After a recent update on Ubuntu I found that I was unable to use ssh due to a strange permissions error to do with the ssh config file. This was quite a problem as I wasn't able to push changes to my git server. The error was as follows:

I have started to use virtual machines to develop sites rather than installing a local web server. This allows me to replicate the exact setup of the server I will be deploying to with ease. For each virtual machine I set up a shared folder which allows me to store the files locally whilst being able to run the code on the virtual machine. One thing I missed was the ability to use xdebug to debug the sites through Netbeans, so I set about trying to set up the virtual hosts to allow me to use xdebug remotely.

Searching all files in a directory and sub-directories for a particular term is really useful and comes in handy in all sorts of situations. It is available on all Linux systems and the basic syntax is as follows.

The -r flag is used to recursively search underneath the given directory and the -i flag is used to ignore case. The pattern is a normal regular expression, which can be changed to an extended set by using the -E flag.

I have talked before about running Selenium tests in PHPUnit but I have only recently come to properly automate things. Getting a Selenium server to start and stop in a script is relatively easy and can be done in a simple script. My original script for running a directory of PHPUnit tests was as follows.

PhoneGap is a free and opensource framework for developing mobile applications. It is a great way of creating applications that work across multiple devices including iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows and others. It works by rendering HTML pages using a browser, which means that you can create applications using just HTML and JavaScript. It also allows you to interact with elements of the phone like the camera and accelerometer through JavaScript using a simple API.

I had a recent requirement where I needed to temporarily replace the homepage of a website running Drupal with a simple HTML page. I wanted to do this without doing lots of changes to the site templates so I needed a solution that was easy to turn on and off and would still retain the Drupal site as it was. I found the simplest solution was to add a rule to the DirectoryIndex rule in the sites .htaccess file. Here is the rule I used.