D3 Charting

D3, a very powerful, low level charting package, can be difficult to start with. To create just a simple line graph can take a few hours to get off the ground. I found this site which has all a few templates to gets started: http://nvd3.org/ghpages/examples.html.

And, if you're interested in the more advanced D3 visualizations, there's always the Github gallery with some impressive examples:

https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery.

Developer Application Management

Microsoft, Facebook and Google all have different URLs to manage applications.

Facebook is the easiest to remember: https://developers.facebook.com/ (Makes sense). Plus, if you're like me, I usually miss the "s" on developers, yet Facebook is smart enough to redirect me.

Microsoft and Google are both difficult to find. It's a good few minutes each time. 

Microsoft: https://account.live.com/developers/applications/

Google: https://code.google.com/apis/console/

Google also supports the "developers" subdomain, but it presents with too much information. You'd need to know you're looking for the API console.

This will certainly save me a few minutes next time I need to open up a dev server that has a different URL yet still needs the same API access.

jQuery Isotopes

Coworker pointed this out today, jQuery Isotopes. Looks interesting - a bit of eye candy. I'm not sure if I would put this on a website (using their homepage example), but it has a bit of promise for some other purposes. Something I'll keep in mind for future layouts.

Ubuntu Linux Items

Turns out installing items on Ubuntu is extremely easy. The following items turned out to be useful tips (if not also the "proper" way to install additional items).

For PHP, to install additional modules, it's also a "sudo apt-get install php" command. Press the tab key "tab out, as it were, and it will show you the additional items that can be installed.

For Apache, to enable additional modules, instead of modifying the httpd.conf file, the files are separated out into separate directories. Use the "a2enmod" (presumably it's the 'Apache2 enable module' command.

I'm working on getting Ubuntu running Symfony and connecting to the Azure SQL Server database - this is turning out to be quite the challenge. After that nut is cracked, or when I crack and install MySQL instead (using apt-get), I'll post the results here to save the next person some work.

Composer and IIS

When running composer on a site hosted by IIS, the permissions of downloaded files aren't correct. The IIS user is not added, which means all of those packages you just downloaded cannot be used by your application. Fret not, there is a simple command to recursively update permissions (a la chmod, chgrp for linux).

icacls ./ /grant:r IUSR:"(OI)(CI)"F /t /inheritance:e

This took a bit of time to start and finish, but when it was completed, everything was good to go.

Updating Group File Permissions

From the command line:

chmod -R g+w *

This will give recursive group write access to everything. This is useful for me when my Apache is run under one user and my text editor is running under a different user (e.g. the user I logged in as). This will ensure both users, provided they're in the same group, will be able to edit the file.

XDebug

So - followed the steps to paste the phpinfo() output into the following webpage: http://xdebug.org/wizard.php. Pasted the instructions, followed the step where it said "add the following line to php.ini".

Few notes:

1. XDebug needs the full path.
2. The link above will say to just add zend_extension="path to dir". That is wrong. It needs to be the full path, including the directory, to  the xdebug dll.