Peter DeMartini

A software engineer who loves his job. Specialist in PHP, MySQL, UNIX, CodeIgniter and SugarCRM.

[thecodeslayer-blog-blog]

How to force remove locked items from trash (Mac OS X)

Recently I have had a folder in my trash that would not go away even after I emptied it. So I decided to do some simple command line to force delete the file. 

Step 1:

Open up Terminal in Applications/Utilities

Type "sudo rm -rf " - with a space afterwards and don't press enter

Step 2:

Open up Trash on the Dock, then drag the folder or file to Terminal Window

Step 3:

Go to the Terminal Window, you should see "sudo rm -rf /path/to/.Trash/folder"

Press enter

Enter in admin password

Now you are done. The folder should have disappeared from your trash.

[thecodeslayer-blog-blog]

[thecodeslayer-blog-blog]

Get page load time in jQuery

Have you ever wondered how to get that nifty little page load time on the bottom of your page? This is all about bragging rights. You want a quick website so why not show everyone. Anyways, here is the good stuff.

http://codepad.co/s/585338

[euvoltologo]

Fight Club as Code.

[thecodeslayer-blog-blog]

Developer and Designer?

Someone told me once you can't be a designer and a developer. I didn't believe him. I thought you could do it all. I was actually wrong. It is like being a doctor and an artist. You can only specialize in one. Although you could be a designer and developer. You should only focus on one field and excel at it. For me I picked developer and it was the best the decision of my life. What about you, designer or developer?

[thecodeslayer-blog-blog]

Global Sessions with Redis Bug Fix

I recently ran into an issue on my node server where the sessions were all the same across website. For example, if someone logged in, then everybody who accesses the site would be logged in as that user.  My sessions were being stored by redis -- because that is an efficient way of storing key:value pairs.

Anyways, the problem was that redis (on my server) wasn't properly configured. So logged into redis-cli and ran the "SHUTDOWN" command. Logged out of redis-cli. Copied the redis.conf template, from the source code folder for redis, to /etc/ using this command cp /path/to/redis.conf /etc/redis.conf . After that was copied over, I ran this command: redis-server /etc/redis.conf .That fixed the global session problem.

[thecodeslayer-blog-blog]

Advanced Twitter Streaming API Concepts in PHP

Twitter's Streaming API Documentation is pretty slim for advanced uses. Sure they give you some of the bare the concepts and examples but when it comes time to actually build yourself a scalable application you can find yourself stuck with an inefficient product. I am not going to give you code examples but more discuss certain concepts that will help you succeed.

First of all, these concepts can differ per application and may not apply directly to yours. From my experience, I have discovered three concepts when building an effective application using Twitter's Streaming API.

Use System Daemons:

First note that you don't want the Streaming API being run directly in your Web Application. Cron Jobs work great for scheduled tasks but not for handing a constant stream. In my case I ended up using System_Daemons. They work pretty well and fairly easy to set up in a UNIX environment.

Get out of being Rate Limited:

Option 1: Apply and become a Twitter Partner.

Option 2: If you are wondering how to track more than 400 keywords without becoming a twitter partner. Use your application to authorize more twitter users and use those auth tokens for each 400 or (399 to be safe) keywords being tracked.

Storing Tweets Rapidly:

This concept is directly related to speed and redundancy. First of all if you are tracking a lot of keywords, users, or whatever you may be doing. Twitter is going to be sending those to your application in great abundance and rapidly. In one of my applications we were getting in 1000 tweets a second. Now the key is to handle that amount of data is not to process every tweet right when you get them in. You want to save the tweets coming in as fast as possible and insure that they will be processed and that involves just doing one thing, saving them into a database or file.

In a previous app I was building we were using MongoDB and that worked great. Basically just converted the tweet coming in, into an array and then inserting the array directly into the MongoDB. This was fast and worked great.

Once the tweets are queued you want to processes them. To really benefit from Twitter's Streaming API, you want to process the tweets in the queue as fast as you can. If you can keep the queue count at zero, then you are golden.

Using a queue helps you prevent your application from losing tweets and creates an efficient way for processing tweets.

Conclusion:

Planning is key. Think about how you are going to integrate Twitter's Streaming API. Write clean and efficient code. Speed and redundancy is key.

Notes:

Last but definitely not least, use Phirehose for ease of use.

If you have any questions or need any help on a project send me a message, I am available for hire.

[thecodeslayer-blog-blog]

Javascript Convert First Letter In Each Word to Uppercase

Title says it. Just a simple javascript that converts the first letter in each word to uppercase. Enjoy.

http://codepad.co/s/cd4066

function capFirst(string){ var newString = ''; string = string.toLowerCase(); strings = string.split(' '); for(var i = 0; i < strings.length; i++){ newString = newString + ' ' + strings[i].charAt(0).toUpperCase() + strings[i].slice(1); } return newString; }

[thecodeslayer-blog-blog]

Array Conversion Helper for PHP

So today I decided to create a class that does several things. All of which are related to arrays. Here is a list of what this class can be used for:

Converting an Object to an Array

Converting an Array to an Object

Converting an Array (keys and values) to lower case

Converting an Array (keys) to lower case

Converting an Array (values) to lower case

Converting an Array (keys and values) to upper case

Converting an Array (keys) to upper case

Converting an Array (values) to upper case

<?php //Converts objects to arrays, arrays to objects, array strings to lower case, and array strings to upper case //Works with Multi-Demensional arrays and objects class arrayConverter { //Converts objects to arrays //pass an array to this function function object_2_array($object){ $array = array(); foreach ($object as $key => $value) { if (is_array($value) || is_object($value)) { $array[$key] = $this->object_2_array($value); } else { $array[$key] = $value; } } return $array; } //Converts array to object //pass an array to this function function array_2_object($array){ if(!is_array($array)){ return $array; } $object = new stdClass(); if(is_array($array) && !empty($array)){ foreach($array as $key => $value){ if(is_array($value)){ $object->$key = $this->array_2_object($value); }else{ $object->$key = $value; } } return $object; }else{ return false; } } //Convert array keys and values to lower case //Works with objects and arrays function array_to_lower($array){ if(is_object($array)){ $array = $this->object_2_array($array); $convertBackToObject = true; }else{ $convertBackToObject = false; } $newArray = array(); foreach($array as $key => $value){ $key = strtolower($key); if(is_array($value)){ $newArray[$key] = $this->array_to_lower($value); }else{ $newArray[$key] = strtolower($value); } } if($convertBackToObject){ return $this->array_2_object($newArray); }else{ return $newArray; } } //Convert array keys to lower //Works with objects and arrays function array_keys_to_lower($array){ if(is_object($array)){ $array = $this->object_2_array($array); $convertBackToObject = true; }else{ $convertBackToObject = false; } $newArray = array(); foreach($array as $key => $value){ $key = strtolower($key); if(is_array($value)){ $newArray[$key] = $this->array_keys_to_lower($value); }else{ $newArray[$key] = $value; } $newArray[$key] = $value; } if($convertBackToObject){ return $this->array_2_object($newArray); }else{ return $newArray; } } //Convert array values to lower case //Works with objects and arrays function array_values_to_lower($array){ if(is_object($array)){ $array = $this->object_2_array($array); $convertBackToObject = true; }else{ $convertBackToObject = false; } $newArray = array(); foreach($array as $key => $value){ if(is_array($value)){ $newArray[$key] = $this->array_values_to_lower($value); }else{ $newArray[$key] = strtolower($value); } } if($convertBackToObject){ return $this->array_2_object($newArray); }else{ return $newArray; } } //Convert array keys and values to lower case //Works with objects and arrays function array_to_upper($array){ if(is_object($array)){ $array = $this->object_2_array($array); $convertBackToObject = true; }else{ $convertBackToObject = false; } $newArray = array(); foreach($array as $key => $value){ $key = strtoupper($key); if(is_array($value)){ $newArray[$key] = $this->array_to_upper($value); }else{ $newArray[$key] = strtoupper($value); } } if($convertBackToObject){ return $this->array_2_object($newArray); }else{ return $newArray; } } //Convert array keys to lower //Works with objects and arrays function array_keys_to_upper($array){ if(is_object($array)){ $array = $this->object_2_array($array); $convertBackToObject = true; }else{ $convertBackToObject = false; } $newArray = array(); foreach($array as $key => $value){ $key = strtoupper($key); if(is_array($value)){ $newArray[$key] = $this->array_keys_to_upper($value); }else{ $newArray[$key] = $value; } $newArray[$key] = $value; } if($convertBackToObject){ return $this->array_2_object($newArray); }else{ return $newArray; } } //Convert array values to lower case //Works with objects and arrays function array_values_to_upper($array){ if(is_object($array)){ $array = $this->object_2_array($array); $convertBackToObject = true; }else{ $convertBackToObject = false; } $newArray = array(); foreach($array as $key => $value){ if(is_array($value)){ $newArray[$key] = $this->array_values_to_upper($value); }else{ $newArray[$key] = strtoupper($value); } } if($convertBackToObject){ return $this->array_2_object($newArray); }else{ return $newArray; } } } ?>

[thecodeslayer-blog-blog]

FindAndModify Query for Mongo in PHP

If anyone has ever wondered what the quickest way to find a document and at the same time remove the document from that collection with MongoDB and PHP. This is the solution you need:

<?php $found = $coll->command(array('findandmodify' => '', 'query' => array('name' => 'superman'), 'sort' => array('created' => -1),'limit' => 1, 'remove' => true)); ?>

The documentation for this can be found here on the mongodb site.

[thecodeslayer-blog-blog]

Using the MongoId as the Created Date

On my current project, we have been making improvements to our mongo database by removing unneeded indexes. We store a created date in one of our collections and we were sorting and grabbing documents using that date. However that isn't really needed in this situation since the way Mongo's unique id is created. So first lets go into how MongoId's are created, every MongoId has 4 things:

A 4-byte UNIX timestamp

Machine-Id

Process Id

An increment value 

All of those values are compiled into one string to make it a unique id. That string is created into an object, which becomes the id. Check out this link for more info: MongoId Documentation

We needed the created date for two reasons:

To sort by most recent

To get documents that were created since a specified date

The solution for the first one is easy. To sort by created date, assuming that the date hasn't changed since the actual creation of that document, you basically just sort by the '_id' by using $cursor->sort(array( '_id' : '1' )) [ASC] or $cursor->sort(array( '_id' : '-1' )) [DESC]. This works since the first four bytes in the id are a UNIX timestamp.

The solution for the second one was a little more complex. Basically, you pull a certain amount of documents from the collection and then filter out the documents that are older then the specified date and grab more documents if necessary. Here is an example of the code for this:

function getDocuments($name, $params = array()){ global $coll; //this is the condition in the query    $conditions['name'] = $name; //limit can be anything you want $limit = 10;    $offset = isset($params['offset']) ? $params['offset'] : 0; //order them by the created date    $order = array('_id' => '-1'); //run the query (This may differ)    $documents = $coll->find($conditions)->sort($order)->limit($limit)->skip->($offset); //convert mongo cursor object to an array - not required but remember but to make the required changes this function $documents = iterator_to_array($documents);    //add a fail safe if(empty($documents) || count($documents) == 0){   return array(); } //prepare values for passing into array_filter function    $this->since = $params['since'];    $_this = $this; //filter the documents to get rid of ones that a before the since date $documents =  array_filter($documents, function($doc) use ($_this) {      $since = $_this->since; if (isset($since) && !is_null($since)){ if($since->sec < $doc['created']->sec){ return true; }else{ return false; } }else{ return false; } }); //If the number of documents returned equal the limit then re-iterate through this function to process more. WARNING: This is possibly and endless loop if(count($documents) == $limit){ $params['offset'] = $offset + $limit; //potential infinite loop $more = $this->getDocuments($name, $params); foreach($more as $doc){ $documents[] = $doc; } } //return the documents return $documents; }

[thecodeslayer-blog-blog]

Here is the photo where I got the idea for this blog name.

[thecodeslayer-blog-blog]

Downgrade PHP Mongo Driver

So recently I upgraded to the Mongo PHP Driver 1.2.7 - however we ran into some problems our Amazon Web Server. We were getting a 324 Empty Response Error or a white page. So after hours of trying to figure out what the problem was we finally decided to downgrade the driver. I couldn't really find a good resource on how to downgrade the driver on a Unix Server. Anyways, lets get to the code because you probably aren't reading this anyways, here is the code.

sudo mkdir ~/mongo_install cd ~/mongo_install sudo wget http://pecl.php.net/get/mongo-1.2.6.tgz sudo tar zxvf mongo-1.2.6.tgz cd mongo-1.2.6 sudo phpize sudo ./configure sudo make install sudo apachectl -k restart

Enjoy :) Hopefully this works for you guys. If it doesn't let me know and I will help you guys out.