Jay Versluis Before we execute a shell command from PHP it’s a good idea to test if the server will respond to it. We can do this by making use of the empty() function. The following example consists of a helper function you can call before executing the command in question. Then we call it with the … Read more
If we’re executing shell commands via PHP we need to know if the server is running Windows or Linux. Thanks to a magic constant in PHP we can find out like this: echo PHP_OS; This will give us a single value like Linux Darwin Windows WINNT With that info at hand, we can write a … Read more
How to install Mac OS X onto an external drive
I love the WP Code Highlight plugin by BoLiQuan. It brings well deserved colour to code blocks wrapped in PRE tags. I use them a lot, but until I discovered this plugin they all looked grey and bland. Since last year I was using them on my iOS Dev Diary and thought since both sites … Read more
I’ve decided to start using Google Plus more in 2014. Thanks to JetPack 2.7 it’s a breeze to publish my posts on Google Plus without having to share them manually. What I’ve noticed though was that by default all my posts were appearing as “privately shared” only. As I’d like the widest audience possible I … Read more
Sometimes you want to tell the user that something’s happening behind the scenes and that there’s no need to panic. While your process is happening you can display a “spinning gear” in the middle of your screen. One way of doing this is via a UIActivityIndicatorView. You can create them in Interface Builder, but it’s […]
As much as I appreciate the idea of Auto Layout, I don’t think it likes me very much. In turn, I don’t like Auto Layout very much. The pain and hassle it takes to make several UI elements fit well on a 4 inch screen as well as a 3.5 inch screen regularly drives me […]
It has puzzled many generations how to get rid of the keyboard when the user is done entering text into an iOS text field. There doesn’t seem to be an obvious action we can attach to make this happen. That’s because rather than looking at the keyboard itself, we need to look at what actually […]