Just a quick note, be careful when using the whitespace character \s in preg_match when operating with UTF-8 strings. Suppose you have a string containing a dagger symbol. When you try to strip all whitespace from the string like this, you will end up with an invalid UTF-8 character: $ php -r 'echo preg_replace("#\s#", "", [...]

Today I had the need to restore single objects from a mongodb installation. mongodb offers two tools for this mongodump and mongorestore, both of which seem to be designed to only dump and restore whole collections. So I'll demonstrate the workflow just to restore a bunch of objects. Maybe it's a clumsy way, but we'll [...]

I use trac for quite a few projects of mine. Recently I tried to find a plugin for deciding which features to implement next. Usually trac hacks has something in store for that, but not this time. I wanted to be able to create a ticket and then collect user feedback as comments for the [...]

Just to add to the speculation about the causes of the 2011 alarm clock bug of iOS where the one-time alarms would not activate on January 1 and January 2, 2011. My guess is that the code that sets off the alarm takes day, month and year into account when checking whether the alarm should [...]

I have been using Mac OS X as my primary operating system for a few years now, and only today I have found a very neat way to debug PHP code, like it is common for application code (i.e. stepping through code for debugging purposes). The solution is a combination of Xdebug and MacGDBp. I [...]

Whenever a new version of WordPress comes out (as just WordPress 2.6 did), it is somewhat of a pain to upgrade it. But not for me anymore, because I have created a small (and simple) script some versions ago which I would like to share with you. $ cat upgrade_wordpress.sh wget http://www.wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz mv www wordpress [...]

I am only scratching my own itch here, but maybe someone can use it or expand from it. I just always found annoying that pear run-tests tab gives all files instead of just *.phpt. This is what this snippet actually does. Paste this into the file /opt/local/etc/bash_completion on OSX (for me it is just before [...]

I'd like to introduce you to this great book by Steve Souders. There already have been several reports on the Internet about it, for example on the Yahoo Developers Blog. There is also a video of Steve Souders talking about the book. The book is structured into 14 rules, which, when applied properly, can vastly [...]

Use svn merge -rhead:{date} to go back in time with a file

Note that this is an updated version. Original version can be found here. Thanks to the commenters I have updated this post with some better tricks. In a loose series I'd like to point out a few of them. As I am currently mostly programming in JavaScript, I will write most of my samples in [...]

Note that there is an updated version I have been programming for about 10 years now, and I am always longing for improving my code. Throughout time I added a few habbits that I consider to be good practices and increase the quality of my code. In a loose series I'd like to point out [...]