Connecting the dots…

Thoughts on Web Development, Scalability and Application Architecture

Month: January, 2009

Quick Tip for File Uploader in Symfony 1.2

So in symfony < ver 1.2, in the backend you could update the generator.yml to change a field type to make it more like a file upload button. I would usually substitute type: admin_input_file_tag and that would automagically convert it to a file upload. Starting 1.2.x you cant do that anymore. It has quite logically [...]

DateHelper (date_format) in symfony

DateHelper is quite a useful helper in symfony, though I am not a big fan of introducing a ton of functions (concerned about possible name space collision, two functions with the same name etc) but anyway that’s a discussion for another day. DateHelper has a particular function format_date which is quite good for formatting dates, [...]

Perl Script to combine css/js using yui compressor

Yui Compressor is an awesome tool if you want to compress your css and (possibly obfuscate) js. However if you are anyone like me who would create a single css file for each Object / module (Restified CSS, a term that I use to define the use of a single css file for each object), [...]

Installing modules using CPAN interactive shell in perl

We have all done this, get a *.tar.gz file from cpan, do a configure, make, test and make install only to realize that the dependencies for the package are missing and then going and fetching them from CPAN and downloading it again and doing the process over and over again. CPAN Shell is one of [...]

SVN: Quick start guide.

I have written about CVS and GIT in the past and the joys of working on various projects mean that I end up using pretty much any system that I get a chance to lay my hands on which make me more aware of the options available. So this time it was SVN, I spent [...]

Looping through values using reference

There are times where you need to loop through a large array and manipulate the items in the array. This is what you usually do. List through items Create a temp array which contains the modified values Exit the loop and re-assign the new array back to the actual array. This works fine, other than [...]

SimpleXML and parsing namespaced attribute

SimpleXML is really good, this is especially more from the heart as its coming from someone who spent a decent amount of time using DOM API to parse xml in Java, though XPath was mostly a saviour. I usually get stuck when I there is an edge case or parsing some data format that I [...]

SEO Glossary

I have recently started to be more interested in upgrading my skills for search engine optimization. This category will contain my learnings in this area. The problem with starting reading about new things is that most of the articles contain lot of abbreviations and sometimes without their full forms, you might loose the essence of [...]

Failure: The Secret to Success

I had created this category on my blog to document my journey of self development that I started on when I decided to leave a small town in India and move on to achieve bigger things in life. It amazes me what how confident I was in my younger years and basically took up anything [...]

Automatic login on ssh

At work/home I end up logging into multiple boxes at the same time, one to manage configuration, other to tail log files and another to check db stuff and the start of the day usually begins by running the same commands over and over again and then typing the password a number of times. Looked [...]