Git: change commit editor to vim

This command can be used:git config --global core.editor "vim"or one can setup environment variable GIT_EDITOR:export GIT_EDITOR="vim"

Git: last commit date

To obtain date and time of the last commit in a current branch one can use git log command: git log -1 --format="%cd"

IELTS preparation: useful vocabulary

Recently, I was preparing myself for IELTS (International English Language Testing System) test (general module). As part of this preparation I composed a list of useful words and expressions for this test. The list also contains words that spelling was difficult for me to remember.

If you are curious, my overall IELTS score was 8.0 with the lowest band of 7.0. Hope that the list will be useful to you also.

Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal): Use 'normal' GNOME instead of Unity

Ubuntu 11.04 uses Unit as its default desktop environment. However, it is very easy to switch back to 'normal/traditional' GNOME desktop environment. Just select 'Ubuntu classic' option in your login window:

Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal): How to remove chat and mail icons (indicators) from system tray

Just like for Ubuntu 10.04, the two following icons (notifiers):

can be removed by removing two packages: indicator-me and indicator-messages:sudo apt-get remove indicator-me indicator-messages

ImageMagick: Make thumbs of images

For example to make jpg thumbs of all tiff images in a current director one can use:for f in *.tiff; do bname=`basename $f .tiff` ; convert -resize 256x256 $f ./thumbs/$bname.jpg; done

ImageMagick: Flatten and convert an image to grayscale

In short, to flatten and convert to grayscale all images in current director one can use: mogrify -flatten -type Grayscale *or mogrify -flatten -alpha remove *.tiff

An example file upload progress monitoring in Zend Framework 1.11

An example web application demonstrating usage of Zend_ProgressBar and jquery progressbar for monitoring progress of file uploads in Zend Framework 1.11.3.

Since file uploads are done to the folder APPLICATION_PATH/uploads, the application tries to create this folder if it does not exists. For this reason APPLICATION_PATH should be writable, or uploads folder created manually with necessary rights. The application also requires 'uploadprogress' PECL package since it uses 'uploadprogress_get_info' function for getting the information about upload progress.

The source code is at GitHub. Most action happens in indexController.php and index.phtml.

An example of OpenID, Facebook and Twitter authentication in Zend Framework 1.11

This is an example Zend Framework 1.11.3 application that uses OpenID (Google,
Yahoo, MyOpenId, AOL, OpenId) as well as Facebook Connect and Twitter Oauth for
authentication of users.

During authentication, information about a user (e.g. an email or a country) is fetched from the authentication provider.

Zend Framework 1.11 does not have a very good support for OpenID, not mentioning Facebook Connect and Twitter Oauth. Thus, to make it all work the following elements were used:

• openid-selector
• My_Auth_Adapter_Facebook by Michael Krotscheck
• My_Auth_Adapter_Oauth and My_Auth_Adapter_Oauth_Twitter by Jason Austin
• My_OpenId_Extension_AttributeExchange by Chris Bisnett
• Patched Zend_OpenId_Custumer

In some cases slight modifications to the above elements were made.

The demo of this application is here , while the source code is at GitHub. The user authentication is performed in a loginAction in UserController.php.

Hopefully, this example application will be useful to others as it was for me.

Drupal 7: Add last update date to the footer of the page

I needed to add a date of last modification of the website made in Drupal 7. I did it by enable core module PHP Filter and creating a block located a footer block region. The body of the block was as follows:
<?php
// get date of most most recent change to a node
$result = db_query('SELECT title, changed FROM {node} WHERE status=1 ORDER BY changed DESC LIMIT 1');
$node = $result->fetchObject();
$date = date('d-M-Y g:i a', $node->changed);
echo "Last update: $date";
?>