Chris Mckee Designs, by Chris McKee, who'd of guessed | ChrisMcKee.co.uk

Validating UK Credit & Debit Cards With LUHN to Type

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

Setting up CouchDB on Ubuntu/Debian with Lighttpd

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

Get Lat,Long from Google Maps Bookmarklet

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

Google Maps jQuery plugin

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

Magento Developers Lend Me Your Data

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

Magento Beginners Guide… Its a Book for Magento Beginners, No-Really

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

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.

Curl HTTP 417 – Expectation Failed

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"

Magento Commerce – Layered Navigation Cache Error – Part Badger Part Duck

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

Saving user content to XML aka How to Remove Invalid Characters in UTF-8

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

A Survival Guide for Decent Folk

Taken from http://nightjack.wordpress.com/ before Sir David Eady QC merrily allowed the removal of anonymity privileged to the the author, losing him his blog and very nearly his job. That’s Sir David Eady of Tenterden, Kent who values anonymity up to the point where it exposes legal incompetence. Source: NightJack In these days of us increasingly having to … Read on Squire

Browser Testing

Ok to save time (and the fact I type enough to drive me nuts) I’ll cut the bull and just give you a set of great tools for browser testing. IE Tester – this neat FREE bit of software lets you test in all the IE browsers since 5.5 within one browser. Great stuff; the … Read on Squire

IE 8 is finally out complete… and its not terrible

Regardless of whether or not your a fan of IE, bits of functionality in windows will make you use it, whether it be update or irritating banking sites that insist on making you use a specific browser; so do yourself a favour and download it anyway… if your on a mac you can just go … Read on Squire

Magento Commerce – Layered Navigation Cache Error – Part Deux

Solution 2 – Running the Layered Navigation Cache in bits from PHP-CLI Part Three Solves a lot (GO BADGER) So not everyone has half a gig of ram to play with, that’s a git. Funnily though, I don’t have PS on the server I’m developing Magento on (why, oh god why?) so I cant build a shareable … Read on Squire

Magento Commerce – Layered Navigation Cache Error

When running a cache refresh on Layered Navigation the script times out producing either an Error 500 or server based error. The problem is then made worse by magento's failure to recognise that the process didn't complete.

Submit Your Site Feeds

Submit Your Site Feeds [REPUBLISHED FROM OLD SITE] There’s little to love about search indexes, they can easily make or break a company, spread vicious rumours that are a nightmare to remove and last but not least drive web-masters to the point where they crack. Just to save time; there’s not many search engines left any more, nearly … Read on Squire

Converting a Date to MySql Formatted Date

Date-Convert is a handy function to take one of the aches and pains out of MySQL by converting data from a variable (posted from a form or just stored) into a format mysql will be able to store and converting the database date back into the british standard of date month year.

How to Solve: “Delayed Write Error”

[Republished from old blog] With many large hard-drives on Windows XP, attached via SATA, people have started to encounter issues where the disk drive starts to display problems displayed in the windows information bubble listing that drive X:(your drive name) has encountered a “Delayed Write Error”, usually followed by some file name your probably not even accessing. Now … Read on Squire

Installing Advanced Policy Firewall on Media Temple

Prerequisites for installing APF on MT [Taken from old blog] 6 pack of beer or other alcoholic beverage (as this is really boring) About an hour of your time (allowing time for drifting off and watching tv) Large blunt object (hands will do) for mashing keyboard (mt) Developer tools installed (mt) SSH Access (mt) slow bleeding brain hemorrhage. Access to the internet … Read on Squire

UNITE! in the name of hippy whacking

UNITE! Thousands of half arsed under-researched opinion mongering by thousands of people that don't matter, won’t make scratch difference.