Entries by Ian P. Christian

It's pretty common for sites to have a password reset system on websites, which allow you to enter your email address, and have the site email you a link you can use to reset your password.

I had a specification that demanded this kind of system, however it needed to be stateless - in that I could not store any extra information. Also, the hash could only be used once, and it was required that it needed to time out after a configurable time period. Also, the URL must be short enough such that it can be easily copied and pasted into the address bar from an email, and doesn't wrap in the email.

I got PHP4, compiled it as CGI.. here's how.

Install required packages

  apt-get install make libmysqlclient15-dev libmcrypt-dev libxpm-dev libpng12-dev \
libjpeg62-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev apache2-dev  gcc bison flex

configured as follows.

./configure --enable-force-cgi-redirect --disable-cli --enable-discard-path  \
 '--prefix=/home/pookey/php/' '--with-xml'  '--enable-bcmath' '--enable-calendar' \
 '--with-curl' '--enable-ftp' '--with-gd' '--with-jpeg-dir=/usr' '--with-png-dir=/usr' \
  '--with-xpm-dir=/usr/X11R6' '--with-mcrypt' '--enable-magic-quotes' \
 '--with-mysqli' '--with-mysql=/usr' '--with-openssl' \
  '--enable-discard-path' '--with-pear' '--enable-sockets' \
 '--enable-track-vars' '--enable-versioning' '--with-zlib'

This installed it into /home/pookey/php

Enabled per vhost using the following syntax

  SetEnv PHPRC /home/pookey/php/lib/stage
  ScriptAlias /php4-cgi /home/pookey/php/bin/php

  <Location />
    Action php4-script /php4-cgi
    AddHandler php4-script .php
  </Location>

For some stupid reason I failed to figure out, doc_root needs to be set to the document root for each vhost, and can only be done in php.ini (setting PHP_DOCUMENTATION_ROOT with SetEnv failed). This means each vhost needs it's own php.ini, which is placed wherever you set PHPRC to.

Using this system, you can have PHP4 and PHP5 mixed even on the same vhost

I noticed that google was going crazy indexing trac for doctrine. Today it downloaded over 90000 pages, transfering 3 gig of data! It was causing quite a bit of load on the server (not huge amounts, but enough to show in my graphs!)

Eventaully , I came up with a nice little trick for reducing the number of hits google will make against a trac install. Google have extended robots.txt to allow some slightly improved pattern matching. Here's my snippet, if you don't understand it, please don't use it.

User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*?rev*

Took me a while to figure this out, so thought I'd put it here for others. This is useful for Xen setups, where you use a file for the disk image. AFAIK, you can only grow an image, not shrink it.

# dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=1024 >> disk.img
# e2fsck -f disk.img
# resize2fs disk.img
# e2fsck -f disk.img

This makes the disk image bigger, checks the image, resizes the file system, and then checks it again

Check out this blog post. Looks promising, PHP might finally get name spaces, and somehow, they have managed to use the '::' separator! Great news, but I'm not going to believe it till I see it released, even though it's been checked into SVN already

The symfony SVN is pretty unstable, and it's anoying

Here's a mirror!

http://symfony.pengus.net

#!/bin/bash
REPOS="$1"
TXN="$2"
PHP="/usr/lib/php5/bin/php"
SVNLOOK=/usr/bin/svnlook

CHANGED=`$SVNLOOK changed -t "$TXN" "$REPOS" | awk '{print $2}'`
for LINE in $CHANGED
  do
  FILE=`echo $LINE | egrep \\.php$`
  if [ $? == 0 ]
  then
   MESSAGE=`$SVNLOOK cat -t "$TXN" "$REPOS" "${FILE}" | $PHP -l`
   if [ $? -ne 0 ]
   then
    echo " " 1>&2
    echo "---------------------------------------------------------------------------------" 1>&2
    echo "During automatic PHP syntax checking we found an error in the following PHP file: " 1>&2
    echo " " 1>&2
    echo "${FILE}: $MESSAGE" | sed "s| -| $FILE|g" 1>&2
    echo " " 1>&2
    echo "Please correct the error and try commit again." 1>&2
    echo " " 1>&2
    echo "You can check for syntax error on your computer by running command: php -l ${FILE}" 1>&2
    echo " " 1>&2
    echo "Best regards," 1>&2
    echo "Doctrine Dev Team" 1>&2
    echo "---------------------------------------------------------------------------------" 1>&2
    exit 1
   fi
  fi
 done

I've done a bit of research, and the N95 is defiantly coming to Three. The time frame isn't set (or at least, isn't announced, and I've been unable to find one...), however it's likely to appear within the next few weeks or months.

UPDATE (31/05/2007): The manager at my local 3 store was told that the phone would be in by the end of this month. It's not actually going to happen, but it does give the impression it will be happening any time now. Perhaps within the next few weeks. Someone discussing this on 3g.co.uk suggests that Three don't want to release another buggy handset, and are holding back on releasing this phone for a while.

UPDATE (01/06/2007): Another place worth watching might be here http://www.x-series.org/2007/05/08/nokia-n95-is-coming-to-three/trackback/ - apparently the first week of june is looking likely!

UPDATE (12/06/2007): Three called me today, and explained it would be a while, they are still testing. They could unfortunately give me no idea as to how long it would be, but it is coming (apparently).

The parts of a Walkera 60 are hard to find, as such I had to get mine of ebay. The parts came with no instructions at all, and it took me much googling before I managed to find anything useful.

So, I though I would link to guides I found from here, to help out fellow Walkera 60 owners. The first guide also covers the fitting of the tail rotor kit, and shows how you would go about replacing a rotor shaft should you need to.

• http://www.rctrend.dk/shop/information.php?info_id=13
• http://www.1upcomputer.com/storage/temps/cnc60.pdf

Phix - an alternative to PHP... well, not yet
Knowing how Theo is when get gets in one of his moods, it will never actually get finished, but he's started a new language called Phix, which hopefully one day might be a replacement for PHP. Wait and see....