FettesPS » Programming

Uninstalling Visual Studio’s Productivity Power Tools

FettesPS — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 04:00:52 +0000

Took me far too long to find this option. Powertools had some annoying quirks that I just couldn’t get passed and I wasn’t using any of it’s good features. Plus either it or the SP1 upgrade has left Visual Studio 2010 in a less than stable state, I find it crashing several times a day. So today I have removed Productivity Power Tools using the following method:

Tools -> Extension Manager -> Productivity Power Tools -> Uninstall

How to Reset a Drupal 7 Password

FettesPS — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 01:41:17 +0000

After abandoning one of my Drupal 7 sites for some time I decided to buy a domain for it and start working on it again. I immediately ran into a case of “Oops I forgot the password” and could not log in, eventually getting my account locked out. This is what happens every time I try and come up with a more clever password. Unlike in previous versions of Drupal it’s not a matter of just slapping an MD5 around a password when updating the database. With Drupal 7 you have to make use of a salted sha512 hash, the easiest way to do that is to create a file in your installation server with the password you want to convert and when you run it you will get your encrypted password echoed out to you. Simple enough! So here’s the code:

Simple browse to this file in your web browser and it will output your new salted password. Take that password and then go into PHPMyAdmin (or your favourite MySQL client) and then browse to your users table, there you can paste it in as the new password. Make sure not to use the password() or md5() functions when editing the field as it needs to be stored as plain text.

Thanks to Conclusion on Drupal.org for presenting this conclusion.

Ajax – Post Multiple Select Values

FettesPS — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 11:12:41 +0000

So this form is pretty basic, it has a select box (list box) filled with possible values. You can select all or some of the values and then submit it to the server via Ajax. The problem was when I grabbed the value from the select box I only got the last value selected, not each. Regardless of if I was using POST or GET I still had to build the parameter list since that’s how XMLHttpRequest works. So I looped through the list and tried using the same parameter name for each, then on the PHP end I had the same result — each parameter overwrote the previous one and I saw only the last result. It wasn’t until I stumbled upon this post that someone gave a decent suggestion, which was to put a [] at the end of each parameter name when building the query string and PHP would automatically interpret it as an array. Since his code was somewhat over complicated I thought I’d share my version of it:

test-utility.php



    Test Utility
    


    Test Utility



    ">
        
            Error: 
        
    

    
    
    
        
            Listbox(s):


            (Hold CTRL to
select multiple)

test-utility.js

function select_all() {
    var d = document.getElementById("listbox");
        for(var i=0;i

    // For modern browsers
    if(window.XMLHttpRequest) {
        xmlhttp = new XMLHttpRequest();

    // for IE 5/6
    } else {
        xmlhttp = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
    }

    //  Rebuild the array of selected option boxes
    lb = document.getElementById("listbox");
    for(var i=0; i < lb.length; i++) {
        if(lb[i].selected) {
            // Note the [] after the name
            url += "&lb[]=" + lb[i].value;
        }
    }

    xmlhttp.open("GET","test-utility-ajax.php" + url, false);
    xmlhttp.send();

    if (xmlhttp.status == 200) {
        document.getElementById("ajax_results").innerHTML = xmlhttp.responseText;
    } else {
        return false;
    }

    return false;
}

test-utility-ajax.phpbr>

Download MSINET.OCX

FettesPS — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 22:07:33 +0000

Have an old Visual Basic 6 legacy application that is demanding MSINET.OCX in order to run?. Here is a copy of Microsoft’s redistributable run time file for VB6:

Download MSINET.OCX

After you have downloaded the file, you can either place it in your C:\Windows\System32 (or C:\Windows\SysWow64 on an x64 system) and register it there or you may want to put it directly into your application’s directory and create a .local file so that the application does not look beyond it’s own folder for the file.

To register the file, open up command prompt (Win+R then cmd) and enter:

regsvr32 "C:\Windows\System32\MSINET.OCX"

If you are going to use the .local file, just create an empty text file in that directory with the same name as your application but a .local extension appended. So for example if you had a file called “MyApp.exe” you would create an empty text file called “MyApp.exe.local” Make sure if you have hidden extensions that it is not secretely adding “.txt” to the end of the file name.

Download MSWINSCK.OCX

FettesPS — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 23:55:53 +0000

Anyone who still works with Visual Basic 6 for legacy applications will inevitably run into an issue where a customer’s computer needs MSWINSOCK.OCX in order to run their application. You could install the entire VB6 runtime files package or you may chose to redistribute this one file with your software. In any case, I wanted to make sure this file was available for those who need it.

Download MSWINSCK.OCX

To register the file, open up command prompt (Win+R then cmd) and enter:

regsvr32 "C:\Windows\System32\MSWINSCK.OCX"

Fixing Wp-dbmanager’s Database Visibility Error

FettesPS — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 02:51:53 +0000

I’ve been on a bit of a new plugin craze as of lately, started searching for people’s favourites and came up with a few good ones I had not seen. Today I tried out wp-dbmanager, which I may have never noticed due to it’s non flashy name. Despite it’s non flashiness it definitely does what it promised and a whole lot more than what I had expected. In addition to automating database backups and optimizations it also gives me direct access to my WordPress database and a query editor saving me from having to log into phpMyAdmin. But despite all this plugin’s strengths I was a bit peeved by the following error popping up everywhere in my admin panel:

Your backup folder MIGHT be visible to the public

To correct this issue, move the .htaccess file from wp-content/plugins/wp-dbmanager to /wp-content/backup-db

Sounded simple to me, but I got snagged when I found there was no .htaccess file in that folder. I also was stumbling over not noticing that backup-db was two directories down from the wp-dbmanager not one, but that was my own carelessness. What needed to be noticed was that there was an .htaccess file it just was not named .htaccess as the error message indicated. Rather the file was called htaccess.txt, which completely slipped past my scans of the directories looking for it. It wasn’t until I was about to give up that and just deal with the error (as the folder was not visible from the web anyways) and then I noticed it. So the correct line you’d need to run from the wp-dbmanager folder is:

mv htaccess.txt ../../backup-db/.htaccess

Once that’s done, refresh your admin panel and the error should be gone! Now you’re free to use the power of this impressive plugin without being nagged to secure that folder!

Fixing WordPress’ “W3 Total Cache Error: some files appear to be missing or out of place” Error

FettesPS — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 02:25:43 +0000

Today I used the automated plug-in installer to install W3 Total Cache which resulted in my page doing nothing but spitting out a nasty error. Since I did not want to spend time debugging their plug-in and had immediately lost faith in them for not properly handling their errors I went ahead and nuked the folder in the plugins directory. That left me staring at this nasty error:

W3 Total Cache Error: some files appear to be missing or out of place [...]

Hmmm… “Not cool,” I thought to myself. At least it seemed to be confined to the admin panel and my site was now back up and running from the user’s perspective I still had to try and fix this error without taking down the site again.

The initial suggestion made by the error description was to delete advanced-cache.php from your wp-content folder. I went ahead and renamed it to advanced-cache.php.bak and was then told by the next error that I should delete db.php. At this point I decided to do some more research and see what my best options were, and for hte time being I reinstated the advanced-cache.php file from it’s backup.

My search results on disabling a plug-in through the database all told me to look in the wp_options table and under the active_plugins field. In there was a serialized array containing each of the active plugins. I searched for “w3″ and removed everything between the semi-colons for that plugin:

Remove:

i:12;s:33:"w3-total-cache/w3-total-cache.php";

At the start of the active_plugins field is an a: with a number beside it, this is your total number of enabled plugins. None of the sites I had dug up on disabling a plugin from this table mentioned this and the typically suggested wiping the entire line out to just a:0:{} which is not necessary.

After updating that field I was still presented with a message suggesting I delete the cache file. So I did the same and backed up each file it told me to (instead of deleting, as it suggested). In the end three files needed to be backed up.

Disable and Backup Some Files:

mv advanced-cache.php mv advanced-cache.php.bak
mv db.php db.php.bak
mv object-cache.php object-cache.php.bak

After refreshing my admin panel I once was able to log in to manage the site. Crisis averted! After a few days when I’m confident my site is stable I will delete the backups.

Adding Line Breaks to an HTML Input Button

FettesPS — Tue, 31 May 2011 04:36:18 +0000

I ran into a small little quirk today when trying to add a line break to a simple Input Button. All of the methods that immediately came to mind failed. I tried adding a
however it literally printed that tag out between my words. I also tried forcing a new line with \n which did the same thing, spit it out literally. I tried tweaking the CSS and had nothing but unexpected results as well. Eventually I tried adding several extra spaces between the words, hoping that it would force it to word wrap — but instead it printed out each space literally. Then it occurred to me, if it’s not ignoring extra white space like HTML normally does, will it not ignore a line break? Sure enough, it was that simple. To break the text up in your HTML Input Buttons all you have to do is tap the enter key and make sure the line of code is broken into several lines.

Wrong:

Right:

How To Get Your Drupal Site Out of Maintenance Mode

FettesPS — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 12:53:29 +0000

After getting hit with some serious forum spam I put my one Drupal site into maintenance and forgot about it for a couple of weeks. When I came back to update it to the newest Drupal version I found that I had been logged out and no longer got a menu with it in maintenance. I knew that in WordPress I could add /wp-admin/ to the URL to get to a login screen but I didn’t know the equivalent for Drupal.

To log into your “under maintenance” Drupal site simply append /?q=user to your address

http://www.yoursite.com/?q=user

From there you can log in and take your site out of maintenance mode, or apply whatever tweaks you need to perform.

PHP – Converting an Array to JSON

FettesPS — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 13:09:01 +0000

Every now and then I stumble upon a tidbit of information that just makes me want to kick myself. Today was one of those days. Just by chance I ended up at an entry on PHP.net while Googling another issue. Once I realized what this function was capable of I was torn between thinking “Wow, this is awesome!” and “Wow, I’m a dumbass!”

$array = array (
    'alpha'=>4,
    'beta'=>9,
    'gamma'=>3
);
echo json_encode($array)

You should then see something like the following:

{"alpha":4,"beta":9,"gamma":3}

If you were manually processing the array and building a JSON object like I was, assume the face palm position.