ALWAYS check manufacture date of the battery, you purchase!

nullAndroid, hardware0 Comment
3 min. reading

I have put my own and Izzy‘s answer on Android Stack Exchange to formulate this check-list or rather list of importance for things that you should consider when purchasing a new battery.

tl;dr: Li-Ion batteries stored in store or warehouse without cyclic re-charging (which most likely never happens in these scenarios) are completely dead after 20 months at most. Thus, you should never, ever purchase any kind of battery that is two years old or more. No matter what seller says.

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close up photo of programming of codes

CTags and Goto source definition in Sublime Text 3

nullIDE, sublime0 Comment
11 min. reading

One of the most important functionality of each high class IDE is “Goto source definition” mechanism, which let you click particular symbol (i.e. class or method name) in any source file of your project and be immediately redirected to file (and line) that contains its definition.

Sublime Text 3 is not supporting this functionality natively. But, we can add it quite easily, using CTags plugin.

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Cyclic jobs in Yii and MySQL

nullPHP, SQL, Yii0 Comment
3 min. reading

When we are talking about some cyclic tasks executed periodically in PHP, most of us automatically thinks about CRON. It is not surprising, since it is very popular, easy to manage (available often even on shared hostings) and easy to code (it simply fires given PHP script).

However, there are four other ways you can achieve exactly the same in Yii/PHP. And many Yii developers may not be aware about some of them.

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Remove “Edit with Notepad++” option from context menu

nullsoftware5 Comments
3 min. reading

One of the newest updates of Notepad++ has introduced new, quite annoying Edit with Notepad++, item added to many context menus. Since, there isn’t an option in Notepad++ itself, to remove it, you have to solve the problem yourself, by unregistering one of Notepad++ services.

There’s a solution that:

  • doesn’t require you to tweak with the registry or
  • download and install or run any program.

All you need is to use a command line in administrator mode and follow five quite simple steps.

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SublimeCodeIntel and Code intelligence in Sublime Text 3

nullIDE, sublime0 Comment
8 min. reading

There’s an article about using CTags plugin to implement “Goto source definition” functionality in Sublime Text 3 — a mechanism, which let you click particular symbol (i.e. class or method name) in any source file of your project and be immediately redirected to file (and line) that contains its definition. You’ll find it here: “CTags and Goto source definition functionality in Sublime Text 3“.

This functionality is often called “Code intelligence” and there is another plugin — SublimeCodeIntel — that implements it in Sublime Text 3. If you want this kind of functionality in Sublime Text 3, but don’t want to use CTags plugin, this article will tell you more about alternative to it.

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Working with code snippets in Sublime Text 3

nullIDE, other, sublime0 Comment
8 min. reading

This is another article about my transition from Netbeans to Sublime Text 3. This time I’m going to handle code snippets topic. This is another area, which is much better solved in Sublime Text 3 than in Netbeans.

This article is generally based on “Working With Code Snippets In Sublime Text” blog text from hongkiat.com. And — of course — wonderful, yet unofficial Sublime Text documentation’s chapter about snippets. With some my personal additions and updates.

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Useful keyboard shortcuts in Sublime Text 3

nullIDE, other, sublime0 Comment
5 min. reading

This is one of the last article in my private serie of blog entries targeting developers, who starts their journey with Sublime Text 3. Treat it as memo or list for easy remembering sometimes very useful, not always often, keyboard shortcuts, that are available in ST3. Where it is possible, I’m adding links to Sublime Text Unofficial Documentation, which is great source of information in any aspect related to Sublime Text 3.

Note, that entire document is based on default Sublime Text 3 key bindings, before any user changes, like for example those mentioned in [Netbeans-like keyboard shortcuts in Text 3.txt] text. Also note, that when speaking about Alt key, I’m referring to left key. As on some non-English keyboards, right Alt key may have different meaning (entering language-specific letters etc.).

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Beginning with Sublime Text 3

nullIDE, sublime0 Comment
9 min. reading

My journey started with reading (and watching videos) two good blog entries done by Stuart Herbert:

However, both texts are old and covers Sublime Text 2 only. And both are quite long. If you want a shorter version, updated for Sublime Text 3, then read on…

Note, that this article is filled with many comparisons to that Netbeans. Intentionally. I’ve been using Netbeans for past five or more years. And from the first day, I started using Sublime Text 3, I feel like I’m a newborn developer again. And I finally have super-fast, super-powerful IDE instead of old, slow, buggy, cranky Java-based Netbeans. Whoa! :]

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Changing sidebar’s font size in Sublime Text 3

nullIDE, sublime0 Comment
4 min. reading

Changing font size of editor (by adding "font_size": 14 for example to Preferences > Settings – User file) changes font size of editor area. But leaves font size of sidebar unaffected. I have found files and folders’ names, drawn on sidebar with 10 pt font size, quite not so comfortable on Full HD resolution screen.

So, I needed a fix.

There’s (of course!) a Stack Overflow answer, that explains, how to achieve this in Sublime Text 2. I managed to port this solution to Sublime Text 3.

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Migrate PuTTY sessions between computers

nullsoftware0 Comment
3 min. reading

PuTTY is one of the first programs, that I install on every computer. Since, it stores sessions in registry, it is a bit difficult to migrate sessions between computers. So far, I manage to do this with a little bit help of regedit.exe program and guides like this one. Today, unfortunately, I hit the wall, when my brand new installed Windows 7 told me, that it can’t merge entries from my putty.reg file, because it can’t access Windows Registry.

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Capture double click on Yii’s CGridView row

nullYii0 Comment
4 min. reading

I was using a simple Javascript code (attached to CGridView.selectionChanged property) to capture click on any grid view’s row and redirect user to row-specific URL. I wanted to change it to double click only.

CGridView exposes selectionChanged even only, no click or dblclick, so that was a quite nice challenge. It seems that the only way is to capture this event yourself.

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Delete model with relations

nullYii0 Comment
3 min. reading

To delete in Yii a model with some relations we usually have at least three options.

Depending on many factors (RDBMS type, table type, situation, context etc.) most of them have advantages and disadvantages. Good developer already knows these options, so intention of this post is not to discuss them, but to show you an interesting, new (at least for me) fourth approach to solve this problem, that I found recently.

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urlReferrer and opening new browser tab

nullYii0 Comment
< 1 min. reading

To open particular URL in a new tab, you have at least two possibilities:

  • click a link with middle button (usually under mouse wheel) or
  • open a blank tab and copy-paste URL to URL bar.

There is slight difference it this (at least in Chrome) when it comes to urlReferrer in Yii:

  • in first case browser sets referrer correctly (i.e. Yii::app()->request->uUrlReferrer contains a valid URL),
  • in second approach URL referrer IS NOT set (i.e. Yii::app()->request->urlReferrer is an empty string).

The second situation is obvious. Opening a new tab means that browser does not have a history for it and thus it is unable to set urlReferrer correctly. However, it is better to keep this information in mind. If you rely on this information, you may get yourself (or your code) into a problem.

CGridView: the summaryText maddnes!

nullYii0 Comment
2 min. reading

I’m finishing entry phase of my first big project (first big project, where I’m key project manager and lead developer, to be precise). Right now I’m after four days of sleeping for 5 hours and coding for remaining 19 hours each day. My brain simply bowls. In this specific situation, I’ve crafted a helper method, which makes mad-laughing or mad-screaming, each time I see it.

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The unlink function returns TRUE on non-existing files!

nullPHP0 Comment
< 1 min. reading

Is seems, that unlink() returns FALSE only, if file, that is about to be deleted, exists and there was a problem removing it. If file wasn’t there, when unlink tried to remove it, it still does return TRUE. Keep that in mind!

This seems to be reasonable. Logic, that I see here is:

You wanted me to delete that file and… swoosh… it is gone. It doesn’t matter, that I had nothing to do with its deletion, right?

For some this could be surprising — unlink() function returns logic value about whether file, that should be deleted is deleted. It’s return value says nothing about whether actual deletion process occurred.

For me this is not only surprising, but also wrong! Dear PHP, I wanted you to “delete” this file (which you didn’t). Not, to “make sure it is gone” (which, we may agree, that you did).

Dealing with ‘No external storage available’ error in Android 4.3

nullAndroid0 Comment
5 min. reading

I’ve been cleaning internal storage (the only one, that I have) on my Google Nexus phone and it seems that I remove a bit too much… My storage stopped responding and when I went to gallery or photo camera I saw a beautiful message, saying:

If you’re facing the same or similar problem, you may find solution in this post. However, I must warn you that most likely you’re going to loose everything on that storage!

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Key difference between GPL and BSD licenses

nullother0 Comment
4 min. reading

For the project, I’m working on, I came over Plupload library, which is dual-licensed on GPL+OEM model. Since paying commercial license (OEM) in this project is not an option, I told my boss, that we can’t use this library, because we’d have to publish all our project’s sources as open source (base GPL licensing requirement).

He told me, that this is not true, because both PHP and Yii, that we use, are licensed in the same model.

I was so sure, that I’m correct, that I immediately made some research and wrote this article as a summary of all my findings. I was more than happy to prove my boss, that he is wrong! :>

If you think similarly to my boss, then you should definitely read this post.

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Upload files via AJAX and fill up other model properties in the same time

nullPHP, Yii0 Comment
3 min. reading

There’s a comment to Yii 1.1: XUpload Workflow Wiki article, made by MeDroogie, who asks, how to handle situation, where file is correctly uploaded (via AJAX, in separate layer, handled by upload action), but form submission itself fails, as form processing action stops on some model’s validation errors.

I had the same problem with other AJAX uploader, that I think, I solved gracefully.

Keep in mind, that since solution, that I’m discussing in this article, is part of proprietary project, I cannot share any code. This is purely design or theoretical discussion.

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Remove file from repository and from all revisions [updated]

nullVCS0 Comment
2 min. reading

Say, that you have commited to a Git repository, a file, that contains sensitive or confidential information. You want to literally purge it from the repository history.

Simple git rm --cached <file> won’t do the trick. It will remove a file from the repository (keeping it in your working directory), but it will still keep the file in history. What now?

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Write a directory tree to a text file in Windows command line

nullMicrosoft0 Comment
2 min. reading

I found a question “How to write a list of directory trees to a text file?” on Stack Overflow, as I was looking for exactly the same solution. It has two brilliant answers, and since I’m using this blog as my personal remember-that-diary, I decided to share it here, so I shouldn’t look for this solution again.

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