How-To

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a plugin that examines available updates for WordPress, I needed to test situations where the WordPress Core is out of date.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

GitLab is a neat GitHub clone that can be installed on your own servers. I wanted to setup mine running in a virtualized Ubuntu 12.04LTS environment.

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).

I’ve been having some problems downloading packages using Composer. It seems GitHub is having some hickups and it’s returning errors such as:

[Composer\Downloader\TransportException]
  The "http://nodeload.github.com/symfony/Yaml/zipball/v2.1.3" file could not be downloaded (HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found)

Over the weekend we were rebuilding the Hijacker Camper Jacks on our camper. Since Hijacker has gotten out of the camper jack business, the rebuild kits are tough to find. We were in NAPA (Canada) and managed to size replacement o-rings that seem to do the trick.

I use the Advanced Permalinks plugin on my site because I changed my permalink structure and didn’t want incoming links to return 404 errors. However, at some point the plugin has broken the RSS feed functionality of WordPress. When I visit the feed url on my site, a blank page is returned with no errors.

Ubuntu has a rather nasty bug when it comes to temperature control on the Thinkpad line of laptops. The fans run at a lower RPM than necessary, which results in overheating and random shutdowns. The overheating has also caused perminant damage to some of the cells in my battery, significantly decreasing battery life.

After doing a fresh install of Ubuntu 12.04 I had problems installing running VMware Workstation 8; when building the kernel modules it failed to build the network module (vmnet).

Microsoft introduced a new type of VPN with Windows Server 2008 called Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol (SSTP).

Linux support is provided by sstp-client, and network-manager-sstp. However, there are currently no packages in the offical repos and the author’s sites recommend compiling from source.