If you use nautilus to manage your files (if you are using Ubuntu, you do) and you would like a quick way to open files with sudo rights, check out the nautilus-gksu package.

This extends nautilus allowing you “open as administrator” from a right click menu. This is a great time saver and a much better idea than trying to run nautilus itself as root.

If you are having DNS issues and you are on Be Broadband then you might be using out of date DNS servers (as they tell you to do in the instructions).

Check out this page for up to date DNS server information:

http://beusergroup.co.uk/technotes/index.php/DNS_Issues

To update your DNS, you have to go through the setup wizard for the broadband connection

If you have a script that is receiving posted XML for whatever reason and are trying to access this XML without any filtering, escaping etc then this is the solution you are looking for.

Instead of trying to access via $_POST etc, you can simply call the following:

$xml = file_get_contents('php://input');

This will then allow you to load it into Simple XML for example for further processing

$sx = simplexml_load_string($xml);
if($sx){
   ....
}

If you have dutifully installed the required PEAR libraries for your application (eg PHPList HTTP/Request) but its still saying that you haven’t, see if you have an open_basedir restriction in place.

If you do, there is a good chance that this is your problem.

If you are bewildered by the choice of lightbox style javascript plugins available, you might find this page useful:

http://planetozh.com/projects/lightbox-clones/

Its a well organised matrix of lightbox clones so you can compare features and choose the right one for your specific requirements. Handy!

I’ve just finished my first delivery of a Zend PHP course module. It was the databases section of the higher structures course. Everyone seemed to enjoy it and I think it went really well. Its great to be able to help newcomers to PHP to get a better understanding of the language and see the power and flexibility that it offers.

Netbeans is great for speeding up development, but learning some keyboard shortcuts can speed things up even more. Here is a nice blog post I found with a few new shortcuts (eg [ctrl]+[k] == cool )

If you use Virtual Box for virtual machines (eg testing web sites in IE, what fun) then this is of interest to you. There is another feature which I have only just discovered called Guest Additions.

This is something that you can install into your VM which gives much tighter integration with the host OS. For example no more having to capture/uncapture the mouse and full copy and paste compatability. Its incredibly easy to use once its installed.

To install Guest Additions, just fire up the VM and then go to the Devices menu at the top. At the bottom of this menu is the option Install Guest Additions.

That’s it, very easy, highly recommended

If you see this error message when trying to access the backups section of Magento Admin:

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/*****/public_html/lib/Varien/Data/Collection/Filesystem.php on line 234

Then this simple fix is for you:

replace (line 24):

foreach (glob($folder . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . ‘*’) as $node) {

with this:

foreach ((array)glob($folder . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . ‘*’) as $node) {

I saw this here, so all credit to them.