Step 1. Configure a type A domain record by using a wildcard and a fixed sub-domain name like:

*.lab    A    127.0.0.1

( why didn’t I think of that x_X )

Step 2. Enable mod_vhost_alias in Apache if not already active.

Step 3. Configure a virtual host and use the wildcards from mod_vhost_alias to your liking, for example

<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1:80>
    ServerName lab.yourdomain.com
    VirtualDocumentRoot /var/my_flexible_friends/%1
</VirtualHost>

would redirect myproject.lab.yourdomain.com to 127.0.0.1 and serve pages from /var/my_flexible_friends/myproject but would also redirect jquery.lab.yourdomain.com to 127.0.0.1 and serve pages from /var/my_flexible_friends/jquery.

Just look at the mod_vhost_alias documentation for more possibilities.
Also a nice consistent setup to share in development teams.

If you happen to stumble upon apache error messages like ‘Request exceeded the limit of 10 internal redirects due to probable configuration error.’, just change your .htaccess file by added the rule RewriteBase /. This will most likely happen when you are using the windows hosts file instead of a real domain.

See also Stackoverflow Infinite Rewrite Loop

SetEnv APPLICATION_ENV development
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -s [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -l [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^.*$ index.php [NC,L]

OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea6 1.9.10) (6b20-1.9.10-0ubuntu1~10.04.2)
OpenJDK Client VM (build 19.0-b09, mixed mode, sharing)
WARNING: You are launching IDE using OpenJDK Java runtime

THIS IS STRICTLY UNSUPPORTED DUE TO KNOWN PERFORMANCE AND GRAPHICS PROBLEMS

NOTE: If you have both Sun JDK and OpenJDK installed
please validate either WEBIDE_JDK or JDK_HOME environment variable points to valid Sun JDK installation

Ubuntu Sun (Oracle) Java Installation Guide

sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner"
sudo apt-get update
aptitude install sun-java6-jdk
sudo update-alternatives --config java

@method Magic Properties

@property Magic Methods

/**
* $args may contain the following keys:
* - var1:
* - var2:
*
* @param array @args
* @return void
*/

Items prefixed with a ‘- ‘ will be treated as bullets by phpDocumentor.

source: zend framework community

I’m currently piloting PhpStorm because I had some issues with Zend Studio, it’s interesting to notice that a phpdoc line like:

/*
 * @return Foo[]
 */
function getList() {
   $f = array();
   $f[] = new Foo();
   ...
   return $f;
}

triggers auto-completion in PhpStorm when looping over the return value like:

$list = $this->getList();
foreach($list as $l) {
    $l->(starts auto-completion ...)
}

Examples (Windows):

zf create project ./
zf create module test
zf create controller Test index-action-included=1 test

Remarks:
- The Zend Tool will maintain a xml based configuration file called ‘.zfproject.xml’, do not remove!
- Zend Tool is case sensitive, thus “zf create module blog” and “zf create module Blog” are different commands, running them both will create 2 modules (in Windows it will only result in 1 module directory though!)
- The create module command did not create a module Bootstrap file
- The bootstrap file in the tests directory has a lowercase ‘b’ which probably needs to be an uppercase like ‘Bootstrap.php’
- Note: PHPUnit is required in order to generate controller test stubs.
- For a module Bootstrap to work, the application.ini needs resources.modules = ""

A simple module Bootstrap looks like:

<?php
class Yourmodulename_Bootstrap extends Zend_Application_Module_Bootstrap {
	protected function _initSomething () {
    }
}

Thanks for visiting, come again!

p.s. High resolution images are still available in the code repository.
p.p.s. Clicking on advertisement banners will give me more bandwidth or just donate :)

*update* I put the images on the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) which should provide some stress relief, well at least it scales better!

And send it with this message:

Sooo lonely, i am so lonely :-)

Thanks Christoph ^_^ and FU Facebook

I (finally) found time to spend a couple of nightly coding sessions to create some League of Legends jQuery Plug-ins, it’s a project that was becoming a never ending story. It is an open source project and uses a lot of cool technology like jQuery and CSS Sprites. With it you can create all the champion builds/pages you desire. I already had an awesome code contribution and I’m hoping for more  community feedback.

Enjoy!

FULL DEMO

More info and demo’s at http://ingol.nl/blog/jquery-league-of-legends-plugins/

League of Legends Forum Posts

http://eu.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?p=2045061#post2045061
http://www.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?t=705751

More to come …

- League of Legends Champions Plug-in

- Additional features on the current plug-ins to make them more awesome

- Back-end code to create / host your own champion build tool and exchange builds

Final Words

These features will probably not come early because we’re expecting another child soon, maybe with community support we could speed things up greatly, join me at my BitBucket project. If you happen to be Dutch/Belgian and would like to join a LoL Community, take a look at CowClan

Donations will be accepted to buy gifts for the baby / kids ;-)

The one with the cool Spider-man t-shirt (blue), so proud! We also bought an enormous amount of Lego last weekend, finally a good excuse to spend lot of cash on toys again. For the non-geeks: “Nom Nom Nom”. What we bought:
- http://starwars.lego.com/en-us/Products/7868.aspx#7913 Thanks to my nephew for making him enthusiastic about Star Wars Lego

- http://herofactory.lego.com/en-us/Products/Default.aspx#2063 and http://herofactory.lego.com/en-us/Products/Default.aspx#2142 which can be combined to create: http://herofactory.lego.com/en-us/BuildingInstructions/2063-2142/combi1.aspx (okay, I had to buy both of course, otherwise we’d only have half of the puzzle and I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night)

References:
ISO/IEC 8859-15
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-15

Unicode Character ‘EURO SIGN’ (U+20AC)
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/20ac/index.htm

CREATE TABLE "EURO_TEST" ( "EURO" VARCHAR2(50 CHAR) )

Zend Framework Controller Action …

   /*
    * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-15
    * EURO = Hex A4 (Dec 164)
    *
    * Unicode Character 'EURO SIGN' (U+20AC)
    * http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/20ac/index.htm
    * EURO = UTF-8(hex) 0xE2 0x82 0xAC (e282ac)
    *
    * Oracle Adapter Configuration:
      resources.db.adapter = "Oracle"
      resources.db.params.host = ""
      resources.db.params.username = ""
      resources.db.params.password = ""
      resources.db.params.charset = "AL32UTF8" !!IMPORTANT!!
      resources.db.params.dbname = "..."
      resources.db.isDefaultTableAdapter = true

    * Get Oracle NLS Settings:
    * SELECT * FROM NLS_DATABASE_PARAMETERS;
    */
    public function euroAction ()
    {
        $this->_helper->viewRenderer->setNoRender(true);

        $db = Bootstrap::getDatabase();
        // cleanup a previous test
        $db->delete('EURO_TEST');
        $db->insert('EURO_TEST',array('EURO'=>'€'));

        echo '<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"><html><head><title>Euro Test</title><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /></head><body>';

        /* @var $db Zend_Db_Adapter_Oracle */
        $result = $db->fetchAll("select euro from euro_test");
        // Shows the €
        foreach ($result as $r) {
            echo htmlentities($r['EURO'], ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'); // !!IMPORTANT!!
            echo '<br/>';
        }

        // http://www.techonthenet.com/oracle/functions/dump.php
        $result = $db->fetchAll("select dump(euro, 1016) as eurocode from euro_test");
        // Should show something like Typ=1 Len=3 CharacterSet=AL32UTF8: e2,82,ac.
        foreach ($result as $r) {
            echo $r['EUROCODE'];
            echo '<br/>';
        }

        echo '€';
        echo '</body></head></html>';
    }

See also:

A solution to set various PHP UTF-8 encoding settings for PHP through a .htaccess file can be found in this stack overflow post:

.htaccess settings for UTF-8 encoding support example:

########################################
# Locale settings
########################################

# See: http://php.net/manual/en/timezones.php
php_value date.timezone "Europe/Amsterdam"

SetEnv   LC_ALL  nl_NL.UTF-8

########################################
# Set up UTF-8 encoding
########################################

AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
AddCharset UTF-8 .php

php_value default_charset "UTF-8"

php_value iconv.input_encoding "UTF-8"
php_value iconv.internal_encoding "UTF-8"
php_value iconv.output_encoding "UTF-8"

php_value mbstring.internal_encoding UTF-8
php_value mbstring.http_output UTF-8
php_value mbstring.encoding_translation On
php_value mbstring.func_overload 6

# See also php functions:
# mysql_set_charset
# mysql_client_encoding

# database settings
#CREATE DATABASE db_name
#   CHARACTER SET utf8
#   DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8
#   COLLATE utf8_general_ci
#   DEFAULT COLLATE utf8_general_ci
#   ;
#
#ALTER DATABASE db_name
#   CHARACTER SET utf8
#   DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8
#   COLLATE utf8_general_ci
#   DEFAULT COLLATE utf8_general_ci
#   ;

#ALTER TABLE tbl_name
#   DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8
#   COLLATE utf8_general_ci
#   ;

(function($) {
	$.fn.blink = function(options) {
		var defaults = {
			delay : 500
		};
		var options = $.extend(defaults, options);

		return this.each(function() {
			var obj = $(this);
			setInterval(function() {
				var color = "#";
				var hex = '0123456789ABCDEF';
				for (var i = 0; i<6; i++) {
					var r =  Math.round(Math.random() * 16);
					color += hex[r];
				}				

				var color2 = "#";
				for (var i = 0; i<6; i++) {
					var r =  Math.round(Math.random() * 16);
					color2 += hex[r];
				}

				var size =  Math.round(Math.random() * 20) + 10;				

				var aran = Math.round(Math.random() * 3);
				var a = ['left','right','center'];

				$(obj).css({'text-align':a[aran],'background-color':color2,'color':color, 'font-size': size+'px'});
				if ($(obj).css("visibility") == "visible") {
					$(obj).css('visibility', 'hidden');
				} else {
					$(obj).css('visibility', 'visible');
				}
			}, options.delay);
		});
	};
}(jQuery));

$('#blink').blink({delay:400});

</pre>
<form id="myform"><input type="text" name="ok" value="cute" />
 <input type="submit" /></form>
<pre>

$(function(){
    $('#myform').submit(function(){
        var values = {};
        $.each($(this).serializeArray(), function(i, field) {
            values[ field.name ] = field.value;
        });

        values['custom-param'] = 'value';

        $.ajax({
            // mimeType: 'application/json',
            // contentType: 'application/json',
            type: "POST",
            async : false, // 'false' if I want code behind this call to handle response data
            url: 'myurl',
            data: values,
            dataType: 'json',
            success: function(response, textStatus) {
                if (response) {
                    // ^_^
                    console.debug(response);
                } else {
                    // x_x
                }
            },
            error: function (XMLHttpRequest, textStatus, errorThrown) {
                // x_x
            }
        });

        // do more useful stuff

        return false;
    });
});

If you happen to use Zend_Rest_Route (like me often) be careful when using “PUT” because the parameters will not be found in the request, you would probably need to serialize the “values” array with the json2.js library like:

data: JSON.stringify(values),
contentType: 'application/json; charset=utf-8',

which should be JSON decoded server side. Or just perform a POST at the REST path with an ID included in the path because that call will actually trigger the PUT action (which in my opinion is kinda weird, would rather have it fail but I can understand the logic). Don’t know why ZF doesn’t just parse the parameters on a PUT request if the content type is ‘application/x-www-form-urlencoded’.

My basic options for Python (Python.sublime-options) and Javascript.

# Settings in here override the defaults in:
# Packages/Default/Options/Default File Type.sublime-options
# See there for the available options and their description.

tabSize 4
translateTabsToSpaces true
trimTrailingWhiteSpaceOnSave true
wordWrap false

<?php

class <ModuleName>_<ControllerName>Controller extends Zend_Controller_Action {
 public function <ActionName>Action() {
 // Making sure the date gets refreshed.
 $this->_response->setHeader('Cache-Control', 'no-cache, must-revalidate');
 $this->_response->setHeader('Expires', 'Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT');

 /*
 Already performed by sendJson()
 $this->_helper->layout()->disableLayout();
 $this->_helper->viewRenderer->setNoRender(true);
 */

 $this->_helper->json->sendJson(<DATA>);
 }

 public function init() { }
 public function indexAction() {}
 public function getAction() {}
 public function postAction() {}
 public function putAction() {}
 public function deleteAction() {}
}

// Optional base class to inherit from, adds authentication and/or context switching.
class Default_Service_BaseRestController extends Zend_Controller_Action {
 public $requireAuthentication = false;

 public function init() {
 /* @var $contextSwitch Zend_Controller_Action_Helper_ContextSwitch */
 $contextSwitch = $this->_helper->getHelper ( 'contextSwitch' );

 /*
 $contextSwitch->addContext('csv', array());
 $contextSwitch->addActionContext ( 'index', 'csv' )->initContext ();
 $contextSwitch->addActionContext ( 'index', 'xml' )->initContext ();
 */

 $contextSwitch->addActionContext ( 'index', 'json' )
 ->setAutoJsonSerialization ( false )->initContext ();

 if ($this->requireAuthentication) {
 $this->authorize();
 }
 }

 // Just a helper ...
 public static function isAuthenticated() {
 $auth = Zend_Auth::getInstance();
 return $auth->hasIdentity();
 }

 public function authorize() {
 $auth = Zend_Auth::getInstance();
 if (!$auth->hasIdentity()) {
 /*  Not authenticated, could additionally also check for authorization ...
 $this->_helper->json->sendJson('error');
 exit;
 */
 }
 }
}

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project name="YUICompression" basedir=".">
    <target name="default" description="Minifiy a set of files">
        <taskdef name="yuicompress" classname="com.yahoo.platform.yui.compressor.YUICompressTask">
            <classpath>
                <pathelement path="${basedir}/lib/yuicompressor-2.4.2.jar"/>
                <pathelement path="${basedir}/lib/yuiant.jar"/>
            </classpath>
        </taskdef>
		<delete>
			<fileset dir="${basedir}/output" includes="*.js"/>
		</delete>
        <concat destfile="${basedir}/output/javascript.js" append="true">
            <fileset dir="${basedir}/src" includes="*.js"/>
        </concat>
        <yuicompress linebreak="16000" warn="false" munge="no" preserveallsemicolons="true" outputfolder="${basedir}/minified">
            <fileset dir="${basedir}/output">
                <include name="**/*.js"/>
            </fileset>
        </yuicompress>
    </target>
</project>