<?php //include 'zenmagick/apps/storefront/web/index.php'; return; ?>

Good news: I just pulled all symfony2 upstream changes and ran the vendors script to pull those changes – all still working

As some of you might know, I live in New Zealand. More specifically I do live in Christchurch, a great city which had the bad luck of being in the way of some major earthquakes over the past 6 months. The most recent of those hit the city big square and fair and as a result we, like tens of thousands, have been without water, power and lots of other bits of infrastructure in the last two weeks.

Now, working with computers kind of sucks without power, so other than saying that I am back and unscathed there isn’t really a lot to report.

The aftershocks still affect our daily life and will continue to do so for quite some time. Having said that I think it is important to stress that I and my family have still been rather lucky and there are plenty of other people around us that have been through a lot worse. Our thoughts are going to all those suffering and those that have lost loved ones.

The city that I still love will not be the same after things have settled and all the rubble cleared – and there will surely be mixed feelings over time seeing how things change.

I’ll be back doing some ZenMagick work and also trying to keep up with questions, etc. I do hope that within the next 2-3 weeks there will be a mostly stable snapshot available for those curious to see what we have been up for ZenMagick 0.9.12.

Just a quick note that I’ll be moving hosting – again, so a bit of downtime is to be expected in the next few days…

UPDATE: Changing ISP is done, however I didn’t have time to completely upload all files from by backup yet – not sure what is missing, though. The blog at least seems to work. I should be able to finish updating all web content tonight…

Yesterday I came across a very strange zen cart failure. What happened was that on a dev site the payment options JavaScript validation was broken and the payment selection form was submitted without any checking.

Now, that is not that bad – I am sure that will happen in real live quite often. However, the page I was redirected to was completely broken (blank).

The url looked something like this:

index.php?main_page=checkout_payment&payment_error=usaepay_api&error=The+credit+card+number+starting+with++was+not+entered+correctly,+or+we+do+not+accept+that+kind+of+card.+Please+try+again+or+use+another+credit+card.&usaepay_api_cc_owner=me&usaepay_api_cc_expires_month=01&usaepay_api_cc_expires_year=10


As you can easily see from the url, the selected payment module was USA ePay but other modules will be affected too.  After some digging I noticed a strange response header: 406 Not Acceptable.

And soon enough I found that in application_top.php a very long list of $GET parameters is checked for urls and also length. Turns out that the allowed max. length is not 42 or 44, but exactly 43. Not sure why 43 is more secure than 44, but that is beside the point.

Does this mean it is not advisable to use those parameters as all? I don’t know, but on the other hand putting error messages into the url is not really necessary anyway.

Either way, something to be aware of and keep in mind should you ever have unexpected blank pages after a redirect…

It’s been over a week now since the 7.1 earthquake that shook Christchurch. Since then we’ve had more than 500 aftershocks (and counting), some quite strong. Checking right now there have been two 4.1 since I came into the office…

Of course, we haven’t felt all of those – thanks! but enough to keep edgy for most of the time.

This week will hopefully allow most of us to get back to a more normal life. Some schools, kindergardens and playcentre are open again and I am back to work too. I might go home early for a few more days, though. Sitting on the 10th floor still feels not to be the best place to take aftershocks…

The image in the link above is take just a block away from the office. Luckily the quake affected mostly old buildings with no earthquake protection. All the over engineering of buildings has really payed off!

Still, the news are talking about 5000 homes not suitable for living – I guess that gives an indication of how lucky we still are.

Ijust ran into an interesting problem where I do not want to expand three consecutive tilde ‘~’ chars to be expanded as user name in mediawiki. Furthermore, those chars where in a code section.

Does anyone know how to suppress signature expansion in mediawiki?

Not sure if you’ve heard about the earthquake in New Zealand on Friday night.

Let me tell you I have and despite the fact that our house is still good and water is back (power hopefully tonight) I’ll be a bit more offline that usual….

Time for another update – not the weekly one but just about the catalog manager refactoring.

The last few days I finally had a serious stab at getting this to work and I think I’ve got the basics done (screenshot at the end).
Things do not look spectacularly different from the old code, so don’t expect too much right now. However, it looks like we’ll be able to get the main layout done properly in the next week or two.

Finally, I’ve just added the task ‘Create standalone admin installer’ to my list and I’d like to mention that to hopefully get some feedback on that.

Since the new admin UI is completely separate, it is absolutely possible to run that without any other storefront/templating code. I wonder if that would be attractive as a first step to migrate to ZenMagick (should someone wish to do so). Also, no matter what, the more the merrier, so even if people would just use the admin app it would mean a lot more exposure (and finding bugs

It’s good to finally see some light at the end of the tunnel. The trip is far from being over, but at least there is now a degree of certainty about whether things will work or not.

Once the admin is stable (not complete, just everything working) it will be a lot easier to work on adding features, etc. Also, at that point there will be some more changes to the store code to catch up with all the good stuff that got created to make admin (and the MVC code in general) better.

And, once all that is done it really is time for a 1.0 release! Way to go, but it doesn’t look as impossible as, say, 6 month ago.

I have done some searching online, but despite multiple tries I can’t find a decent SQL (MySQL) parser in PHP. If anyone knows one I’d love to hear about that…