Oracle of ONE1

Occassionally, I need to load an unrealted model into a controller. There are a number of ways to do this but some are better than others. The following is taken from reply by gwoo to a discussion thread.

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I have thrown together a simple proof of concept (POC) in cakePHP for displaying cloud words. What are cloud words? Word frequencies displayed in a cloud similar to a tag cloud. A tag cloud may be found on right column of this blog site. The POC may be tested here.

What does it do?

Cloud Words allows for the upload and analysis of plain text and MS Word files. MS Word files are converted to plain text for the analysis. The analysis simply does a count total for each word in the file. A simple word count is actually not very useful since the most common words will dominate the count list. The most common words are generally not very useful for understanding the contents of a document. “THE” is the single word found most often in documents.

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Last week, I was working on updating some old PHP code from 1999 and 2000. Now this is working code in PHP4 but was not quite up to todays standards. As an example it used the PHP code start tag of <? instead of the much better <?php. Also needed to make certain that all of my variables were declared and that no global or unsanitized variables were used. Overall not a big deal just a good use for grep or sed.

A WinXP laptop is my where I write most of my code and the files are then uploaded to a FreeBSD server. I do not and have never owned a Mac. Usually for this type of action, I would run grep or sed on my FreeBSD server but instead decided to try Windows Grep. I ran Windows Grep with the proper regular expressions and voila, my PHP start tags were updated. Next, the files were uploaded to a new server for testing. ERRORS, errors everywhere.

About half of the updated files were kicking out errors or failing completely. The failed files were rather random and the code looked just fine in the editor. What was going on?

Comments not recognized by PHP

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I regularly develop GPL open source plugins, modules, and widgets for Joomla and WordPress. On ocassion, a users has asked if a donation would help support this development. The comment alone is a great compliment and incentive. Cash is always greatly appreciated but in this case, if you find one of my plugins useful please make a donation to one of these great organizations instead.

American Red Cross in Southeastern Wisconsin – Provides relief to victims of disasters and helps people prevent, prepare for, and respond to emergencies in Dodge, Kenosha, Milwaukee, Ozaukee, Racine, Walworth, and Waukesha Counties.

Milwaukee Achiever Literacy Services – Inspires and empowers adult learners to gain the skills necessary to enrich their lives through education and training in an atmosphere of mutual acceptance and respect.

New plugin for Wordpress developed. It should be available on the their site shortly. In the meantime, it will be available for download here.

If you have any comments or questions, please add them here.

A 1.5 native plugin enabling you to display section or category descriptions within content. This is a very simple, single purpose plugin that does only and exactly what it claims. On occassion, an article may wish to include the description from a section or category. Copying that description means it may need to be updated in multiple places if changes are made. With this plugin, just update the section/category description and all of the articles remain current.

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Module ggis-tabnews is a module developed for Joomla 1.5. Basically, it takes all articles in a category or section and outputs them to a tabbed box. It depends on the Joomla Works Tabs & Slides plugin for the tabbing javascript. A future release may remove that dependency.

Where to get it?

This is currently not a public release but if you are interested in it, please drop a comment on this article.

Expected Usage

This module was developed for a very specific usage and has not been developed or tested beyond that. I do however, see a wide variety of applications for this module. A client wished to display offsite class locations by county in a tabbed box. Additionally; the person editing the locations, while familiar with the basic editor interface on the front-end, was not expected to handle much complexity in layout.
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Recently, I have started backing up my servers to Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) using Duplicity. So far, I am pleased with the process and the costs involved. I still do regular disk dumps to my own backup server but may slowly phase down the frequency of these dumps.

What is Amazon S3?

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

What is Duplicity?

Duplicity backs up directories by producing encrypted tar-format volumes and uploading them to a remote or local file server. Because duplicity uses librsync, the incremental archives are space efficient and only record the parts of files that have changed since the last backup. Because duplicity uses GnuPG to encrypt and/or sign these archives, they will be safe from spying and/or modification by the server.

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What is it?

ggis Iframe gives authors an easy way to insert an iframe into a Joomla content item.

Features and Requirements

• Joomla! 1.5 or greater

Setup

Using ggis_iframe is a very simple matter of performing a short setup and then inserting a simple code in your article.

1. Download and install plugin using standard means. Download here.
2. There are really no plugin options to set, everything is controlled by the insert tag.
3. Publish the ggis_iframe plugin

Usage

The subscription form may be inserted on a post, page, or text widget by including the following code in your text.

{ggis_iframe %param0="val" %param1="val"}

http://iframe.url{/ggis_iframe}

The insert tag starts with {ggis_iframe} and ends with {/ggis_iframe}. A number of parameters may be set in the openning tag. The URL of the iframe to insert goes between the tags.

Another example with all parameters set:

{ggis_iframe id="mine" width="100%" height="650"
frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true"
scrolling="auto"}http://mydomain.com/page{/ggis_iframe}

Parameters

• id – identifies your iframe (text)
  • default = random number
• width -sets the iframe width (% or px)
  • default = 100%
• height – sets iframe height (% or px)
  • default = 650px
• frameborder – border width around iframe (low integer)
  • default = 0
• allowtransparency – iframe background transparency (true or false)
  • default = true
• scrolling – set iframe scrolling (auto, yes, or no)
  • default = auto

To Do

What is it?

ggis Subscribe gives authors an easy way to insert a form that performs emailing list subscription management.

Features and Requirements

• Wordpress 2.5 or greater
• An email list to subscribe to. Currently supports:
  • ezmlm lists – subscribe by sending email to listname-subscribe-your=address.com@domain.com
• Designation of success page

Setup

Using ggisSubscribe is a very simple matter of performing a short setup and then inserting a simple code in your post.

1. Download and install plugin using standard means. Download here.
2. View the ggisSubscribe options from the Settings menu.
3. Add the email address of your mailing list. If you have more than one list, use commas between each address.
4. Enter the URL of your thank you page (next page)
5. Enter the URL of you main subscription management page.
   • Yes. Create and publish your subscription management first and then finish with your ggisSubscribe options.

Usage

The subscription form may be inserted on a post, page, or text widget by including the following code in your text.

[-%ggis-subscribe %formtype "%listname"-]

Here is an explanation of the fields:

• ggis-subscribe – identifies the code (required)
• formtype – identifies the form type
  • 0, default – full subscription management form
  • 1 – subscribe only form , requires “listname”
• listname – identifies the list to include in a subscription only form

See the demonstration forms.

In a Widget?

A subscription form may be placed into the standard text widget using the methods above. For widget use, I suggest using only formtype=1, the short form.

To Do

1. Add template tag output
2. Add other list manager types

Interesting presentation on what makes a web site more than compelling for viewers. Link to ‘Discover is the New Cocaine‘.

In development work, you must always test your functions or expressions for proper results. For credit cards, there are some numbers that are NOT REAL numbers but will verify properly in developmental tests.

Testable Credit Card Numbers

* Thanks to http://www.crazysquirrel.com/finance/test-cc.jspx