The Other Wax Drum

I started using the Codeigniter framework when it was still in its infancy. I understand that many folks have bailed in favor of more modern, comprehensive frameworks like Laravel, with which I've dabbled a bit myself. However, most of my sites are not mission critical or revenue generating, and web development is not a full-time job for me so maintaining my CodeIgniter sites is a practical option.

In April 2016 I had the privilege of participating in an ARISS space chat (Amateur Radio on the International Space Station). This is a little-known program which connects students who are licensed amateur radio operators with the astronauts on the space station. It was a tremendous event, the first ever in Rhode Island, and I was extremely moved while watching children ranging in age from 6 to 14 speak live to Jeff Williams aboard the ISS.

So for reasons too extensive to get into in this post, I decided to make the jump on my MacBook Pro from OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) to the latest OS X which at the time was 10.11 El Capitan. Prior to making this leap, I checked the compatibility of all my mission critical applications. Naturally, however, the upgrade came with many challenges when it came to setting up the local web application development framework. Apache was fairly straightforward, as was PHP 5.6. MySQL was another story.

Since Drupal 6 has reached end-of-life, I decided to dive in and upgrade the tech blog to 7.5. It wasn't nearly as smooth as all the minor updates, but I think I've managed to work out most of the kinks.

First off, the update.php script was throwing loads of "module not found" errors. Not sure why, but it doesn't seem to affect the actual performance of the site.

The next problem I had was due to my kludgy hack of the default "Garland" theme, which I fixed by resetting my custom logo selection under Appearance, then reloading the logo.

Now that Ubuntu 10.04 (Desktop version) is past the LTS period, I'm stumbling across more issues that I have to solve "manually". A particularly perplexing one lately was the inability to play flash videos from within ANY browser (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Chromium). I googled & regoogled, & tried everything I found, some of them recommending complex reinstallation procedures.

In the end, it was a relatively simple fix. Of course, YMMV.

You'll need to download the adobe flash plugin debian package file

For whatever reason, Apple decided to bury the Directory Utility application in Snow Leopard. You will no longer find it in the utilities directory, but it still exists in /System/Library/CoreServices. Simply "Go" there by selecting "Go to Folder" from the Finder menu (⌘⇧G), and type the path into the field. From here on out, the process is the same for Mac OS X 10.5.

I have shied away from using keyboard glyphs on blog posts here and other web sites I've built mainly due to the historic unreliability of older browsers. These days, however, most (all?) modern browsers have excellent Unicode support, and so I figured I'd post a description of how to get these glyphs to display on a web page.

First of all, you need to know the character codes, and secondly, you need to know how to format them so they are interpreted correctly by a browser. This holds for ALL non-ASCII characters including glyphs with accents (such as é, ñ) and so on. The table below shows the keyboard keys, glyphs, and associated HTML Unicode string you'll need to use on a web page in order to display the glyph correctly.

I started having a problem streaming baseball games from mlb.tv on my Mac Mini running Mac OS X 10.6.8. The player window would top at 33% and "whirlygig" indefinitely. After a quick (unsuccessful) search on mlb's tech support page, I checked my console log (Utilities/Console) to see if there was a problem. Bingo.

7/29/14 7:27:31 PM	com.apple.launchd[1]	(com.apple.flashupdater[592])
posix_spawn("/usr/libexec/flashupdater", ...): No such file or directory

ImageMagick seems to be one of the most widely supported image manipulation packages available on linux-based web services. ImageMagick is primarily has an API for server-side web scripts, but I tend to use it from the command line when fixing borked images during the development stages of a web site. Because it is such a powerful application suite, I can never remember the basic syntax. Here are the most common uses I have on a day to day basis:

Get Image Properties

I've used the same email address since 1997. Until recently, I have never had a problem receiving excessive spam, thanks to SpamAssassin running on my mail server. I'm not sure why, but lately I noticed much more spam getting through the filter. After a little digging, I discovered a great tutorial on training SpamAssassin to recognize the spam you receive more effectively. You must create separate mail boxes to contain ONLY spam or ONLY ham. You can then train SpamAssassin with the appropriate commands. Here is a summary of Faisal's tutorial.