Yet another blog about PHP, HTML and CSS » Tools

Strong random password with a bookmarklet

Petr 'PePa' Pavel — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 18:17:58 +0000

I create all sorts of passwords rather often, be it for me or for my clients. Until today, I always sort of let my hands use the free-fall feature and generated some random characters just by dropping them onto the keyboard. Then I added upper/lower case character and a symbol here and there. I tried to use random password generators before but the above procedure was always faster than locating and executing a special-purpose application. Well, today it occurred to me that a bookmarklet would be a much better solution. The browser is always running and having the bookmarklet in the bookmark toolbar makes using it a single-click job.

So, you know the drill. Drag this onto your bookmark toolbar:

Random Password

It uses code from str_shuffle() (project php.js) – thanks guys!

You can edit the javascript code and change the set of characters that are used in the password (str). You can also change the password length there (passLength).

I did search the web for an existing solution before writing my own. I found quite a few bookmarklets that generate a unique password based on your master password and the place that you want to use the password for. It wasn’t my case. I needed passwords for new ftp or mysql users, this kind of stuff.

To be honest, I haven’t tested it in anything else than Firefox, the only true browser ;-)

Alternative icon for Eclipse IDE

Petr 'PePa' Pavel — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 09:52:01 +0000

Each year we have the pleasure of switching to a new version of Eclipse. And by pleasure I mean both shades of the word. Cool new features and boring migration. I usually fight my laziness for quite some time and migrate my projects gradually. Thanks folks for keeping Eclipse isolated so that I can run both versions simultaneously. I’m getting to my point now: I needed a new icon that would distinct the new version from the old one.

After a proper googling I came to a conclusion that there simply isn’t one I could just download and use (ico for Windows). So I searched through the Galileo directory and found a nice gif icon:
C:\Program Files\Eclipse 3.5 PDT\configuration\org.eclipse.osgi\bundles\162\1\.cp\feature.gif

Then I googled for an online ico creator and found iConvert that can not only create Windows icons but also Mac and Linux icons.
Click, click and I was finally able to link my shortcut to a new icon. Perfect!

Ganymede / PHPEclipse – not a good choice for debugging CakePHP

Petr 'PePa' Pavel — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:57:40 +0000

After hours of trying I finally conclude that CakePHP cannot be debugged in Eclipse 3.4.1 (Ganymede) and PHPEclipse 1.2.1.200810130444PRD (XDebug).

My webroot is set to app/webroot and Eclipse stops on a breakpoint only if it’s in app/webroot/index.php
Even after it stops there it won’t stop on a next breakpoint that is set in my controller.

The only working solution I found is downgrading to Eclipse 3.3.2 (Europa) and PDT 1.0.3.v20080603. Fortunately both can run side by side so in theory, I can write new code in Ganymede and debug in Europa but that sucks. Programming is a constant debugging.

I could try to switch from XDebug to DBG. Maybe I will next time I have a day that I can waste.

Update:

New PDT 2.0.0.v20081030-1802 works with Ganymede/XDebug just fine. It also has features I have been missing like Mark Occurrences – one more reason for switching. It doesn’t have support for chm help files though (PHPEclipse does) and is generally slower than PHPEclipse.

Great tool for sharing pieces of code

Petr 'PePa' Pavel — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 09:21:19 +0000

Ever needed to send someone a piece of code in an e-mail to illustrate your thinking?

Pastebin does just that. You paste your code, choose what language you use to get the right syntax highlighting and post it.

Then your colleague makes his changes and posts them back. With one click you can see his version, your version and the difference, just like in this example:

http://pastebin.com/pastebin.php?diff=f3bd4dcb6