Page Scroller plugin

http://pagescroller.com/

Convert MySQL content from one encoding to another

This is an example to convert from latin-1 to utf-8. I used this to convert the content of old wordpress mysql database to true utf-8 content.

# Dump the old database in its original encoding (latin1 in this example)
mysqldump --default-character-set=latin1 SOURCE_DATABASE > db.sql

# Replace sql code to reflect new encoding (utf8 in this example)
sed -e 's/SET NAMES latin1/SET NAMES utf8/g' -i db.sql
sed -e 's/CHARSET=latin1/CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_unicode_ci/g' -i db.sql

# Import the db.sql into the database (which must be created with the correct new encoding)
mysql --default-character-set=utf8 -u root -p TARGET_DATABASE < db.sql

Noty looks good

http://needim.github.com/noty/

ACF is awesomeone

http://www.advancedcustomfields.com

Apache VirtualDocumentRoot for wildcard virtualhosts

<VirtualHost *:80>
    UseCanonicalName Off
    VirtualDocumentRoot /mnt/projects/%1/public
    ServerName subdomains.starfall.local
    ServerAlias *.starfall.local
</VirtualHost>

<Directory /mnt/projects/*/public>
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

Now you might run into infinite redirect issue if use together with mod_rewrite. Add this line in the mod_rewrite .htaccess file for each folder under /mnt/projects to stop this.

RewriteBase /

Update:
The similar effect can be achieved via mod_rewrite. Put this into /etc/apache2/httpd.conf, or apache2.conf but it needs to be loaded first before virtualhost/conf.d. The point here is to let virtualhost config to override this wildcard.

<VirtualHost *:80>
    UseCanonicalName Off
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/icons/
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(.*)\.starfall.local$
    RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ /mnt/projects/%1/public/$1
</VirtualHost>

You may still need to add “RewriteBase /” in case of infinite redirect.

From what I tested this new method handles:
- allow wildcard request to point to /mnt/projects/SUBDOMAIN_NAME/public
- it doesn’t not interfere with subsequent rewrite rule usually present in .htaccess

Push local git repo to a remote server

So this is how to put local repository onto a remote “central” version control repository:

On remote server (note the “–bare” is important otherwise you won’t be able to push):

mkdir /home/vincent/projects/repo.git
cd /home/vincent/projects/repo.git/
git init --bare

On local, cd into the local repo directory first

git remote add origin ssh://username@remoteserver/home/vincent/projects/repo.git
git push origin master

In future you can just clone:

git clone ssh://username@remoteserver/home/vincent/projects/repo.git

jQuery Performance Tips

http://dumitruglavan.com/jquery-performance-tips-cheat-sheet/

Some notes from reddit:

#6 There is little to no performance difference between a cached selector and chaining. The ONLY difference would be shorter code (less bandwidth used?).

#9 This is just plain wrong. DOM manipulation can be extremely fast if you know what you are doing. He uses this example

The faster way to do this would be

frag = $('<ul id="menu"></ul>');
listItem = $('<li></li>')
for (var i = 1; i < 100; i++) {
  frag.append(listItem.clone().text(i));
}
$('#header').prepend(frag);

#14 Use jQuery’s utility functions
“.each(), for example, relies on anonymous function calls. This can be REALLY slow”

#15 not really much of a performance tip
#16 is REALLY finicky and hard to profile.

Git deploy script

The script grab new files (after “git add”) and modified files and copy them to a new directory “deploy”.

git status | grep "modified\|new file" | awk '{print $3}' | while read file; do mkdir -p `dirname deploy/"$file"`; cp $file deploy/$file; done

Or, use this to create the deploy folder for commits done in the last 2 days: (the code may generate some error output saying certain files don’t exist, because it’s trying to copy the files you deleted in commits, they are harmless just too lazy to put check in)

git whatchanged --since "2 days ago" | grep ^: | awk '{print $6}' | sort | uniq -c | awk '{print $2}' | while read file; do mkdir -p `dirname deploy/"$file"`; cp $file deploy/$file; done

Two interesting jQuery plugins

jScrollPane

ColorBox

Highcharts

http://www.highcharts.com/

Django production server

Install

sudo apt-get install python-django libapache2-mod-wsgi python-mysqldb python-setuptools

Virtualhost

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName tang.local
WSGIDaemonProcess snake display-name=%{GROUP}
WSGIProcessGroup snake
WSGIScriptAlias / /mnt/host/snake/apache/django.wsgi

Alias /static  /mnt/host/snake/static
</VirtualHost>

WSGI script

import os
import sys
sys.path.append('/mnt/host')
sys.path.append('/mnt/host/snake')
os.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE'] = 'snake.settings'

import django.core.handlers.wsgi
application = django.core.handlers.wsgi.WSGIHandler()

Generate git change log

git whatchanged --since "2 month ago" | grep ^: | awk '{print $6}' | sort | uniq -c | awk '{print $2}' > change.log

Monospaced Fonts for Programming

Some nice monospaced fonts.

• Consolas.ttf
• Mensch.ttf
• Terminus.ttf
• Inconsolata.ttf
• Monaco.ttf

Managing apache folder

The goal here is to allow apache process as well as multiple developers to have read and write permission to all apache files.

What I’m currently doing is:
- Add a new group “dev”

addgroup dev

- Add www-data (or whatever your apache runner user is) to the group “dev”

adduser www-data dev

- Add all developers to the group “dev”

adduser vincent dev
adduser anotherdev dev

- Change apache user “www-data” and all developers’ default group to “dev”

vim /etc/passwd
# each line is a user:
# username:x:userid:groupid:userinfo:script
# now change groupid from the default user group to the groupid of "dev"

- Change umask to 002 (all developers on ssh, all developers on sftp, and www-data)

vim /etc/profile
# change umask to 002
vim /etc/ssh/sshd_config
# change Subsystem to:
Subsystem sftp /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server -u 0002
vim /etc/apache2/envvars
# add
umask 002

- Change all apache folders to www-data:dev, 775 and files to www-data:dev, 664

chown www-data:dev /home/www-data -R
chmod 775 /home/www-data
find /home/www-data/* -type d -exec chmod 775 {} \;
find /home/www-data/* -type f -exec chmod 664 {} \;

CSS3 based jQuery Gallery

Flux Gallery

YUI Compressor for JavaScript

# $1 input file
# $2 output file
java -jar yuicompressor.jar $1 -o $2

yuicompressor.jar is attached.
source: http://yuilibrary.com/download/yuicompressor/

Google event tracking

$(document).ready( function() {
    // add an event to all link for google analytics
    $('a').click(function () {
        // tell analytics to save event
        try {
            var identifier=$(this).attr('id') ;
            var href=$(this).attr('href')
            var label="";
            if ( typeof( identifier ) != 'undefined' ) {
                label=label+'[id]:'+identifier
                category='JSLink'
            }
            if ( typeof( href ) != 'undefined' ) {
                label=label+' [href]:'+href
                if ( href[0] == '#' ) {
                    category='Anchor';
                } else {
                    category='Link';
                }
            }
            _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', category, 'clicked', label]);
            // console.log('[tracked]: ' + category + ' ; clicked ; ' + label );
        }
        catch (err) {
            // console.log(err);
        }

        // pause to allow google script to run
        var date = new Date();
        var curDate = null;
        do {
            curDate = new Date();
        } while (curDate-date < 300);
    });
});

Source: External blog

Make JavaScript calls within ActionScript 3

import flash.external.ExternalInterface;
var returnedValue:int = ExternalInterface.call("foobar()", "argument");

Learn Vim Progressively

Source

Best practice for loading jquery, and other JavaScript libs

<script type="text/javascript" src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/VERSION.NUMBER/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">window.jQuery || document.write('<script src="js/jquery.js" type="text/javascript">\x3C/script>')</script>