Chris Mckee Designs, by Chris McKee, who'd of guessed

Credit Card validation is a Pain in the Arse *Updated March 2010
My Co-Worker pointed out this wont validate all Maestro Cards; Now hunting a list of registered prefixes.
But its not going anywhere fast. So I’ve combined two of the scripts I’ve found to meet my needs, added UK credit card data (Maestro/VisaDebit etal) and here … Read on Squire

Depending on your version of Ubuntu ~ Debian, you may be able to install the latest version of CouchDB via APTITUDE; chances are though, you wont.
As its really not that difficult to install it from scratch we may as well do it from source.
Here we’ll cover the installation; basic configuration and how to proxy a … Read on Squire

I was getting slightly bored (and pissed off) with using the “link to” on Google Maps to get the Latitude,Longitude for making a market file.
So this will be a storage area that I’ll be adding more and more bookmarklets to, to simplify my life and hopefully to simplify someone elses.
Get the longitude and latitude from … Read on Squire

A new plugin to simplify some of the more irritating bits of Google maps (i.e. GeoCoding and all the usual gubbins)

I’m looking at testing the new developments that Magento plan to release in version 4, but I need a few sizable databases to test the new speeds etc with.
My own test bases generally range up to 1000 products, 30 attributes. So if anyone has higher and wishes to help-out by lending me their database … Read on Squire

Anyone who already knows me knows I have a ridiculous amount of books; mostly e-books thesedays (the future-wifey takes exception to a book-based house-invasion) and mostly for reference. I am by all definition a book whore.  So when PACKT offered to send me their latest so I can review it and didn’t stipulate any real … Read on Squire

Ever wondered why Magento Layered Cache Was SOOOO Slow and Greedy, as in it sees mysql as its bitch and likes to consume as much resource as humanly possible.

This is a SINGLE update query based on my test 'footwear' store, several attributes etc. Course the more attributes you have the slower it goes.

I was nocking up a client script to drag down a news-feed and post it to a Wordpress blog; the script ran fine, no posts appeared and no errors occurred… irritating.

So I figured I'd share this pain in the arse issue fix to the "HTTP/1.1 417 Expectation Failed Error"

PHP-CLI Edition
* Auto Product Count
* Auto On Completion Destroy Temp Files
* Various Optimizations

*NEW* PHP Web Browser Edition
* Three files;
* Wrapper (which you run from your browser)
* Two IFRAMES: The main functional script and a counter to show its not fallen asleep

Error Contains None UTF-8 Content… Bleh
When encoding use content to XML there are often issues that occur… 99.9% of the time stemming from users copy-pasting from MSWord in to text boxes and all the odd characters being carried through. PHP will play dumb and happily save this, then winge like a b’tch about displaying it.

A … Read on Squire