Graceful Exits

Bursting IE’s Javascript parser, or: generating bizarre error messages through subprocess apoptosis

Workflows of Drupal’s user load and save functionality: spot the hooks and win a programmatical prize.

Simon Willison mentioned a while back a link to help on how to undo a svn commit in subversion (more a kind of internal branching than an actual undo, of course: but that’s subversion). That’s all very well, but how about undoing the log message for a particular commit?
Say you have a codebase that only [...]

Steve Yegge on code’s worst enemy:
… This brings us to the second obviously-bad thing that can go wrong with code bases: copy and paste. It doesn’t take very long for programmers to learn this lesson the hard way. It’s not so much a rule you have to memorize as a scar you’re going to get [...]

Say you want to see both the log and diff of a given svn version, just the differences between it and the previous version, plus log message (i.e. what was committed, and why, for version NUM) The following will work at a bash command prompt:
$ r=NUM; rr=-r`expr $r - 1`:$r; svn log -r$r; svn diff [...]

KentBye, Flickr user, has been playing with GraphViz. He’s used it to turn an XDebug output into a pretty visualization of Drupal’s call stack, or what functions call what functions during a typical Drupal request.

I have a couple of on-login tasks doing various distributed office jobs for me: one brought in all the networked drives from machines in this and the other office; the other backed up my locally stored email to the office server. Because my work rarely spans offices I don’t pay much attention to the former; [...]

Since listening to Garrett Coakley speak at the first Geek Night on the topic of Drupal, I’ve been sniffing round that open-source CMS. He kindly came to speak to us again, and very inspiring it was too. We’re now having a deeper look at it, seeing what it can do, what are its strengths and [...]

I’ve recently been experimenting with calling external commands (mplayer and lame, so you might be able to guess what I’ve been doing) from within a scripting language (Python, although it needn’t have been as it turns out). Bizarrely, the external commands—argumentae intactae—worked absolutely fine on their own, chained together by me, by hand. However, when [...]

For reasons of speed I’m currently embedding Java in Coldfusion code. Given Coldfusion is built on Java, and can instantiate Java objects through createObject(”java”, class_name), you’d think that’d be reasonably easy. But the boundary between Coldfusion and Java is like the gap between two halves of a broken bone: jagged, bleeding-edged and painful when coerced [...]