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Over the past few years, I’ve developed a strong interest in home automation. For example, Home Assistant automatically controls the interior climate by managing the thermostats, opening and closing blinds, and running expeller fans to manage humidity. After installing a Fantech Hero HRV to improve interior air quality, I was disappointed to find there was no existing Home Assistant integration. My goal was to integrate the HRV into the automation system to optimize comfort and energy use: vent the minimal amount required to maintain air quality, while taking into account temperature set points, humidity, and outdoor air quality.

I was trying to get the material design App Bar/ActionBar/Toolbar working with an activity that uses AndroidAnnotations. I was following the tutorial here but I was finding that while the bar was rendering, it didn’t have any content.

Enable HHVM debugging in PhpStorm

zfc-user-doctrine-orm Is a Zend Framework 2 Module that enables Doctrine 2 support for the ZfcUser module.

Recently when developing a plugin that examines available updates for WordPress, I needed to test situations where the WordPress Core is out of date.

By default, Zend Framework 2 (ZF2) controller plugins cannot force the request to end. Typically, the controller action calls plugin methods and then does what it wishes with the returned value. However, there are some circumstances (such as user authentication), where you may want to end the request if certain conditions are met in the controller plugin.

Zend Framework 2 introduced a new controller abstract class: AbstractRestfulController (more docs here). This is used to create restful services (which will communicate with javascript in the browser, for example).

ActionScript includes an EX4 implementation that allows easy parsing of XML in code. I wanted to parse HTML for screen scraping purposes and found that EX4 allows for a syntax that loosely resembles a combination of XPATH and css3 selectors.

The OpenVPN config file structure on ClearOS is non-standard (For example there is no server.conf), so I was unsure where to put the directive. However, as it turns out enabling the Management console is as simple as adding the following to /etc/openvpn/clients.conf:

management localhost 7505

Edit: Shortly after positing this entry, Inventic contacted me with some responses. These are in italics.

I’ve been using Doctrine in conjunction with the Zend Framework for years. Although it is an excellent ORM, writing yaml by hand is a tedious and error-prone process. Furthermore, it can be difficult to visualize a large database from a series of text files, so I find myself maintaining a MySQL Workbench diagram in addition to the textual database representation.