Blogs

Have been playing around with Lockr on Drupal 7 and want to play around with it locally and so I fall back to Acquia Dev Desktop.

Just as a note, as of the writing of this blog post, Acquia Dev Desktop ships with an invalid openssl.cnf location, so you have to provide one.

I found this out when I started getting this message while trying to create a certificate locally:

Hi Dries,

You probably have no idea who I am—and hey you'd be just like the vast majority of people, so no big there—but if you're reading this I greatly appreciate your time.

The past week or so has been dizzying. Many, many long time die-hard Drupalers have been angry, frustrated, and saddened by the events that have taken place surrounding Larry. You know better than anyone else what happened. No need to rehash.

Although I love Drupal, lately some of my projects have had me delve into learning new technologies and Stacks. The one I've spent more time with lately is Node.js.

One reason for this is that I've actually known JavaScript longer than I've known PHP. I started doing JavaScript about 21 years ago... (that feels like a lifetime ago). Anyhoo, I digress.

A few weeks ago I started playing Hill Climb Racing 2. It's a fun, addictive game and, best of all, it's free to play. You actually don't have to spend any money (though you do have to watch ads) but if you're patient, you can unlock everything without paying a single penny!

Recently, I figured I'd splurge and pay $4.99 for one of their little "deals" in the game where you get a deal with a custom decal and a heaping helping of these little things called Gems aka 💎.

I needed to parse some logs and I wanted to know what Acquia's Log file format was. Here it is:

LogFormat "%{X-AH-Client-IP}i %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" <br/>
\"%{User-agent}i\" vhost=%v host=%{Host}i hosting_site=<siteid> pid=%P <br/> request_time=%D forwarded_for=\"%{X-Forwarded-For}i\" <br/> request_id=\"%{X-Request-Id}i\" "`

So back in April of this year, I gave a talk at Texas Camp entitled Building Kick SaaS Installation Profiles.

The slides are over there, but I'm uploading a local copy of them here—just in case!

Note: no audio is available, but the slides might be pretty handy!

So as I was sitting here just now waiting for an 80+ MB import to process over an SSH connection, I began wondering to myself if there was some way to monitor the progress of an import. Percentage—or even throughput—of the file being sent over the pipe.

Turns out that there is a way!

Enter the command pv.

Output buffering in PHP isn't new. It was introduced in PHP 4 and for the most part, it's one of those things that unless you're not using a CMS or a framework, you'll never really need to mess with it much.

However, today I was playing around with doing client-side redirections in JavaScript and wanted to see first-hand how they worked. Modern browsers begin parsing the HTML before it is completely delivered and once the <script> tag is parsed, it is executed immediately.

Background and Intro

The Hamshield was a Kickstarter that ended sometime last summer. The original expected delivery date was October of 2015, but due to issues with manufacturing and a problem with their amplification circuits, it was delayed. I won't go into the details here, but you can read it on their Kickstarter page: