sharing knowledge

ssh tunnel and a half

Jul11
2011 2 Comments lucas Written by lucas

 

Using ssh to shut down lights :-)

As you all might know ssh is a very popular protocol used to connect to remote shells. I mostly use OpenSSH as a client (I think most of you to). SSH has a lot of cool options but in this post i’m going to write about how to use it to create a secure tunnel.

What is a tunnel?

A tunnel specifies a given port on the local (client) host that is to be forwarded to the given host and port on the remote side. How it works? This works by allocating a socket to listen to a port on the local side, optionally bound to the specified bind_address.  Whenever a connection is made to this port, the connection is forwarded over the secure channel, and a connection is made to the port from the remote machine. Continue reading “ssh tunnel and a half” »

Posted in Linux - Tagged , ,

nice to meet you

May31
2011 Leave a Comment lucas Written by lucas

Hace aproximadamente un año atras decidimos que en algún momento ibamos a arrancar con un nuevo emprendimiento, al cual bautizamos a modo de juego, lanubecita.

El tiempo fue pasando y lanubecita se fue haciendo cada vez más real.

La diferencia puntual entre lo que hacemos en easytech vs lanubecita es que en el primero hacemos desarrollos a medida para nuestros clientes y en lanubecita desarrollamos aplicaciones web que  vamos a comercializar como servicios (SaaS).

Continue reading “nice to meet you” »

Posted in Misc - Tagged

Playing with TermKit in Linux with Chrome

May21
2011 19 Comments Cesar Miquel Written by Cesar Miquel

TermKit is graphical replacement for the old Unix terminal developed by Steven Wittens. It is based on the WebKit HTML rendering engine used in Safari and Chrome. The only ‘problem’ with TermKit is that you need a Mac with OS X to use it. Since we are Linux users we wanted to at least give it a try and found that you can test it using Chrome. In this post I cleaned up the instructions for testing TermKit on a machine with Ubuntu.

Continue reading “Playing with TermKit in Linux with Chrome” »

Posted in Linux, Misc - Tagged ,

Guick Support Ticket System | First Shot

May19
2011 Leave a Comment lucas Written by lucas
  • english
  • spanish

Some time ago we begin to need something to manage our clients requirements because it was  already a very high entropy. After some research (that means google) we were unable to find a simple app that fit our needs. At this point  Cesar decided to implement Drupal + Support Ticket System module.

As always this module had not all we needed and as always we finished  changing the module’s code, creating new views and a lot of Drupal theming to get a better functionality and a better UI to the way we work. Since then  we have been using it (2 years actually) we very good results.

Continue reading “Guick Support Ticket System | First Shot” »

Posted in Drupal - Tagged , , ,

Error reporting in PHP scripts

Dec02
2010 Leave a Comment Cesar Miquel Written by Cesar Miquel

It often happens that you are trying to debug a PHP script running from command line or a part of your code and the script mysteriously dies. Depending on your server configuration (or command line) errors may be being silently being hidden. In those cases I recommend you add the following lines to your code to guarantee that all errors, notices, etc will be printed.

<?php

 // set error reporting para que reporte TODO
 error_reporting(E_ALL);
 ini_set(‘display_errors’, ‘On’);

 // The rest of your code …
 

This post is really for reference since most PHP developers already know this …

Posted in PHP, Programming and Scripting

A PHP Shell

Jul02
2010 Leave a Comment Cesar Miquel Written by Cesar Miquel

A Nautilus shell

We do a lot of development in PHP here at Easytech. Many times you need to test a bit of PHP code. If you played around with python you surely used the python shell. Fortunately the people at Facebook have created a similar shell for PHP (ironically written in python!). You can find it here: http://www.phpsh.org/. From there you can access the GIT repository or download a tgz or zip file.

Currently I couldn’t find a DEB package for Ubuntu. If you want to install it just follow the following steps (you need python installed)

$ cd ~/Devel/PHP (o donde lo quieran tirar)
$ wget http://github.com/facebook/phpsh/tarball/master
$ tar zxvf facebook-phpsh-*
$ cd facebook-phpsh-*
$ sudo python setup.py install

thats it! To test some PHP weirdness…

$ phpsh
Starting php
type ‘h’ or ‘help’ to see instructions &amp; features
php> var_dump( 1 == ’1′ )
bool(true)
 
php>
Posted in PHP, Programming and Scripting

Exploding and imploding…

Apr24
2010 1 Comment Cesar Miquel Written by Cesar Miquel

Very often when I review other peoples PHP code I come across an old problem: generating a list of comma separated values from a list of things. This happens often when you want to, say, write an SQL query with a WHERE field IN (a,b,c,…,x) and you have an array with a, b, etc.

Another example is when you want to create an include path by concatenating a list of directories with the PATH_SEPARATOR. Yet another example is when you want to build a path concatenating them with the DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.

The usual code to accomplish looks something like this:

< ?php
     // loop through list an generate string
    $line = ”;
    foreach( $list as $el ) {
        $line .= $el . ‘,’;
    }

    $line = substr( $line, 0, strlen( $line ) – 1 );
?>
 

Continue reading “Exploding and imploding…” »

Posted in PHP, Programming and Scripting

Creating a page with tabs in Drupal

Jan18
2010 1 Comment Cesar Miquel Written by Cesar Miquel

If you are developing a module for Drupal you might need to use tabs to simplify a bit a screen which has too much functionality. Typically a settings page that might need too many options to comfortably fit on a single screen. Since I had to search and experiment a bit to find out how to do it I decided to write a short post with my findings. In this article I assume you have a basic understanding on writing Drupal modules.

Continue reading “Creating a page with tabs in Drupal” »

Posted in Drupal, PHP

Drupal Tip – How to determine what module handles a given path

Nov18
2009 Leave a Comment Cesar Miquel Written by Cesar Miquel

Drupal has a sophisticated module system that allows developers to extend the CMSs functionality very easily. Each module “hooks” into Drupal by implementing hook functions. On way to use this feature is to hook different URLs to module functions. Essentially the developer in his module declares an array of url paths and what function should be called when that path is requested. This small post will show you how you can determine which module handles a specific URL. This can be quite useful for debugging and/or browsing other peoples source code to learn how to do something.

Every module in Drupal that hooks to a URL path needs to implement the hook_menu function. This hook basically tells Drupal what paths will be handled by this module. This information is read when the module is enabled and stored in a database table. In Drupal 6 this information is cached so if you modify the array returned by the hook_menu function you need to clear the cache. To determine what module is handling what path you simply need to query the menu_router table. A simple query to do this is:

SELECT
  path
  , file
  , page_callback
  , type
  , title
FROM
  menu_router m
ORDER BY
  path

Continue reading “Drupal Tip – How to determine what module handles a given path” »

Posted in Drupal - Tagged ,

Using Zend_Reflection to generate API docs

Aug08
2009 Leave a Comment Cesar Miquel Written by Cesar Miquel

Today I needed to generate source code documentation for a webservice APIs we are in coding. One of the guys in the office suggested I take a look at Zend_Reflection. It turns out its quite simple to write PHP code to parse source files and extract the documentation from them. I took a little time to write this sample program.

This program is quite simple: it has a single class called TestClass with one method: addIntegers(). Below this class I wrote a little code which parses the file and then outputs the information. You can use this and a templating system to generate doc. I used it to write the documentation so that we can easily add it to our Wiki.

The script I wrote parses the documentation style used in Zend Framework. Here’s a sample class:

< ?php

/**
 * This is a sample test class.
 *
 * This class has only one method: addIntegers() which adds
 * two integers. Its a sample class for our test.
 *
 */
class TestClass
{
    /**
     * This method adds two integers.
     *
     * This method adds the two given integers and returns
     * its sum. If only one integer is given it sums zero.
     *
     * @param int $number1  The first integer
     * @param int $number2  The second integer
     * @return int The sum of $number1 and $number2.
     *
     */
    public function addIntegers( $number1, $number2 = 0 ) {
         return $number1 + $number2;
    }
}

 

Read the rest of the post to see how to easily parse this code…
Continue reading “Using Zend_Reflection to generate API docs” »

Posted in PHP, Zend Framework
« Older Entries
Stop SOPA!

SOPA breaks our internet freedom!
Any site can be shut down whether or not we've done anything wrong.

Stop SOPA!