So where am I going?

Well, my fiancée and I will be starting, on the 3rd of January, a new company called Bairwell Web Development to combine our two talents. Bairwell will be offering WordPress, Perch and LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP 5 : also some Varnish, PostgreSQL, Memcache, Perl and Systems administration) development consultancy services – so if you want a well designed (Katy), scalable and responsive (me) website: then please get in touch with us via our web development site (Katy is still working on it at this time of writing), Twitter or Facebook.

Fingers crossed!

Connecting to Amazon EC2 using PuTTY

1. Load PuTTY
2. In the Hostname box, enter the Public DNS entry of your Amazon EC2 instance (ec1-23-456-78-901.xx-yyyy-1.compute.amazonaws.com)
3. Click, in the left hand side of the PuTTY window, Connection->SSH->Auth
4. In the “Private Key Field” select the file you saved from “Preparing PuTTY for Amazon EC2“
5. Click “Open”
6. Login as “ec2-user”

Continued in Installing and Configuring Jenkins CI

I’m assuming that you’ve created an attribute with the attribute code “supplier_price” as a decimal, that you’ve kept this field up to date and your stock levels are accurate If it isn’t called “supplier_price” change the appropriate part in the query.

SELECT
COUNT(sku) AS 'products_stocked',
SUM(qty) AS 'items_in_stock',
SUM(stockvalue) AS 'stock_value'
FROM (

SELECT
catalog_product_entity.sku,
cataloginventory_stock_item.qty,
catalog_product_entity_decimal.value,
(cataloginventory_stock_item.qty * catalog_product_entity_decimal.value) AS stockvalue
FROM
cataloginventory_stock_item,
catalog_product_entity,
eav_attribute,
catalog_product_entity_decimal
WHERE
catalog_product_entity.type_id='simple' AND
cataloginventory_stock_item.product_id=catalog_product_entity.entity_id AND
catalog_product_entity_decimal.entity_id=catalog_product_entity.entity_id AND
eav_attribute.attribute_id=catalog_product_entity_decimal.attribute_id AND
eav_attribute.attribute_code='supplier_price' AND
cataloginventory_stock_item.qty > 0
ORDER BY sku ASC) AS b

XDebug by Derick Rethans

The oldest and most well known profiler. Needs modification of the server’s PHP file to run. Compatible with KCachegrind/WinCacheGrind, MacCallGrind and Webgrind and remote debugging tools. Produces quite large debug files (typically 900Kb to 10Mb compare to XHProf’s 110Kb).

XHProf by Facebook Inc (available via PECL)

Large amount of information provided and allows you to “drill down” by various sections – allows comparison of “diffs” between runs to check performance enhancements. Needs modification of the server’s PHP file to run. Also compatible with the *Grind systems. Used by Facebook and Manga High’s online maths games website, but only currently runs on Linux/FreeBSD. Seems to be preferred by iBuildings (see Profiling with XHProf) which is how I originally heard about it.

PHP Quick Profiler (PQP) by Particle tree

Needs modifications to your PHP code, but does not need the server’s PHP modifying (so it can be used on shared hosting easily). Nice and bright. Used by ParticleTree on their Wufoo product.


class class_A {
public $setting;

public function doSomething() {
$toReturn=Array();
for ($i=1;$i<100;$i++) {
$object=new self();
$object->setting=$i;
Array_push($toReturn,$object);
return $object;
}
}
Calling $class_A->doSomething() then returns 100 “class_A” objects.

However, I then needed to extend the PHP class (let’s call this class_B – declared with “class class_B extends class_A”) to take into account additional settings and I fully expected $object to be a new copy of class_B (as class B is technically the class being run).

Nope, it doesn’t work like that. I ended up with $object being class_A . I had to modify the code to change:
$object=new self();
to:
$object=clone $this;
which then allowed $class_B->doSomething(); to return 100 class_B objects.

Annoying, but something to remember!

If you just want to handle three character top level domains – then this code works:

<?php
// let's test the code works: these should all return
// example.com , example.net or example.org
$domains=Array('here.example.com',
'example.com',
'example.org',
'here.example.org',
'example.com/ignorethis',
'example.net/',
'http://here.example.org/longtest?string=here');
foreach ($domains as $domain) {
testdomain($domain);
}
function testdomain($url) {
if (preg_match('/^((.+)\.)?([A-Za-z][0-9A-Za-z\-]{1,63})\.([A-Za-z]{3})(\/.*)?$/',$url,$matches)) {
print 'Domain is: '.$matches[3].'.'.$matches[4].'
'."\n";
} else {
print 'Domain not found in '.$url.'
'."\n";
}
}
?>

$matches[1]/$matches[2] will contain any subdomain and/or protocol, $matches[3] contains the domain name, $matches[4] the top level domain and $matches[5] contains any other URL path information.

To match most common top level domains you could try changing it to:

if (preg_match('/^((.+)\.)?([A-Za-z][0-9A-Za-z\-]{1,63})\.([A-Za-z]{2,6})(\/.*)?$/',$url,$matches)) {

Or to get it coping with everything:

if (preg_match('/^((.+)\.)?([A-Za-z][0-9A-Za-z\-]{1,63})\.(co\.uk|me\.uk|org\.uk|com|org|net|int|eu)(\/.*)?$/',$url,$matches)) {

etc etc. If you want a list of top level domains, you may find Mozilla’s TLD List useful and DKIM Reputation Detected Registered Domains code handy.

It gets worse! Google Chrome (based on Apple WebKit), sends “content-type”.

Here’s the summary

Hope it helps somebody else!

So, yes, it is possible to (unofficially) download parts of the Zend Framework and not have to worry about dependences.

If so, the problem may be because you are sending an “AMT” (Amount) of 0 to Paypal: I did this because I didn’t want to actually take any money now…

It appears this is a long standing issue with the SetExpressCheckout section and RecurringPayments on Paypal and to avoid the blank white page, you’ll need to just send a nominal amount (such as 0.01) for Paypal to process “now”. However, Paypal does charge you a 20p transaction fee on the live system, so you may need to adjust your entire Paypal Express Checkout integration.