Cocept's Blog Posts

Mar 8, 2016 | Category: development Jekyll is adding .html file extension despite permalink

If you want to remove the .html file extension from your jekyll permalinks, you must include a trailing slash:

Feb 25, 2016 | Category: development Fix for Wordpress Media Upload Http Error on Nginx

I ran into an issue when uploading large files to Wordpress using the new drag and drop media uploader. The file would upload to 100% then immediatly show an enigmatic error message: “Http error”. It looked like this:

Feb 19, 2016 | Category: development Removing SEO Spam from Wordpress Blog Posts

I was commissioned to repair, update and secure a Wordpress website that was may years out of date and had been hacked to pieces.

Feb 5, 2016 | Category: development Changing the Colour of the Toolbar in Chrome on Android

You might have noticed a dash of colour injected into Chrome for Android lately, particularly if you visited the mobile version of this site:

Jan 13, 2016 | Category: development Using the Pillow Imaging Library on Amazon Elastic Beanstalk

I often use Amazon Elastic Beanstalk (EB) for project deployment. Several times now I’ve hosted projects on EB that use Pillow, Python’s image manipulation library, and have run into a slew of problems. I have documented solutions to each one I encountered below:

Dec 30, 2015 | Category: development Contact Forms for Static Site Generators like Jekyll

Static site generators like Jekyll are great. They’re fast, simple to use, and you can even get hosting that is updated directly from your Git repository using Github pages like I do.

Sep 16, 2015 | Category: development Sandboxing User Data in Model Forms

A lot of online applications nowadays are built using Multi Tenant Data Architecture, meaning the data for multiple clients is stored in the same database. This can obviously cause some data security concerns because the developers have to ensure that their client’s data is sandboxed and not accessible by other clients.

Aug 30, 2014 | Category: design Push Menus

A Push Menu is a navigational menu that is placed off canvas and brought into view when the user performs a particular action.

Aug 17, 2014 | Category: design Sticky Menu UX Pattern

A Sticky Menu is a menu that stays put even when you scroll down. I’m using one on this page - scroll to the top and the menu bar hugs the top of the page. Scroll down slightly and it follows you instead of disappearing.

Aug 14, 2014 | Category: development Generate Random EAN13 Numbers

Here is a simple script for generating totally random EAN13 numbers. The script is written in Python and simply prints the result to the standard out.

Apr 13, 2014 | Category: development Install PIL on Amazon Beanstalk

To install python libraries like PIL on an Amazon Elastic Beanstalk instance, put the following into a file called “requirements.txt” in the root of your project:

Apr 13, 2014 | Category: development Amazon Elastic Beanstalk PIL JPEG Support

The error message “decoder jpeg not available” in your Amazon Elastic Beanstalk instance means you are trying to use PIL with a jpg image but don’t have the required software installed on the server to perform the decoding. To have the required software installed when your EB server is created, edit your EB extension file (usually located at .ebextensions/python.config) to add the following lines:

Apr 12, 2014 | Category: development Flask File Upload Connection Reset

While following the Flask file upload tutorial here, you might get a "This webpage is not available" message due to the connection being interrupted (ERR_CONNECTION_RESET). This is due to a problem with how modern browsers interact with the Werkzeug WGSI.

Mar 28, 2014 | Category: development Track Outbound Links to New Windows with Google Analytics

You can use Google Analytics to track when a user clicks on a link that takes them to an external website using the code snippet in the link below:

Mar 5, 2014 | Category: development Odoo (Formerly OpenERP) Functional Binary Field

In order to have more flexible file serving functionality within Odoo, you can swap out binary fields for a functional field that returns the contents of your file. Below is a sample class that loads a file’s contents from a file system path and serves it to the user using a functional field. It was originally built for version 6.0 but should work on newer versions too:

Jan 5, 2014 | Category: development Rails 4 CKEditor uninitialized constant Ckeditor::Orm

With Rails 4 you may get the following traceback when trying to use the CKEditor gem:

Dec 4, 2013 | Category: development Fingerprint Not Appended to Assets When Deploying in Production

When deploying your rails 4 app, you might experience a problem where the** fingerprint is not appended** to the assets name on your HTML when you deploy into production. To solve this issue:

Nov 29, 2013 | Category: development Gridster iFrame breaks Drag and Drop

Gridster is an open source javascript dashboard plugin. It provides a nice simple way to make an auto reshuffling dashboard with very flexible contents.

Aug 27, 2013 | Category: development Create an OpenERP Webkit Report from Scratch

This guide will help you prepare your OpenERP instance to use the Webkit reporting engine - a reporting engine rendered by webkit and powered by HTML and Python mako templates.

Aug 12, 2013 | Category: development Setting up Lithium PHP Web Framework on Ubuntu

Below is a very thorough tutorial for configuring the Lithium PHP web framework to work flawlessly in Ubuntu. It takes you through steps which prevent several issues that are commonly encountered when configuring Lithium on Ubuntu, such as setting up permissions for the template directory correctly.

Aug 11, 2013 | Category: development Android Studio Ubuntu Classpath

When setting up Android Studio on Ubuntu you might get the following error message:

Aug 10, 2013 | Category: development Lithium Could not write compiled template - Ubuntu

When setting up the Lithium PHP Web Framework it is necessary to allocate the correct permissions to the app/resources folder, otherwise you will get a message like the one below, when Lithium tries to write the view cache files:

Aug 10, 2013 | Category: development Kivy unexpected keyword argument '__no_builder'

This error comes from subclassing a widget and overriding __init__ without **kwargs.

Aug 10, 2013 | Category: development Kivy Screen Manager Blank

Following the Kivy Screen Manager tutorial here might prompt you to define your Screen Manager outside of your app class so you have access to it everywhere. Like this however, you will find that your screens are blank and ignore your KV layout file! The fix to this is simple:

Aug 8, 2013 | Category: development Dependency issues after downgrading PHP 5.4 to 5.3 on Ubuntu

After using the php version downgrade script to downgrade your PHP version from 5.4 to 5.3, you might experience an issue where installing php plugins leads to the below dependency errors. In my case, I was installing a list of packages as advised on this guide.

Aug 8, 2013 | Category: development Install PHP 5.3 on Ubuntu

Installing php 5.3 on Ubuntu can be a bit tricky. Luckily, some kind *nix wiz made the following bash script that will downgrade your existing php 5 installation to version 5.3.

Apr 27, 2013 | Category: development MoSync QR Code Scanner

In this tutorial I will show you how to easily create a cross-device QR code decoder using nothing but MoSync, HTML 5 and a couple of Javascript libraries.

Apr 7, 2013 | Category: development Failed loading ZendDebugger cannot open shared object file

If you get the following error while trying to install ZendDebugger with Xampp 32 bit on a 64 bit machine but already have libssl installed, you might need to install libssl 32 bit! Try:

Jun 3, 2012 | Category: development Move All User Folders to Another Hard Drive - Windows 7

Sometimes, especially if you have a nice new shiny solid state drive (like me), you will want to put all the user files and folders (Documents, Videos, AppData etc) onto a hard drive different to where your operating system is stored.

Apr 19, 2012 | Category: development Android Use Classes From Another Project in Eclipse

A good project architecture separates abstracted code into different projects. This short article shows how to implement this when developing for Android in Eclipse:

Apr 12, 2012 | Category: development Taking Screen Shots with your HTC Desire HD

Some people have been complaining of their HTC Android phone playing the camera shutter sound randomly. Most people do not realise that this is caused by a software update that allows their phone to take screen shots of the current screen!

Dec 16, 2011 | Category: development Android Custom Notification Sound Tutorial

In order to make your notification play a custom notification sound when it is shown, follow the steps below:

Nov 30, 2011 | Category: development Search Entire Project in Eclipse

It came as quite a shock that Eclipse didn't have it's own "Find Across Entire Project" feature. Even more of a shock that a quick google search didn't provide a definitive answer! So here is the solution I found - a simple plugin for Eclipse that quickly let's you find across the entire project:

Oct 29, 2011 | Category: development Android - Add views in a loop

Sometimes you need to dynamically create an unknown number of views - for example rows of data in a table. Because you cannot add the same view more than once without recreating it in a new variable, this is not as straight forward as one would think.

Oct 27, 2011 | Category: development Eclipse Auto Format Line Wrapping Width

When using CTRL + SHIFT + F in Eclipse by default it wraps your lines quite tightly. If you have a relatively large screen this is unnecessary and annoying. To change the width that Eclipse lets your code use before wrapping it to the next line, use the steps below:

Aug 9, 2011 | Category: development Android R.drawables not updating in Eclipse

If your R.java class is not being auto updated by eclipse for new files in a "drawables" directory that you created, it is because the drawable folders that existed originally (drawables-hdpi, drawables-ldpi & drawables-mdpi - which stand for drawables high, low and medium DPI) all resolve to the class R.drawables instead of R.drawables-hdpi etc.

Jul 29, 2011 | Category: development Rosetta Stone microphone setup takes ages

If, when starting up Rosetta Stone, the microphone configuration stage where you have to repeat "1 2 3 4 5" takes longer than a few steps (On average I was repeating them 13 times! Now down to 1.), here is what you can do to fix it:

Apr 27, 2011 | Category: development HTC Desire HD Slow and Laggy

Some people using the HTC desire HD mobile phone have experienced severe lag when trying to interact with it, for example swiping through home screens or opening apps.

Apr 21, 2011 | Category: development Umbraco HTTP Error 500.19

When setting up Umbraco with IIS on Windows you may encounter the following error page:

Apr 21, 2011 | Category: development HTTP Error 500.21 - Internal Server Error

This post shows you how to fix the following IIS error message: Handler "PageHandlerFactory-Integrated" has a bad module "ManagedPipelineHandler" in its module list This error occurs when the IIS module is incorrectly registered (nope, I don't know what that means either.) But to fix it, follow the steps below:

Mar 7, 2011 | Category: development Windows 7 Service Pack 1 Update Failed

I recently tried installing the Service Pack 1 update for Windows 7 and got the following error: 0x800f0a12 Some research told me that the update failed because it didnt have access to the system partition (A hard drive partition that stores backups of system files) which needed to be modified. To rectify this, do the following:

Feb 12, 2011 | Category: development Get Twitter tweets on your website or blog Twitter has discontinued their tweet API which means this post is now deprecated

Feb 11, 2011 | Category: development GIMP Path To Selection

First, make your selection using the Pen Tool.

Feb 10, 2011 | Category: development What is PHP-GTD? How do you install it?

From time to time we all get a bit overwhelmed trying to keep track of everything that’s on our mental to-do list, and when we’re feeling like this it’s hard to stay focussed and just get things done – it’s a catch 22. Well, GTD stands for “Getting Things Done”, an acronym coined by a man called David Allen. He wrote a book about getting things done, which describes how you need to first empty your mind of all the clutter before taking on specific tasks. This process allows you to become much more focused and, well, get things done.

Feb 9, 2011 | Category: development ReCaptcha Not Showing in Firefox

After successfully integrating Recaptcha in my site and it working on Chrome, Safari, Opera & IE8 (shock!) I saw that Firefox was rendering… absolutely nothing. A quick Google search didn’t really yield any useful results so after a bit of time spent digging I found a solution posted in a Google group that I’m going to post here.

Feb 8, 2011 | Category: development Cufon Installation Tutorial

Cufon is a script that makes fonts on your website clearer and prettier using flash vectors. In the past, I have used cufon with a font called delicious – http://www.exljbris.com/delicious.html.