The well-known approach for checking whether path exists, in Unix, is: “if [ -e $path ]” condition. However, contrary to popular belief, “-e” does not always work. The “-e” check works for folders, files etc with one exception: if there’s a broken symlink on the path, it won’t recognize that. Which makes sense: broken symlink...

There has been increasing amount of complain about how Drupal is ugly or not designer friendly yadda, yadda, yadda. Well, sure - it’s not WordPress, because it is much more complex and used for building much more complex websites. Neither do I, personally, think should it try to copy WordPress. Whilst there’s always room for...

Since “svn update” is a subset of “svn merge” you can use something like:\ svn merge --dry-run -r BASE:HEAD . (Source: http://translocator.ws/2005/10/12/svn-update-dry-run) The only downside is that ‘svn merge’ does not quite work like ‘svn update’ in the sense that you can not run ‘svn merge’ from outside the workspace. E.g. if I have several...

We all have come to love and admire jQuery for the amazing Javascript library it is. But we also have fallen in love with numerous extensions to jQuery; plugins, modules - whatever you call ‘em. Most of us, however, just use these goodies and bless the hearts of all wonderful people who make the gems...

Turn on: Preferences -> Messages -> Collect chats into a single window and restart iChat. The problem should go away.

It is only available in the top-level theme as a variable, but in case you need to derive the same value from the View object, per se, here it is: $view->display[$view->current_display]->handler->get_path();

> perl -i -pe 's/oldname_/newname_/g' `find | grep "\.module$"` Or if you want to first check the results: > perl -pi.bak -e 's/oldname_/newname_/g' `find | grep "\.module$"` which will create backup of original files. Those you can delete later with: > find . -name "*.bak" -exec rm -rf {} \; You can replace “.module” with...

Imagine a situation: you accidentally “svn removed” an entire directory tree from SVN. If the tree contained uncommitted code you can restore it from the backup, but you also need to restore things that were in the SVN. You can approach it multiple ways, but arguably the cleanest way is to simply revert to the...

People who know me know that I am the last person on earth to be a Microsoft fan. I have my reasons to be a tough critic of the Redmond company, but something that I did not expect to happen, has happened recently and giving well-deserved credit to them is due. The name is Bing...

PHP error messages are quite helpful, most of the time. Sometimes they do fall short of telling us what went wrong, however. It’s especially common when and if you use a development framework (e.g. Drupal). Frameworks often do output buffering and/or code eval()-ing, making debugger output incomprehensible. In such cases PHP’s debug_backtrace() function is a...

OS-X Leopard comes pre-installed with a Postfix version. No need to install it via darwin ports or other such mess (actually uninstall it if you have previously manually installed it via ports or something similar). Postfix just needs to be enabled and following sequence of several easy steps explains how to do it: sudo vi...

If you have misfortune of having to upgrade Drupal5 website to Drupal6, there’s a very good chance that at some point you will run into a fatal error: Fatal error: Unsupported operand types in... Fatal errors are never fun, but this one is particularly annoying and hard to hunt down. It helps to understand the...

UPDATE: instructions for Espresso 2.0 at: http://freshblurbs.com/espresso-and-syntax-highlight-custom-file-formats Espresso From MacRabbit (you may remember them for their splendid CSSEdit eidtor) is a new Web editor, for Macs, worth paying attention to. It handles the usual suspects: PHP, CSS, HTML, servers over SFTP, Amazon S3 etc with style out of the box and has numerous extensions for...

Blog post about the new World Bank API, how we designed it, why we are excited about it and why you could be, too: http://www.agileapproach.com/blog-entry/world-bank-api-20-launch

Drupal requires its source documentation to be compatible with DoxyGen. If you are working on a large project, you want to install DoxyGen and run it on cron to have nice, up-to-date API docs. Unfortunatley, if you install Doxygen via yum (or any other auto-updater, I assume) it installs a fairly old 1.4.x branch that...