APD post processing wrapper

November 17th, 2007 by Aaron

A while ago, I discovered the ‘joys’ of APD… and then moreso, the ‘joys’ of not being able to make heads or tails out of the output script. After digging deeper, I saw that the original directory already had some PHP scripts to parse the output. I ran those and wasn’t very impressed. Even more important, my boss wouldn’t be impressed. I needed to be able to make something that could be useful to integrate into a table (I finally used dojo to create a table…)

At any rate, I thought I might save anyone some time by posting the code here:

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Create an RSS feed of comments from myspace

September 8th, 2007 by Aaron

Lately, I’ve been trying to find ways to reduce the amount of time I spend on stupid sites like myspace (nevermind the fact that the time it took to reduce this amount took me enough time to visit myspace 1x a day for another month - heh). At any rate, I’ve been using Google Reader alot more (I’m up to 180 or so feeds) and I thought: Why don’t I make an RSS feed o my comments - then I don’t have to go back to the site when someone sends me a comment. (Mind you, myspace does send you an e-mail when you receive a comment, but doesn’t include the content. JEMDiary does, however ;)) I searched the internet and found a few sites that are doing that for a service, and one guy who was giving away a regular expression. So, I took his idea and wrote my own php script for cron. Check it out here:

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Live Combined Error Reporting for Apache and PHP during Development

July 20th, 2007 by Aaron

So many times during development, I’ve missed little PHP errors because they were 1) on a processing page that was redirected or 2) output inside of a html tag - and rendered invisible. From time to time, I have to go back to my file system and check the php error log to see what happened. The first step to solving this was implimenting a custom error handler - which we did at (”the triangle”). But I’m torn on this: should the error handler script function the exact same during development as it does in production, or should we write two different error handlers. To keep the code as simple as possible and allow for scenario regeneration, I opted to have the error handler work the exact same way in development. Some might disagree, but thats not the point here. The issue was that I needed to watch the error log closer (I’m notoriously bad at not checking errors - see my previous post about error reporting…).

Another thing I knew would be nice to see would be the apache error log. As I’m not combining my error logs with php, I don’t often check the apache one. However, local mistakes can cause errors on the production server too.

Luckily, I was able to find a utility that made life easier - and of course - integrates into eclipse. Lets configure:

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When your linkd causes you problems, you must convertd it!

July 6th, 2007 by Aaron

For the setup I use at (”the triangle”), I have alot of filesystem links - and these are made on win32 with the linkd.exe command (the version I got is from the windows 2000 resource cd). When I start a new project, I pass into my script which directories I’d like to make and checkout code into, and which I’d rather just linkd to. Well, every once in a while a link’d folder needs to be a real folder. So, since I’m a lazy programmer, I made a script called ‘convertd’ which will unlink the folder and then make the folder. Chalk one up to efficiency by batch programming? Lets see:

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