When you'are working with Subversion, the situation might be familiar: You have checked-out some directories and want to check them in at another repository. Subversion is not happy to do that, it complains with a friendly reminder, that 'your directory' is already under version control.

The proper way to do it, would probably be to export a clean directory tree, but sometimes this option is not available.

Here's a simple shell script to recursively remove all the hidden '.svn' directories:

rm -rf `find . -type d -name .svn`

Wether it is better to use backticks or xargs is being discussed elsewhere.

Since the ECMA-262 specifications (aka Javascript 1.8.5 aka ECMAScript 5th Edition) it is possible prevent Objects from accepting any changes to their properties. After applying Object.freeze(myObj) it won't be possible to change, add or remove properties from myObj.

So far so good.

As in Javascript Arrays also inherit from Object, I could see not reason, why freezing an array should not work.

var obj = {'a':1, 'b:2'};
Object.freeze(obj);
Object.isFrozen(obj);       // returns true
obj.a = 10;                 // new assignment has no affect
obj.a;                      // returns 1

var arr = [1, 2];
Object.freeze(arr);
Object.isFrozen(arr);      // returns true
arr[0] = 10;
arr;                       // returns [10, 2] ... ouch!

It turns out, that it seems to be an implementation bug in Safari (5.1). It's working in the latest Firefox and Chrome releases.

To check whether freezing arrays works in your brower, click the following button:

ps. I asked the question first on Stack Overflow: 'Freezing' Arrays in Javascript?. Thanks for the constructive answers.

With arrays is trivial to get the length, with objects, the situations is slightly different. One approach would be to get all the keys and get the length of that array:

Object.keys(myObject).length;

More details at Stackoverflow. This functionality is part of EMCAScript 5 specs.

sudo passwd root

After which you are prompted with a

Changing password for root.
New password:

Why the need for root? Surely, it's a dangerous weapon and things can go awry easily, so only use it as a last resort. (I used it for hiding the couchdb account folder from the GUI.)

If you ever find yourself in a situation of having to call a perl script from within PHP, and you want to get the return values from the perl script, you might do it like the following:

$command = "perl /my/perl/script.pl";
$results = exec($command);
// does not print error

If the perl script generates error, you won't be able to see them, as they are written to stderr.

One solution might be to append the stderr to stdout, therefore getting it into the $results variable.

$command = "perl /my/perl/script.pl 2>&1";
$results = exec($command);
// Prints: Died at /my/perl/script.pl line 25.

As this post explains, 1 means stdout, 2 means stderr. 2>1 might look ok at first sight, but the '1' will be interpreted as a filename. Therefore it has to be escaped with &1, resulting in 2>&1.

Suppose you have an array of object:

var array = [   {a:13, b:false },
        {a:7, b:true },
        {a:78, b:true } ]       

The old, ECMAScript 3 way of checking for objects, in which b is true would be a simple for-loop:

var results = [];
for (var i=0; i
Ok, that's working, but not very elegant nor concise. Luckily, ECMAScript 5 offers a nicer way:
var results = array.filter( function(item) {
    return item.b;      // if item.b is true
});
    

var array = [132, 32, 14, 525, 52, 12, 52];
var sum;
for (var i=0; i
I was slightly puzzled, why the above code outputs Nan instead of the consecutive sums of the array.
var array = [132, 32, 14, 525, 52, 12, 52];
var sum = 0; // sum needs to be init...?
for (var i=0; i
After declaring sum with a number, it works. Still have to find out why.
    

Just a quick reminder for myself.

Serving Typekit fonts to https sites only works with the Performance Price Plans.

If your are using Wordpress you might have run into the following situation. Let's say the main usage of this particular Wordpress installation is not so much blogging (articles), but as light-weight CMS (pages). Wordpress' Page and Subpage system works quite well in this respect, but I am no happy with one thing: Numbers as Page Slugs.

While it's possible to create a new page, name it with a number "2012", the page slug automatically turns to 2012-2. Manually editing the page slug back to "2012" and publishing it should solve that. Unfortunately not. Back to "2012-2".

In most cases, when the page slug is not a number, the presence of a "-2" and the end of the slug suggests, that the page already exists in the database. Make sure it's not in the Trash, empty the trash, if it is.

trembl.org/2012/

It does not seem to be a huge problem, because even when the page slug is "2012-2" and you ask for a page named trembl.org/2012/, Wordpress will happily forward (redirect?) you to trembl.org/2012-2/. So... Working: Yes? Nice solution: No!.

No other choice than to have a look at the MySQL itself. If you are not comfortable doing it on the CL, have a look at phpMyAdmin. Actually, if you are not comfortable editing MySQL, don't do it at all. Messing up the MySQL will mess up you Wordpress installation! And I assume you have a recent backup.

So, with that out of the way, open your Wordpress MySQL DB in phpMyAdmin. The wp_posts table holds all your posts, pages, as well as all the revisions to them. Look for the one you want to edit, in this case "2012-2". Open the entry for editing (the small crayon on the left). You'll want to edit "post_name". Change it to whatever you live ("2012"), save (it's called "Go") and you're done.

Wordpress Version: 3.1.3

ln -s /path/to/existing/directory /path/to/new/symbolic/link

After that, a

cd /path/to/new/symbolic/link

brings you to

/path/to/existing/directory

Sometimes a little magic is necessary.

Symbolic link can be removed with a simple 'rm'. This only removes the symbolic link, and not the linked files.

rm /path/to/new/symbolic/link