google search engine reference

http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html

Getting CakePHP up and running on Ubuntu

To enable mod rewrite, you need to add a symbolic link to the module definition file, which lives in /etc/apache2/mods-available, to the folder: /etc/apache2/mods-enabled. Do this by first changing to the mods-enabled folder then adding the symlink.

cd /etc/apache2/mods-enabled 

ln -s ../mods-available/rewrite.load

In the sites-enabled folder /etc/apache2/sites-enabled, edit 000-default (this is actually a symbolic link to etc/apache2/sites-available/default, which will need to be made editable before making changes). You will need to add the statement:

AllowOverride All

to the directory blocks for '/' and '/var/www'. If these blocks do not contain the statement:

Allow from all

then add it at the end. Make sure that any occurrence of AllowOverride None within these blocks is changed, commented or deleted.

Dual booting Hac & Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

After a night and a day of swearing, it turns out that the key to getting this dual boot working is to install Grub2 in a location other than the default option. I selected the Linux install partition. Now all I have to do is figure out why Xiezhy (the Hac bootloader) thinks Ubuntu is Windows.

And this new Ubuntu is fucking quick!

ACL at page level

I've been messing around with CakePHP's built in ACL functionality. I tried it a while back (2007), but just couldn't make sense of it. Now, following Mark Story's tutorial in the Cake Book (and also his blog: http://mark-story.com/posts/view/auth-and-acl-an-end-to-end-tutorial-pt-1 ) , I have it working. He makes it very easy.

Now I'm tinkering with it to make it work on a page level. Success at this will mean I can use the CMS to create admin pages as well as public pages. When I've sussed it, I'll publish.

Converting dates between MySql and PHP

$mysqldate = date( 'Y-m-d H:i:s', $phpdate );
$phpdate = strtotime( $mysqldate );

htaccess tips

http://corz.org/serv/tricks/htaccess2.php

CakePHP, .htaccess and clean homepage urls

Sometimes we need a clean url for the homepage to appear in the browser address bar, e.g. www.example.com

This problem came up with the CMS system I have built as all the pages have a url/name. For example, the default homepage would show as www.example.com/homepage.

Typing www.example.com would redirect to this and change the displayed url. The desired behaviour is to redirect

www.example.com -> www.example.com/homepage but only display www.example.com.

On the other hand, if you were to type www.example.com/homepage the display should stay as www.example.com/homepage .

The answer means a slight change to the default CakePHP .htaccess file

RewriteRule ^$ app/webroot/ [L]

becomes
RewriteRule ^$ homepage [L]

Of course, homepage could be any page name that you want to be the anchor page.