December 2009

The disappointment of cordless mice

The disappointment of cordless mice

Submitted by shane on Thu, 2009-12-03 17:56

I've test driven several cordless mice in the last few years. All of them Logitech because I'm biased. I really, really, hate cords. They just clutter the desk area up and seem to be less important as time goes on. I really thought that the cordless mice had "arrived" and were just as good as their corded counterparts. Wrong. While most applications will find a wireless mouse to meet their needs just fine, I'm on the computer a solid 8-10 hours a day, little things add up and turn into a big deal. Here they are in order of usage.

Magento and setroubleshoot causing certain pages to die.

Magento and setroubleshoot causing certain pages to die.

Submitted by shane on Fri, 2009-12-04 20:40

Some pages in Magento were giving just a white page, with no indication of errors in Zend Server console or log files. This was apparently a memory issue, so I restarted the web server and all was fine.

One issue I noticed was the server "setroubleshoot" was taking 12% of the systems memory. This program just logs issues with SELinux and it seems SELinux doesn't like my Magento install. I have SELinux just set to 'warn', but I may want to disable it all together. I stopped the 'setroubleshoot' program and turned it off with chkconfig.

Developing in jQuery? Use $.dump instead of alert

Developing in jQuery? Use $.dump instead of alert

Submitted by shane on Wed, 2009-12-09 04:17

I just ran into the $.dump jQuery plugin. It sure makes troubleshooting and figuring out jQuery a whole lot easier. Here is how you include it in your page.

  • Download the plugin at here
  • Include it in your HTML like so
    <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.dump.js"></script>
  • Now just include $.dump(object) somewhere and replace object with an object you want more information on

The pop-window you will get

A handy little SQL statement

A handy little SQL statement

Submitted by shane on Thu, 2009-12-31 11:22

Have a look at the following SQL

SET @salt=SUBSTRING(MD5(RAND()),-20);

This will set a variable called @salt that has a random string of 20 characters.