS. That particular version's server release will remain supported [...]

"Failed to open page" on Windows Phone 8

I ran into an issue a few days ago after pushing some hand rolled "infinite scroll" logic to my sites. One of my users reported getting the "Failed to open page" error on her Windows Phone 8 using UC Browser [...]

Using Keyring Access on the OSX Command-line

If you're like me, you probably have a private dotfiles that supplements your public dotfiles repository. It contains private values like API keys and [hopefully not] plaintext passwords. There's even a good chance you're using git submodules or a setup [...]

How to use Generators in PHP

Support for generators (via the yield keyword) has been added to PHP 5.5 and allows you to create simple iterators without the use of the Iterator interface. What's this all mean? It boils down to overhead, generators use less memory [...]

Warning: Network TCP port is being used by /usr/sbin/php5-fpm. Possible rootkit

Imagine my surprise to see this warning during my morning review of the rootkit checkers that run nightly on my boxes. The thing is, there were no other anomalies on the box aside from /usr/sbin/php5-fpm being bound to a port [...]

String dereferencing or How to extract a single character from a string with PHP

String dereferencing allows you direct access to individual characters. The dereferencing syntax is just like accessing an array element by it's index: $string = 'This is my awesome string!'; echo 'First Character: ' . $string[0] . "\n"; echo 'Tenth Character [...]

Easily identify duplicate properties in your CSS files

As of late I've been very adamant about DRY CSS principles. Not so much the descriptive ID and class selectors that some folks wrap their other selectors in, but the focus on not repeating the properties and grouping like selectors [...]

Catching multiple PHP exceptions

I had previously discussed using try / catch / finally and a fine reader pointed out that I didn't mention catching multiple exceptions. He's right, I dropped the ball and decided to dedicate today's post to catching multiple exceptions. To [...]

Co-founder Application

This is partially for LOLz and partially for serious. I'm a guy in Tampa looking for people that want to kick ass with me. I know some very talented individuals in the area but nothing's really gotten off the ground [...]