If using bzr to checkout svn repo and it spits out bzr: ERROR: Connection error: curl connection error, use https+urllib instead of only https. Refer http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/bzr.dev/en/user-guide/http_smart_server.html

I’ve used this for quite a while now, based on discussion in CakePHP mailing list here.

1. Controller::loadModel(’yourmodel’); (preferred)

// in app/controllers/car_controllers.php
Controller::loadModel('Book');
$this->Book->find('all'); // the object initiated and added as a property to the controller, persistModel is enabled

or
2. ClassRegistry::init(’yourmodel’);

// in app/controllers/car_controllers.php
$book = ClassRegistry::init('Book'); // returns the object
$book->find('all');

So.

$ sudo apt-get install python-virtualenv
$ virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python2.4 /home/cawanpink/python2.4
$ source /home/cawanpink/python2.4/bin/activate
(python2.4)$ deactivate

That’s

• install
• create the Python 2.4 virtual environment
• activate the environment
• to get out of the environment

Lots of young programmers working with PHP that I’ve seen in Malaysia hardly understand the OO (object oriented) concept. When you look at their codes, it’s alot of functions and alot of includes. Classes? Nowhere to be seen. It’s probably the most hardest concept to grab while they were in college when actually it’s not that hard at all. If you don’t understand OO then it’s likely you don’t know why it’s good. And of course the MVC (Model-View-Controller) concept in many programming language frameworks you will find it very very hard to digest. Those frameworks are for RAD (Rapid Application Development) – just look at the name, don’t you think it will have something to do with your development speed? It’s like you have a bicycle and a car. You know you can get there faster by car, you only have to learn how to use it. It may takes time but for the next 20 years you’re going to need the car so you can get anywhere faster. So would you or would you not learn how to use the car?? If you still picks bicycle, that’s not a wrong answer. It only shows your preference.

Having MVC, for example, gives you the advantage of having multiple people working on the same page at the same time. A can work on the controller part, B can work on its layout and C can totally change the database engine from MySQL to Postgresql (for example) without having A or B amending their codes at all after that. Also I believe, it’s easier to take over an MVC-ed application than a non-MVC ones. I can’t imagine having to wade through all those includes/requires/imports. All I need to know is where the models, controllers and views are.

Want to try CakePHP? Just one thing you MUST have – the discipline to put your codes to where it belongs, follow the standards. Don’t make your queries in the layouts – it just doesn’t make sense. It’s likely that you’re going to forget about it in a week or two, you’re going to curse your way through it when you can’t find it later for maintenance work (not to mention the other new programmer working on the same app). Just plan for the future. The time that it takes you to do it properly now will save you a heck of a time later. That includes proper comments in your codes.

The learning curve is a bit steep – yes it is if you don’t understand OO. So get to know your OO stuff. And then go for CakePHP, or any framework you fancy. You’ll be surprised how much you’ll like it.

1. Install MySurGuard.
2. I kinda cheated a little bit – took the updated blacklist from here and phraselist from here so MySurfGuard has the latest copy.
3. Install ruby and lynx and wget (the script needs them) and as I was working on CentOS, so it’s

$ yum install ruby ruby-devel lynx wget

4. Install lynx wget (the script requires them)
5. Set configuration file for lynx to use proxy, put in your proxy address and port

#in /etc/lynx-site.fg
PROTOCOL_proxy="http://localhost:8080/"

6. For wget to use proxy, do

$ export http_proxy="http://localhost:8080"

7. Run the script

$ ./mysurfguard-test.rb results-human.txt results-mysurfguard.txt

You’ll have the result in results-mysurfguard.txt

1. Read a file (*.txt) and determine frequency of each characters and total bits.
2. Build a Huffman tree based on previous frequency table. Each node keeps a character & its frequency, path (eg. 011, 0011, 01110 etc), vertex flag (whether it’s a left or right child) and visit flag (whether it has been visited or not – for node searching later). Note though, not every node keeps a character, only leaf nodes do (Huffman tree properties). Sorting algorithm to build priority queue to work with when building the tree is selection sorting algorithm.
3. Follow every root-to-leaf path to get the bits for each character. This script uses breadth-first search algorithm to look for nodes inside the tree.
4. Write compression information in a new file (compressed one) but this script only write the bits sequence into the file.

The file here: huffman.cpp (C++)

Some screenshots:

The problem: Animal guessing game
What I did, the source: in C++

Thought of using classes but was short of time heh!

Some screenshots follows:

You get the idea right. Just that if I want to read another quote in terminal, I have to cd ~/<script folder> and ./getquote from there (I keep my scripts organized). I’m kinda lazy so I just Ctrl-Shift-T, Ctrl-Shift-W all the time. :p Works for me.

This is what I did. I have 2 main files:

• ./import – this one is for importing the quotes all at once from any of their RSS feed provider. Then I use xmlstarlet to extract information I need and format it the way I want (so painlessly, I might add). and then save it as plain text file.

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# retrieve quotes from bash.org and save it to bashquotes.xml
# -one of the RSS provider http://quotes.sydv.net/
echo "Retrieving from bash.org..."
wget -O bashquotes.xml http://feeds2.feedburner.com/top100-bash-quotes
 
# extract the feed to file bashquotes
echo "Extracting RSS feed..."
xmlstarlet sel -t -m '//item' -o '==%%==' -v 'description' -n  bashquotes.xml > bashquotes
echo "RSS feed saved in bashquotes"
 
# replacing html entities to proper character for viewing
sed 's/\&amp;lt;/</g' bashquotes > bashquotes2
sed 's/\&amp;gt;/>/g' bashquotes2 > bashquotes
sed 's/\&lt;br \/\&gt;/\n/g' bashquotes > bashquotes2
sed 's/\&amp;quot;/"/g' bashquotes2 > bashquotes
sed 's/\&amp;nbsp;/ /g' bashquotes > bashquotes2
sed 's/\&lt;img.*\&gt;//g' bashquotes2 > bashquotes.txt
echo "bashquotes.txt ready"

• ./getquote – this one is for reading off that text file and get any one from the quote.

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    # reading from bashquotes.txt
    old_IFS=$IFS
    IFS=$'==%%=='
    quotes=($(cat bashquotes.txt)) # array
    IFS=$old_IFS
 
    # form an array
    j=0
    for ((i=0; i < "${#quotes[@]}"; i++)); do 
       len=${#quotes[${i}]}
       if [ $len -ne 0 ]; then
          let j++
          newquotes[$j]=${quotes[${i}]}
       fi
    done
 
    # get a random quote
    RANGE=${#newquotes[@]}
    let RANGE++
    FLOOR=1
 
    number=0   #initialize
    while [ "$number" -lt $FLOOR ]
    do
      number=$RANDOM
      let "number %= $RANGE"  # Scales $number down within $RANGE.
    done
    echo "${newquotes[${number}]}"

• To get it displayed in the terminal, I appended this in my ~/.bashrc

echo "";
echo "--irc quotes--"
cd /home/cawanpink/bash/quotes/
./getquote
echo -e "================================"
home

Simple right. This is the result of me  being blocked by an SVN server earlier on, that in a way has cut me off from doing any real work. Heh.

Now I know the code is not the most elegant, most of them are copy and paste and modified but all in all it’s worth my time coz the quotes are just freakin hilarious!

Note: my terminal is a modified version of this – I had wanted to post about it when I did it but too lazy now.