Well known is how Loaded Commerce/CRELoaded protect their google banners they wack on all opensource versions of their code.

Once you have removed the footer in the current version though, it checks the output buffer and you will find it after the closing html tag of your page.

The function that does this is cre_uregisterBasicFunctions(); and if you remove the call to it from application_bottom.php, bye bye ads!

Scarily, if a hacker got control of www.loadedcommerce.com, php code could actually be inserted into EVERY Loaded Commerce installation that doesn’t remove this.

If you are building something that is opening a terminal, perhaps a fancy URL handler or something similar but there are errors causing the terminal to instantly close, then this is the solution for you.

It’s actually really simple!

Create a new profile

Select the “Title and Command” tab

at the bottom there is an option “when command exits”

You can switch this to “Hold Terminal Open” which will keep the terminal open so you can see the error message and then fix it

You need to add the following flag to your gnome-terminal launcher:

gnome_terminal --window-with-profile={profile_name}

Beautiful!

If you are having an issue with Magento and the optional Merge CSS Files (beta) turned on and it not updating with recent CSS changes, you may appreciate this.

Unlike other cached elements that are stored in var/cache, Magento stores the cached and minified CSS files in media/css

If you simply delete the contents of this folder, your CSS changes should kick in as Magento is forced to rebuild these files.

There is an option in cache management to flush CSS storage but for some reason this wasn’t working for me. Could be a permissions issue or something else I am not sure, we simply needed to get this change implemented (emergency live site fix) so flushing this folder manually did the trick.

Hope it helps someone else looking for Magento merged CSS clear not working, Magento CSS cache, Magento CSS Files beta

Due to our load-balancing router being a little “harsh” on closing connections that appear to be unused, ssh often sits and hangs.

Using a standard ssh config option though we can set a server keep-alive (on the ssh client, which also keeps sshfs alive)

In the “~/.ssh/config” file, simply adding the following keeps the connection sending a small packet every 30 seconds :-
ServerAliveInterval=30

I’m sure windows clients like puTTY also have a similar option, and on a mac, it should be the same file as Linux.

I needed to quickly generate a deploy folder that included all changes in the last two weeks. Using git and a little bit of bash magic I was able to put together a one liner to do this.

This works we use a public folder within our git structure which makes filtering the files easy, if you don’t have this then you will have to change the grep filter to match your needs. Obviously you can change the since filter to get the files you need.

git log --since="2 weeks ago" --name-status | grep public | sort | uniq | awk '{print $2}' | xargs -I % cp --parents % /path/to/deploy

Hope this helps in the future

One of the things that can catch you out if you have a paranoid server admin is that various magento extensions will contact external servers (such as SagePay or Mailchimp).

If the server admin has blocked outbound web traffic (to avoid DDoS attacks and other malicious traffic), these extensions will slow you down at every step.

Simple answer, if you’re running magento, ensure you have outbound traffic enabled. Also, don’t assume that just because you can use lynx, apt-get et al at the command prompt that you can as the web server user. IPTables and pf both have checks for outbound user, so be sure to test as www-user or apache.

When migrating one server to another you often hit bumps in the road. Todays was transferring a database from one server to another.

During this standard procedure I found that the restored database was missing a few tables. Irritating as Magento doesn’t like missing tables.

Digging down into the backup and extracting the first missing table I was able to replicate the error which came out as
1064 - You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'USING BTREE

I eventually found out that some versions of mysql 5.1 export a dump file that contains mysql5.1 specific features and loading the file into mysql 5.0 will not work.

The solution is a little frustrating but if you run the command with the –compatible=mysql40 switch, the dump file extracts fine :-
mysqldump --compatible=mysql40
Don’t ask me why there’s no –compatible=mysql50 flag.

The new gmail look certainly makes it look the same as many of Google’s other services, but it’s quite space in efficient by default. Fortunately Google thought of that and made it’s space efficiency configurable! There is a button in the top right of gmail that allows you to change it.

http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/11/the-end-of-an-era-internet-explorer-drops-below-50-percent-of-web-usage/

Anyone who had had to either do an extra 50% of work to get IE working, or had to pay someone else to do so. I’m sure you are thinking what we think. Yes!