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Showing posts from September, 2010

Solid Basic Javascript Input Validation

Here is a simple yet pretty powerful and easy to use way to do validation on HTML form text boxes and text areas and similar controls. It checks to make sure required form field have *something* in them before allowing processing to continue. It’s a good simple way to add some basic validation to prevent trusted individuals from forgetting to fill out required fields. This is generally useful for internal websites where you can assume the user isn’t trying to hack the site. First we have two global JS variables that define the default and error-ed state of text boxes in question. Below I have standard controls with black borders and error-ed controls with red borders. // Assign a default border color for all form controls var defaultControlBorderColor = '#000000'; // Use a special color to highlight trouble (such as if a control doesn't validate) var notificationControlBorderColor = '#ff0000'; Below I have the primary function that does the field validation. F...
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Execute a console command in PHP revised

While it seems like there are multitude of different methods to execute commands in PHP, so far the code I will go over below is my preferred method. Using the passthru() function works nicely and includes the final return code of whatever was being executed, which is generally useful to me in error checking. In processing, I also include ob_start(), ob_get_contents(), and ob_end_clean() so that I can capture the console programs output and return it the user eventually. // Execute a console command and return both the // command's success value and any output to the console it made function executeConsoleCommand($commandToExecute, &$commandConsoleOutputToAppend) { $returnValue = 0;      // Append command to output $commandConsoleOutputToAppend .= $commandToExecute . "\r\n"; // Catch console output ob_start(); // Execute the console program passthru($commandToExecute, $returnValue); // Save console output to a string variable (this s...
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.NET Path.Combine() in PHP

I’m the type of person who prefers to do things in a way that I perceive as the proper or correct way. While this tends to make things take a bit longer to accomplish, I feel the result ends up being better overall. One such thing I noticed is that file and path handling in PHP was missing a function I used quite a bit when writing C# code. In C# there is a Path.Combine() function that appends two file paths together to form one complete path without having to care what the beginning character and ending character of the two paths are. I wrote up a little function in PHP to mimic what happens. // Take a path and/or a filename and combine them into one file path function filePathCombine($path1, $path2) { $completedPath = ''; // Check if path1 ends with DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR if (substr($path1, -1) !== DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR) { $completedPath = $path1 . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR; } else { $completedPath = $path1; } // Check if path2 starts with D...
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ChatGPT is a new, and faster, way to do programming!

Currently ChatGPT is in a free “initial research preview” . One of its well known use cases at this point is generating software code. I’ve also just used it to write most of this article… Well, actually a future article about cleaning up SRT subtitle files of their metadata faster than I have been by hand with Notepad++ and its replace functionality. Update: I recorded a screencast of writing the SRT subtitle cleaner application loading and processing portion. I relied heavily on ChatGPT for code. It was a fun process! https://youtu.be/TkEW39OloUA ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a powerful language model that can assist developers in a variety of tasks, including natural language processing and text generation. One such task that ChatGPT can help with is creating an SRT cleaner program. SRT, or SubRip Subtitle, files are commonly used to add subtitles to video files. However, these files can become cluttered with unnecessary information, such as timing lines or blank spaces. To clean...
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Blogger Notable theme pop-up header issue fix (thanks to Gemini Pro)

I've made a few half hearted attempts over the years to to fix Blogger's Notable theme's rendering of the pop-up header that shows up when you scroll down the page a decent amount and then pull back to reveal that secondary header. On Chrome mobile I noticed a gray box that forms next to the magnifying glass icon. I never looked in detail on  Chrome desktop, but it had an issue as well which I'll detail below.  If you are looking for a solution and don't want all of the extra talk about how I was able to find it, here it is:  .centered-top-container .sticky .main_header_elements { overflow : hidden !important ; } I decided to try using Gemini Pro 2.5 to see if it was capable of finding the issue and giving me a fix. Turns out that it was able, but it took a bit of collaboration back and forth to find the actual problem.  Here is a modified article I asked it to give me based on our debugging chat (it was very colorful in the article which I scaled back a lot, ...
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Theme error in 2010s Android App after AppCompat Migration

I plan on releasing a lot of my old work as GPL open source, but most of it has aged to the point that it no longer functions, or if it does work it’s running in compatibility mode. Basically it’s no longer best practices. Not a good way to start off any new public GPL projects, in my opinion. The current project I’m working on is an Android app that calculates star trails meant to help photographers get or avoid that in their night time photos. For now I’m going to skip some of the import process because I didn’t document it exactly. It’s been mostly trial and error as I poke around Android Studio post import. The Android Studio import process… Removing Admob Google Play code before the project would run at all. After removing dependencies, it kind of worked, but when running it in the emulator it shows a pop-up message saying that the app was developed for an old version of Android. Going through the process of updating code to match current best practices… I had the IDE convert the ...
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