OXT blog
“People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.” – Whinnie The Pooh

You may have problems when reading .avi video using MatLab function aviread(). If you have 16-bit color video, aviread() can’t read it correctly. You can receive only grayscaled data using this function in this case. The solution is to use Kelly Kearney’s aviread16bitcol() function, which you can download from here: http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/9314

Do not confuse this printer with LaserJet 1005, it’s different printer (you’ll need drivers from foo2zjs package for 1005).

To make P1005 working you’ll need hplip package. Run hp-setup as root or run hplip from system menu. Unfortunately it is not able to download required plugin (at least in version 2.8.6b). You have to download it manually here http://www.linuxprinting.org/download/printdriver/auxfiles/HP/plugins/hplip-2.8.6b-plugin.run and provide to hp setup tool.

If you have problems printing wide HTML webpage (your text is cropped from the right edge) you can try this solution

I was working on simple symfony website consisting of just one application and one module. Naturally, I wasn’t too creative and choose ‘frontend’ as application name and ‘index’ for module name. When I started to test it on production, it wasn’t working at all except default action. It was giving me 404 error.
After spending some time debugging and logging symfony and mod_rewrite I’ve found out the problem. Rewrite rule was sending me to /index.php/actionname instead of index.php/index/actionname.
The problem was in apache option MultiViews, as soon as I removed it everything started to work as expected. This option tells webserver to search for foo/filename.* if foo/filename wasn’t found.
I had this option enabled in my default virtual host config in my apache distribution and I had never paid any attention to it before.

If you need to display any value or text (for example current point’s value) near different points of your graph in MatLab, you can use text(x,y,’string’) function.

For example:

x = -pi:pi/10:pi;
y = sin(x);
figure('Name', 'Sample graph'), plot(x, y, '--rs');
% Label some points
for i=8:size(x,2)-8
text(x(i), y(i), ['\leftarrow (', num2str(x(i)), ';', num2str(y(i)), ')']);
end

Here is the output:

Output sample

Unfortunately Drupal (as in version 6.5) doesn’t allow easy theming for language selector. However it’s still possible with theme function overriding. Look at the code.

function yourtheme_links($links, $attributes = array('class' => 'links')) {
	list(,$first_link) = each($links);
	if (($first_link['attributes']['class'] == 'language-link')) {
		global $language;
		$new_links = array();
		$num_links = count($links);
		$i = 0;
		foreach ($links as $link) {
			$i ++;
			$link['title'] = '<span class="bg">' . $link['title'] . '</span>';
			$link['html']	= true;
			if ($link['language']->language == $language->language)
				$link['attributes']['class'] = 'selected';
			$new_links[] = $link;
			if ($i < $num_links)
				$new_links[] = array(
					'title'	=> '|',
					'attributes'	=> array('class'	=> 'separator')
				);
		}
		$links = $new_links;
	}
	return theme_links($links, $attributes);
}

It adds ’selected’ class to the current language (which I think logical) and adds separator element between language links. You can customize them as you wish.

symfony has basic CRUD-like admin generator, which allows you to create controls for filtering list results. Naturally, if you have filtered list and press ‘create’ button it would be nice to have new form with populated from filter form fields.

Here’s basic idea how to do it. In my example I have Work entity which has foreign key to Category entity. I have list of works filterable by category id.
To populate category id on work creation form you need to override generated action:

class worksActions extends autoworksActions
{
  public function executeEdit()
  {
  	parent::executeEdit();
  	if ($this->getRequestParameter('action') == 'create')
  	{
  		$filters = $this->getUser()->getAttributeHolder()->getAll('sf_admin/work/filters');
  		if (isset($filters['category_id']))
  			$this->work->setCategoryId($filters['category_id']);
  	}
  }
}

Look into admin generated actions if you want to more clearly understand why we need such code. It is located at cache/admin/dev/modules/autoWorks/actions/actions.class.php

If you are using classes from Zend Framework Laboratory for PayPal integration (which is somewhat unfinished) you probably will have an error when trying

Zend_Service_Paypal::setExpressCheckout();

The error has strange description ‘Security header is not valid’ and not listed in PayPal documentation.

To fix the error you’ll have to change line in Zend/Service/PayPal.php (in Laboratory tree)

const SERVICE_URI = 'https://api-3t.sandbox.paypal.com/nvp';

to

const SERVICE_URI = 'https://api-3t.paypal.com/nvp';

If you can work with usual http queries using PHP Curl, but have problems with https you can try to include this option:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);

If you want to use your key generated in Seahorse in Putty you’ll have to convert it. The process is clear – make export of private key in Seahorse and import it to Puttygen. However one extra step is required – you have to delete everything before —–BEGIN DSA PRIVATE KEY—– mark. Otherwise Puttygen won’t recognise private key.