Peter's Useful Crap

I wanted to do something like this in NeoOffice Calc (similar to OpenOffice.org):

Pressing Enter goes to the next cell in spreadsheets, instead of creating a new line in the existing cell. I think in Excel on a PC, you press something like Alt+Enter. Anyway, I needed to find the equivalent in NeoOffice. I googled for “line return in a cell NeoOffice” and came up empty. Then I searched in the NeoOffice help files and found this:

Pressing the Ctrl+Enter keys inserts a manual line break. This shortcut only works directly in the cell, not in the input line.

Being a Mac newbie, I kept following the above instruction and was met with no success.

So anyway, it’s Command+Enter. (Remember that the Command button on a Mac is the one with the apple icon on it.) And make sure that you’re editing the text in the cell instead of in the input line at the top. To edit text in the cell, double click the cell, and edit the text directly, like in a word processor.

Maybe they just copied over the instructions from OpenOffice.org and didn’t update it?

Tired of paying for a program such as QuickTax / TurboTax or UFile to generate your personal income tax return every year? StudioTax is a free piece of software (donations are welcome, I’m sure) for Windows. StudioTax has apparently been around for four years. Every year so far, it has been CRA NETFILE approved.

According to the RedFlagDeals.com community (which you should check out, by the way), StudioTax should work great for most users. Try it out!

March 8, 2009 update: There are now free and student versions of TurboTax.

I decided to do a spin-off of my custom anti-spam image plugin for WordPress since people kept asking for it to be made available normal forms. Check out the eZ Publish version of this plugin if you are running eZ Publish 3.8+.

So, here it is… version 1.1 contains the features found in version 3.0.3 of the WordPress plugin (such as auto-generated audio for visually impaired users).

Download version 1.1 of Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam for input forms (April 16, 2008)

Previous releases:
February 24th, 2007: Version 1.0 (used by some savings institute)

Requirements

• PHP 4 or 5
• MySQL 3+
• GD Library and FreeType Library

Instructions

Note: I am assuming that you have already set up your own input form and that you are using PHP for both the page that displays the input form and the script that processes the form. Here’s an example input form and an example form processor (both for PHP). These are definitely not the best examples, so I’d advise you to do a web search for other examples! In particular, make sure to always validate input values…

1) Extract all files to a folder on your server, most commonly the same folder that contains the input form and form processor.

2) Update your database connection information in cas_db.php, then run cas_install.php. You can remove cas_install.php once the database tables have been created.

3) Make sure that the temp_sounds folder is writeable.

4) Update settings and translation strings in cas_engine.php.

5) Enter this in your input form (see example_inputform.txt for a basic framework) where you want the anti-spam image to display:

include 'cas_engine.php';
cas_comment_form();

6) Enter this in your form processor (see example_formprocessor.txt for a basic framework):

include 'cas_engine.php';
cas_comment_post();

There are times when installing a web application that you will need to run some shell commands. (OK, so there are many other times, but this is the most frequent scenario for me.) For example, you might have to set some permissions that are more complicated by the 755 and 400 stuff that can be done via FTP. You know, crazy code like this:

chmod a+rwx /home /home/mysite /home/mysite/tmp

(Stop snickering, you coding savvy ones!)

What to do if you haven’t been given shell access by your host?

Well, you could try to bug your host to give you shell access or send them whatever commands you need run. But a quicker solution might be to simply set up a cron job to run… right away. If you have cPanel, this is probably a built-in feature.

If you have a command where it wouldn’t hurt if it was run several times, just set it to run every minute, then wait a few minutes before deleting the cron job.

Poof, shell command executed!

Wondering what in the world a cron job is? Is just a scheduled server task. Usually I use this it to execute a php script at a certain time or at certain time intervals. Read about cron jobs or maybe even read my post about how I discovered the wonders of cron jobs to run backups of small databases.

Hounded by a 1-800 or other number who keeps calling? For some reason they won’t disclose who they are? Well, if they really have Caller ID blocked, you’re a bit out of luck. But if you know what the number is but it just so happened to be a private number, you can still do some investigating.

Check out this smart whocalled.us site. The premise is that we can all help each other out by entering whatever information we know about a particular number that called us. Each number gets its own information page. By sharing whatever information we have, we can uncover the identities of those people and companies who just won’t stop calling. Sometimes it’s a collection agency that has the wrong number. Sometimes it’s a phishing attempt…