So – I was setting up a WAMP server with the most recent CVS version of our site, and for some reason CSS wasn’t working at all – internal or external, in both Firefox and IE8. I searched around for a bit and found the usual PEBCAK issues on Google, and then just started removing things to see what might cause the issue. Answer: Yahoo Analytics breaks CSS on my local dev server – no idea why, and frankly I don’t have the time to look into it.

The offending code is (basically) as such:

<!-- Yahoo! Inc.
var ysm_accountid  = "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX";
document.write(some stuff);
// -->

Removing that from your template/html file should fix the css woes you may experience during development (assuming that your issue isn’t caused by something else, of course).

Yet another reason to choose Google over Yahoo, in my opinion. Google Analytics is leagues ahead of the competition and they don’t release the documentation for it in a fifty page beast of a PDF file. So – a heads up to all on this rather odd issue with Yahoo Analytics – it’s certainly not an obvious one. If anyone knows the reason for Yahoo Analytics causing this issue, please let me know, as although I’m not intolerably curious, I am reasonably curious.

I just recently got my new laptop (Acer Aspire 8730 for CAD 900!) and it’s excellent despite being a behemoth. Anyhow – I decided to take a new approach to work stuff, so instead of installing AppServ as I’d formally used, I decided to go with WampServer – and I’m glad that I did. WampServer essentially does what AppServ did for me, but I like it more already. It incorporates some stuff like cURL without additional fuss, and it apparently makes it easier to switch between PHP versions. Honestly – after having used WampServer – even for this short amount of time – I see absolutely no reason to use AppServ, but I certainly don’t think AppServ is necessarily terrible. I encourage you to check WampServer out if you’re doing any PHP development work.

Anyhow – I also am just starting to realize the full benefits of Eclipse and the advantages and convenience that it offers, particularly with respect to CVS. It finally clicked that I could just point my Eclipse workspace to my WampServer directory, and then checkout my CVS project there while adding the config files to .cvsignore. This would seem really intuitive, but it always seems to be these “obvious” things that end up taking up copious amounts of my time.

I’m also generally focussing on getting better at using CVS and knowing proper development practices – I found an excellent article that does a good job of explaining branching with eclipse that you might want to check out. We have a new workmate as well, and she’s experienced with development practices, and hopefully some of that will rub off on me in the weeks to come as well.

I know it may seem that all I write about these days is work, but I’ve really been quite busy apart from a long weekend in Shanghai recently. I’ll try to get some non-work blog updates posted soon

Confirmed working and committed to CVS!

I also took the time to check out the osCommerce site itself and found that they’re very close to lauching osCommerce 3.0 – that’s definitely good news. The development road map looks strikingly to my own, however, and that’s disheartening, as I’m sort of stuck on my own branch / platform at this point. It will be interesting to see the new engine, but all in all I’m not terribly worried that it will be so much better than mine as to make my past development work worthless / pointless, as open source projects are rather notoriously ragtag.

I suppose now, the next moment to look forward to is when I can compare osCommerce 3.0 to my own ecommerce platform. As far as this small step – I’ll post a working example of my heavily modified osCommerce site working once it’s launched live (probably a few weeks).

I’ve now rewritten most of osCommerce w/ OOP style code, integrated it with Smarty, and am on the verge of having it 100% functional without register_globals. Needless to say, this is a very momentous moment for me, as I’ve spent the better part of three years doing this. The question that I pose myself now, though, is whether to eventually release my work to the osCommerce team, or, given that the changes I’ve implemented are so far reaching, to start my own open source shopping cart project.

The other question, obviously, is whether or not there is much demand for yet *another* open source shopping cart. I would argue that there is, because a ton of the open source shopping cart software that I’ve seen has been absolute garbage (osCommerce included), but perhaps more research is needed. I also might completely remove all osCommerce code / design from my work and create my own site that provides ad-supported usage of the new engine without releasing my source code. Lots of possibilities.

Will post again once I’ve confirmed everything is working fine with register_globals turned off.

A long time ago in 1993, Adobe decided to create a format for sharing files called “PDF” that was allegedly independent of application software, hardware, and operating system – this three letter acronym quickly grew infamous as millions worldwide were exposed to the format. The catch, of course, was that for a long time, the free (and thus most common) way of viewing these files, was with a terrible program called “Adobe Acrobat” (now “Adobe Reader“). This program is really quite astounding, in that it essentially transforms your computer into a badly bound photocopied version of whatever content you were trying to view in PDF format, in fact, if one views enough PDF files, one might come to believe that one doesn’t actually posses a computer at all. This leads me to believe that PDF format was in fact funded by some sort of anti-technology secret society – perhaps the Amish or the like. Although – in the contemporary version – there is now an option to “save as text”, this option is still basically useless for most practical uses, such as viewing a spreadsheet that’s been sent to you in PDF format in Excel or Open Office.

If you are unfortunate enough to encounter a PDF file that must be viewed, there is a good download called “pdf download” by “Nitro PDF Software” – you can get it here for Firefox or IE7/8. While this software is useful, I am not sure if “Nitro PDF Software” is a company that has the best morals. After all – they’re essentially profiting off of one of the worst crimes against human civilization (PDF).

In any case, it seems obvious to me that the secret intent of PDF format was to inhibit the technological advancement of mankind. The tragedy of the PDF atrocity, is that, unlike the holocaust, mankind has not learned its lesson from this atrocity (except Bosnia, Darfur, Chechnya, Tibet, and such) – and PDF files are still in wide and open circulation today. Even though all of the evils of PDF files are known, there are still people out there who continue to create and distribute them as if they were oblivious to the plight of the many who are forced to interact with PDF format on a day-to-day basis. When will we, as a species, stand up for our rights and shout as one “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!” I – for one – have had enough. It’s my sincere hope that, in the future, humanity can be free of all forms of oppression and intellectual suppression – why not start by quashing PDF?

People angry about man underfeeding dogs

As easy as it is to pick holes in the beliefs of animal rights activists, I haven’t seemed to have tired of it yet. At any rate – I think one of the biggest problems with these sort of cases is that it’s hard to know where to draw the line. What animals are included in this ban? Why do animal rights activists not push harder for the rights of cows or sheep (well, I guess the super hardcore ones (Vegans) do, but they’re completely batshit insane)? Would people be just as outraged over cows being improperly slaughtered? Obviously, “love for animals” is reserved only for cats, dogs, and perhaps seals and whales depending on the sort of animal rights quack who you happen to talk to.

Animals are animals – until it’s illegal to eat a steak or go duck hunting, it should be legal to do whatever you want to a dog or cat (assuming it’s yours). Enough of this pointless, selective, and often hypocritical animal rights nonsense already! I’ve been meaning to get a picture of myself at a dog restaurant eating meat that is visibly from a dog – I guess I’ll have to get going on that – will post pictures!

For those who would argue that many serial killers and such get their start by torturing animals – I have a counterargument: why not set them up in slaughterhouses or allot them a monthly supply of baby kittens or puppies with which to torture? Maybe all this prohibition on “violence” against animals in our society is what drove these guys to become what they became. I mean, maybe all they really needed was some encouragement, along the lines of “yes – those are animals, we can do what we like with them, because they’re not human.” When we start to treat animals the same as humans, then we blur the bounds of morality, and suddenly, a boy who is reprimanded for torturing a kitten thinks “well – I guess torturing a kitten is the same or worse than torturing a baby.” Maybe, just maybe, animal rights activism is one of the root causes of much of the sadistic homicide that is prevalent in our society.

Well – as a follow up post to my last one regarding adding subdomain support for Google Analytics – it’s working! It’s trivially easy to make GA work with subdomains, so much so that I’m honestly not sure why this isn’t the default behaviour already :S

It’s always fun to bring someone new into the world of GA – Tuzi is definitely having fun with all of the different filters, reports, and whatnot. Next on the list is probably finding a good wordpress mod that inserts analytics script into themes automatically; it’s not really an issue right now as I only have four themes enabled, but it will definitely be an issue as the site expands.

Tuzi asked me to make her an account so that she can see who is viewing her blog; I just finished updating the tracking code and adding the filter – time to see if it works I guess.

I found a great blog post that I’ll share with those of you who might want to attempt something similar:

Tracking Subdomains with Google Analytics (epikone.com)

I’ll post an update probably on the weekend regarding whether or not this worked!

I’ve been writing PHP for a rather long time, and up until just recently I did it the old school way – I used EditPlus (basically notepad with syntax highlighting). I give you Eclipse:

Downloads Page

I was recently introduced to this excellent development platform, and I haven’t looked back. Besides taking care of little things like completing matching braces and being able to double click on a function (even user defined) for its description or being able to tell if a method overrides a parent method, it also has a great CVS plug-in. I’m still actually just figuring that part out, but already it’s making programming a lot more enjoyable for me by taking away a lot of the “dirty work”. I highly recommend Eclipse to PHP developers.

Welp – writing this update from WordPress Mu version 2.8.1 – the admin definitely looks pretty good, and I like the extra support for Google Gears. I encountered a little bit of trouble that someone with less webdev experience might find extremely puzzling.

A redirect issue (infinite loop) is caused if you have old cookies for the previous WordPress MU install and try to log into the admin panel. As you might expect, the solution is to delete the offending cookies (in my case, I just deleted all cookies for verstory.com and was good to go).

It’s a bit troubling that this advice wasn’t posted on the upgrade page of the WordPress MU sites, but, such is life.