Distributed compiling with Gentoo Linux and WSL2
The year is 2021 and I've decided to embark on a journey to update an old laptop running an installation of Gentoo Linux that hasn't been updated since 2015. I've since used macOS and I've recently settled on a Windows 11 desktop running WSL2 as my main development environment. There's a lot of CPU…
Vítor Brandão
Testing Zend Framework applications with Behat and PHPUnit
In my previous post "Debugging Zend Framework routes with ZF Debug Utils" I presented a tool that I wrote to ease my way around ZF routing. Today I'm bringing another Zend Framework related project that I built to help me test ZF applications. Unit testing a Zend-mvc application If you dr…
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Debugging Zend Framework routes with ZF Debug Utils
Debugging Zend Framework 2 routes and specifically why a given route wouldn't match to a controller was one of my pains while working with ZF2 applications. After spending too much time debugging them I decided to put together a ZF2 module - Noiselabs\ZfDebugModule - to help me visualize what was g…
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Ghost, Dockerized.
In this blogpost we'll see how to Dockerize a local Ghost app for fun and profit. In a rush? Already familiar with Ghost? Jump to the technical bits. Posting, again It's been a *looong* time since my last post. The time has come to break the silence and start posting again. And what best way to ma…
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Introducing SmartyBundle, a Smarty3 bundle for Symfony2
Hello all! I've released yesterday the first version of SmartyBundle on GitHub. SmartyBundle SmartyBundle is a Symfony2 bundle that provides integration for the Smarty3 template engine. It will allow the usage of the Smarty template engine in Symfony2, instead of Twig or PHP templates. SmartyBundl…
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Failed to submit batch buffer (Xorg)
Another Xorg update After my last Xorg update I've lost the nice ability to log into my KDE. Well, this sucks because I spent a long time compiling kdelibs and friends so I really want to use it. Symptoms A blank screen on login. You can even see your mouse pointer but nothing else. If you take a…
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Sanitize filenames with PHP
PDF generation and invalid characters While working with the TableTools PDF generator included in the great DataTables jQuery plugin I've noticed that sometimes the script failed to generate the PDF file. The cause? Invalid characters in the filename. Well, to solve this issue I've made a simple PH…
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Don't let updatedb take your Linux down
Coffee break everyone? Everyday morning was the same: updatedb came and took my Gentoo away. The symptoms were clear, X/KDE applications starting to become slow and unresponsive, and then the two inevitable choices: go for a coffee and wait or pkill the bastard. Asking updatedb to be nice (the wron…
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Meme Miner: the translation tool I've been looking for
No, this will not replace Google Translate or Babel Fish. But it does something that these tools simply can't offer. For some time I've been using Wikipedia to translate expressions that a normal translator couldn't give exact results, because they use literal translations. Now there is a faster wa…
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Ebuild for CoovaChilli v1.2.2 coming soon
It has been a while since I took Laurento Fritella contributions on bugzilla for CoovaChilli-1.0.11 and made them available through Sunrise overlay. In the meantime I've tried to submit version 1.0.14 but run into some problems with SSL and I was back then completely out of time to fix it. Ebuild f…
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tar: file name is too long (max 99)
I was doing the usual make dist process to launch a tarball for one of my apps when tar died with the following message: tar: file name is too long (max 99); not dumped tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors If you happen to see the same error message it is quite likely that you (and by you I…
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Chromium OS using Portage build environment
These are good news for the Gentoo community. Portage is being used to build Chromium OS packages. As you may know, Portage is the Gentoo Linux default package management system which has its roots on FreeBSD's ports. As of February 5, Google developer Ryan Cairns has made this statement on the Chr…
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Mark all messages as Read in Gmail (in 3 easy steps)
Want to get rid of all those unread messages in Gmail? Or, just like me, have some unread messages you can't find and want to reset the unread count to zero? Well, here is the solution: Type "is:unread" in the search bar. Then select "Unread" as seen in the picture below. In…
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Check UTF-8 input in PHP: only letters
This is a simple way to check a UTF-8 string with PHP function preg_match in search for anything that isn't a letter, which includes all UTF-8 letters and not just ASCII. Preg_match performs a regular match on the given input using a pattern. The pattern used tells preg_match to look for letters (\…
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How to prevent caching (force image reload) in PHP and/or JavaScript/jQuery
If you are using images generated on-the-fly by a PHP script (or another server language), like I'm doing on my web application, you surely do not want images to be read from cache as your users will be seeing the same first generated image (saved into cache) and not the new generated versions. You…
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