Hi there,

It looks like codecademy took down their PHP course, which stinks becuase I love, love, love how that site approaches teaching by doing. Any other free resources out there for a do-not-show approach for learning PHP?

Looking to get my feet wet so I'm a little less dangerous when tinkering with my WordPress templates.

I just gave up on installing Gimp via flatpack because it required a 2GB download. I run i3 on top of Xfce. I have lots of Gtk libraries already. Storage is cheap and my internet has no limits, but this seems very inefficient to me. What if I had to install all my software that way?

I have knowledge of the basic concepts of programming in general and html and some very basic knowledge of javascript, but this specific task is proving a little beyond me. I'm actually using tampermonkey, in case that matters.

www.bricklink.com is a site to buy Lego from private sellers. By default, when looking at a shop's listing of items, it shows 25 per page. I would like to automatically switch to 100 per page every time.

Here's a randomly selected store page (no affiliation) at the default 25 per page:

https://store.bricklink.com/TheBricky#/shop?o={"itemType":"P","catID":"18","showHomeItems":0}

Now, same page set to display 100 per page. Note how "pgSize" is added to the url but doesn't appear by default:

https://store.bricklink.com/TheBricky#/shop?o={"pgSize":100,"itemType":"P","catID":"18","showHomeItems":0}

What I would like is for pgSize to be set to 100 only IF

"shop" appears in the url

AND

"pgSize" does not appear in the url OR "pgSize" does appear in the url but does not equal 100.

Since Bricklink remembers pgSize per shop page per session, once pgSize is set to 100 for a particular shop greasemonkey doesn't need to do anything. Intercepting the url before the page loads would be nice but unnecessary since loading is fast and I'm not worried about bandwidth.

I tried making this but wasn't sure how to input what I'm trying to test for in the url. Of course now that I've thought about it some more it seems the task is more probably difficult than I thought it would be at first. Any help would be appreciated.

EDIT: This comment below seems to be working, although the way Bricklink makes their urls feels funky at times.

Hi,

There's a certain site which hosts media files and has a player that depends on a lot of third-party resources to play, while browsers have native support for those file types. Those 3rd-party resources are often blocked by ad blockers and I have no desire to white-list them. I would like to extract the direct link to the media file and make it playable on my custom web page.

The link to the media file is present in the page source of each page, always on the same line. It's not anchored in HTML but present in the JavaScript for the player, like so:

    $(document).ready(function(){
      $("#jquery_jplayer_1").jPlayer({
        ready: function () {
          $(this).jPlayer("setMedia", {
            [ext]: "https://[domain]/[filename.ext]"
          });
        },

In this example it's on line #5. [ext] = the file extension.

I want to build the following:

• A web page with a form with a single input field meant to receive links from that specific file host
• [Something] that extracts the file link from the source of the host's page
• Present the linked file as playable in an embedded native player

So far I've managed to create a form with an input box and a submit button, but it doesn't do anything yet. What is the best way to build the actual functionality? I know HTML/CSS. I have some rudimentary understanding of JavaScript/jQuery and Python3, so those would be my preferred tools.

For those worried about piracy: The files in question are not copyrighted and I'm not looking to make copies. I just want to make them playable. This is for personal use.

Thank you for reading this far. Any and all advice is welcome!

I thought it could be fun to discuss problems that we've encountered in our programming or programming-related work and have never found a solution for. I figure that at worst we can have a lot of fun venting about and scratching our heads at things that just don't make any sense to anyone, and at best we might be able to help each other find answers and, more importantly, some closure.

For the first book of this book club, I chose Google's book on Site Reliability Engineering, because it's freely available online, so we can get started without waiting for any dead-tree books to arrive. For the next book I'll plan on a few weeks lead time to decide on a book then acquire it from whatever bookstore or library you use.

I'm going to aim to do this every Thursday, 1 chapter per week (or maybe 2, if they're short?)

Today's reading: Preface and chapter 1 (full list of chapters here)

Hey! Since it's a small community at the moment, I think we can have a very genreral thread about anything regarding tooling: interesting technologies you use at work/home, your editor, plugins, themes, bruh let's even share some screenshots. I find this kind of shit exciting and know more people like me exist out there :)

I have a personal website, and while I don't mind it showing up in SERPs for DuckDuckGo, Bing, etc. I do not want it showing up on Google at all.

Google doesn't send traffic my way, I pay for my site out of my salary from my day job instead of running ads, and preventing Google from indexing my site seems like the best form of nonviolent direct action I can take to protest their continuing dominance and their "embrace, extend, and extinguish" campaign against the Web.

I figure the easiest way to do this is to add the following to my site's .htaccess file since I don't have access to the server config file:

X-Robots-Tag: googlebot: none, noarchive, nosnippet, notranslate, noimageindex

Are there any downsides that I should know about besides not showing up in Google results?

TLDR: What programming language would be useful for taking info in an excel file and producing a text file (that is organized and arranged in a particular way) containing that info? Which would be useful for this problem but also helpful in general? And also, are there any recommended online courses where I could learn it?

I have no real experience coding or anything but have always wanted to learn. Recently at work we've encountered a problem. My boss had created a matlab program in order to take text/numbers from an excel document and transfer them to a text file, but in an organized way.

Say you have something you call "Pancakes" and the cell next to it has the number "3", as in there are three pancakes. I want to be able to create a text file that would read something like this:

NUMBER OF PANCAKES

• Pancakes: 3

We recently have changed around the format of the excel document for a different item, for example "French Toast". I've tried to mess with matlab briefly but was unable to change the program to compensate, and I no longer easily have access to matlab.

I'm seeing this as an opportunity to learn some programming and also fix some stuff at work. So what programming language would be useful for fixing this problem? Which would be useful for this problem, but also helpful in general? And also, are there any recommended online courses where I could learn it?

Thanks for any help, I appreciate it.

To put this into context: I'm still minor, in Europe, and I was hired into SW company as backend developer. I'm making about 2-3 times as much as my friends in fastfoods.

I'm basically making WS that would be unified wrapper for about 15 another WS - instead of crafting request for each of those, you will just call the API and it will do everything for you.

Everything was fine, until I encountered a nightmare: WSDL/SOAP protocol over HTTPS with need to use client certificate.

Full of false hope, I thought: "It'll be easy, I finished communication with another companies in few hours, this will be quick".

I was very wrong. I spent countless hours on this. I tried 3 programming languages and 4 different frameworks, copy-pasting solutions from stack overflow and wondering why does this still throw errors! I copied it from stack overflow! I used windows alongside linux and installed like 10 wsdl/soap clients from 2008 forums.

I created 8 or so SO questions, most about different language/framework, but the same problem.

Worth of mentoining, at the time, I could obtain wsdl and xsd of the WS with usage of two certificates (crt.pem and key.pem) over PHP. I tried to use PHP SoapClient, which accepted just one certificate file. I used .pem certificate that I received and should get the work done.

Then, I started writing the final question. Including PHP that downloaded wsdl and SoapClient that didn't work. Knowing someone will probably want to see certificates, I used cat key.pem cert.pem > certCombined.pem and diff certCombined.pem cert.pem. cert.pem was the certificate I received and should work. I expected no differences. When I saw two pages of differences, I started to suspect the cert I was given is wrong. So I pointed the PHP SoapClient to certCombined - and it started working!

This would have never happened (at least for several more hours) unless I known someone will want to see diff between working and not-working certificates. Thank you, rubber duck debugging! Next time I'll be solving something, I'll write on paper everything I use and know.

What are your stories?

Imagine that your boss told you that the company is happy to send you to one or two conferences next year, with the aim of helping you to improve your leadership skills.

In this context, "leadership" includes Culture; Coaching & Mentoring; Teamwork; Continuous Improvement; Collaboration; Agile; Culture Change.

You want to make a list of conferences worth considering in order to estimate the budget. What events would you put on your list?

Background

There's been some talk on ~ before, and it seems like there are quite a few people who are either interested in, learning, or working in game development, so I thought this could be a fun programming challenge.

This one is fairly open-ended: make a game in 1 hour. Any game, any engine, don't worry about art or sound or anything.

Doing is the best way to learn. Most people's first project is something overly ambitious, and when they find that it's more difficult than they thought, they can get discouraged, or even give up entirely. This is why the 1 hour limit is important: it forces you to finish something, even if it's small. When you're done, you can come out of it saying you made a game, and you learned from it.

Chances are the game might not be fun, look bad, be buggy, etc. But don't worry about that, everyone's game will have problems, and if you do create something really fun or innovative, congratulations, you have a prototype that you can expand on later!

"Rules"

Like I said before, these "rules" are pretty simple: make a game in (approximately) 1 hour. You can use any tools you want. If you use external assets (art, sound), it's probably best you use something you have the rights to (see resources). If you're completely new to game development/programming, your goal could even be to finish a tutorial.

If you're the kind of person who tends to get carried away with these things, you might want to post a comment saying you're starting, then another one once you've finished your game.

Please share your finished game, I'm sure everyone would love to try them! If your game is web-based, it can be hosted for free on Github Pages or Itch.io. If downloadable, it can be hosted for free on Google Drive, Mega, Dropbox, Itch.io, etc.

Resources

Engines

If you're a beginner, a good engine to start with is LÖVE. It's very simple, and uses Lua, which is very easy to learn.

If you're familiar with another language, you could use a library to make it in that language. Some examples:

C++: SFML, SDL, Allegro

Javascript: kontra, Phaser, pixi.js

Python: pygame

Rust: Piston, ggez, Amethyst

If you want something more complex, consider Godot, Unity, or Unreal.

You can also try something visual like Construct, Clickteam Fusion, or GDevelop

Art

For such a short time constraint, I'd suggest you use your own "programmer art": just use some basic shapes. Your primary focus should be gameplay.

If you think you have time to find something, try looking on OpenGameArt.

Sound

You can make simple sound effects very quickly with sfxr (or in this case, a web port of sfxr called jsfxr).

The first point release came out July 26, and enables upgrades from 16.04 LTS.

https://blog.ubuntu.com/2018/07/26/first-point-release-of-18-04-lts-available-today

Have you upgraded your desktop? Server?

Happy with it? Any pitfalls?

It's often the case that in academic and self-teaching environments, you don't really have the opportunity to grasp and fully understand situations in which a problem has multiple valid solutions and what the implications are in choosing among them. Among those considerations are two in particular: runtime efficiency and maintainability. When these subjects are discussed, the example solutions are often comical at best, or the problems themselves too complex to fully grasp the situation at hand. Sometimes the problems are also so simple as to be completely worthless, e.g. comparing bubble sort to bogo sort.

As such, I would like to take this opportunity to discuss practical but conceptually simple problems and the implications of the different solutions that are available. Conceptual simplicity is an absolute requirement because we want these problems to be accessible to a wider variety of readers. Problems don't necessarily need to be code-related (you could e.g. discuss something related to server administration). Bonus points for problems that include solutions with an efficiency/maintainability trade-off!