Archive for February, 2008

Keeping user data seperate from system data on Apple OS X

on Monday 25th February, 2008 Gabe speculated thusly…

One of the things I grew to like about Linux was the /home directory. Any data for a user was always stored there. Furthermore, you could easily have that home directory on a different disc so when you deleted your system, you didn’t lose your user data too.

(more…)

Posted in Information, Leopard, OS X, Operating System, Tiger

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Linking images in Code Igniter

on Sunday 17th February, 2008 Gabe speculated thusly…

I’m a big fan of the PHP framework, CodeIgniter. However, until recently it has lacked an elegant way of nesting an image in an anchor tag. I had to resort to manually typing out HTML like this:
<a href="<?=site_url?>/controller/action"><img src="<?=base_url()?>/images/button.gif"></a>
CodeIgniter 1.6 has been released, quickly followed by 1.6.1. This includes an image helper. One is still unable to elegantly link images using CI’s helpers. If you want to be able to do something like this:
<?= anchor( 'controller/action', img( 'images/button.gif' )?>

You could just comment out line 117 in /system/helpers/url_helper.php but that means you are altering CI core, which is not a good idea. For a start it will be overwritten when you upgrade and it is an inelegant hack.

A better bet is to create your own helper file and use it to override CodeIgniter’s one. This is dead-simple, just create a file called MY_url_helper.php in the following location /system/application/helpers/. Note that the MY_ prefix is set in the config.php file under $config['subclass_prefix'] = 'MY_'; so if you have changed that setting you will need to adjust your file-name accordingly.

Then just copy and paste the following in to it: (more…)

Posted in CodeIgniter, Development, Frameworks, PHP, Programming

7 Comments »

Rails Production Environment Using Mongrel Cluster, Apache 2.2 mod_proxy, and Capistrano on Ubuntu Gutsy

on Wednesday 13th February, 2008 Gabe speculated thusly…

Recently, I had to setup a production environment for Rails applications at work. I encountered many difficulties, including problems with permissions on client/server computers, and not least because the documentation I had was out of date (Agile web dev and The Rails Way). Online tutorials were helpful but incomplete. I have compiled all that I discovered here. (more…)

Posted in Development, HowTo, Linux, Operating System, Programming, Ruby, Server

8 Comments »