Nerdaphernalia » On the Front Lines

Uncheck All Radio Buttons on a PDF Form

Stephen R — Tue, 25 May 2010 21:50:29 +0000

I’ve been banging away at this issue today and figured it would be useful to others out there.

I made a PDF form for my company’s web site using Adobe Acrobat 8. In a couple places I have a “radio” control — that’s where you can select one, and only one, option from multiple choices. If you tick one box, all the others in that set are turned off. When distributing the blank form, however, I want all of the options to be blank. No default — the user has to pick one.

Here’s the issue: In the course of making the form, I checked one of the options, and now I can’t turn it off to distribute the form. I hunted around and got a lot of useless “you should use a checkbox instead” answers. No, I don’t need a checkbox, I just need to un-fill this field.

So how do you blank the field? You add an extra radio button to the set. Flip over to Preview, click the extra box. Back to Edit mode, delete that button. Voila! Blank radio buttons.

You’re welcome.

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Search Everywhere in MySQL

Stephen R — Mon, 17 May 2010 16:04:35 +0000

In recent months I’ve been tasked with taking over management of a web site programmed by somebody else. They used Drupal, with which I’m not familiar, and so a big part of the job is simply figuring out how that system works. In many cases I’ve wanted to search the entire database for a particular string of text, in order simply to find out where certain data is stored in the database.

I hunted over the web looking for a way to search an entire MySQL database — all tables, all fields — for text. For the most part I find forums with answers such as “Well, you set up your database wrong”. These kinds of responses remind me of the sequence in the movie “Funny Farm” where the truck driver is trying to find the town of Redbud. In short:

“Hey Mac, how do you get to Redbud?”

“If I wanted to go to Redbud, I wouldn’t start from here.”

Nonsensical and useless. If you’re here now, then this is where you’re starting from; telling me to start from somewhere else is simply a non-answer. Funny in a movie, but frustrating in real life.

Today I came across a most excellent script, the MySQL Database Search & Replace Tool. It’s a PHP page that you can drop into a web site and call from your browser. It will search the entire database for a string of text — exactly what I needed.

In a quick test run it threw out a couple errors but then gave me useful results; so it’s not entirely polished, but quite functional and useful. Kudos to Mark Jackson and Eric Amundson for releasing this great tool!

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Hackbook

Stephen R — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 22:45:37 +0000

My laptop has been a bit long in the tooth for a while now. It’s a 12″ Mac Powerbook G4 circa 2003. It actually runs OS 10.5 pretty well, which is impressive considering it originally came with OS 9 (that’s — count ‘em — 6 operating systems ago). The most noticeable issue is that it struggles to play video such as YouTube, and if I’m working with a particularly large file (150+ MB) it struggles to handle it.

So I needed a new one, but didn’t want to drop a grand on it. What to do? Well, I found a fixer-upper on eBay for just over $400. Impressively, it’s last year’s model Macbook with maxed out RAM and a good size hard drive. The down side is that it lacks an optical drive, and the keyboard is en Español.

Got the computer in the mail Tuesday. Thanks to “Target Disk Mode” via Firewire, I was able to wipe the drive and install the OS without an optical drive. Had a small hiccough transferring my old data from my Time Machine backup, in that I had forgotten that my backup doesn’t include my applications. Re-doing the transfer from my bootable backup drive fixed that nicely.

So — I’ll be putting about another $100 into the computer, as I got an English keyboard assembly for $30, and an optical drive for about $75 (both on eBay). I even found an online auction for the *brackets* for the optical drive, which is handy since the computer I bought had the drive completely removed (“it was making a funny noise” I’m told).

So now I get to do surgery. Cool! I replaced the hard drive in the Powerbook a couple years back, so I have a bit of experience with cracking open laptops. Should be an interesting exercise, involving steady hands and very, very small screwdrivers.

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WordPress Constants

Stephen R — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 04:54:50 +0000

In the course of working on WordPress, and plugins and such for WordPress, I frequently find myself at a loss to remember the name of constants provided by the system. Hey, isn’t there a constant for such-and-such directory?

I did a bit of grepping and parsing just now, and in the hopes that it might be of use to my fellow WordPress hackers, here is my list of every defined CONSTANT in the latest WordPress 2.7-bleeding setup.
(...)
Read the rest of WordPress Constants (170 words)

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How to write a solid and stable WordPress plugin

Stephen R — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 15:09:18 +0000

Mark Jaquith has put up a nice article on “How to write a solid and stable WordPress plugin“. It’s more of a rough overview than a detail piece, but he promises more details down the line in separate articles.

This is worth looking at if you write WP plugins, even if you’re pretty experienced — if for nothing more than to check that you’re not missing something….

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Technical Difficulties…

Stephen R — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 02:42:46 +0000

A reader (or at least someone who tried to be one…) emailed me to point out that my site was down for a good portion of the day. To further the embarrassment, in place of my content was a PHP error message pointing a finger squarely at the Shrinkylink plugin that I just yesterday used as an example in a tutorial article.

I just wanted to put on the record that the error had nothing to do with what I described in that article, in which we turned version 0.2 of the plugin into a working version 0.3.

The error was in fact a small-but-significant oversight in the process of turning out version 0.4, which, beyond shutting me down for a few hours, you haven’t seen yet. Funny, it worked just fine on my local test blog — not sure why, actually….

I now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.

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Virtual Multiblog and WordPress 2.6

Stephen R — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:25:42 +0000

This is an important note to anyone using my Virtual Multiblog system for WordPress:

WordPress version 2.6 is going to be released very soon. Until I have had time to test Virtual Multiblog on WP 2.6, I recommend that you not upgrade WordPress past 2.5.1.

I’ve always said that the VMB system is quite future-proof, “unless WordPress makes significant changes to wp-config.php”. Well, WP 2.6 allows users to change the location of that critical file, and the wp-content folder. Either one of these changes may have ramifications for Virtual Multiblog.

Hang Tight folks. I’ll test it out and let you know.

if somebody daring does take the plunge, I would appreciate any problem reports.

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Anti-Spam “Quiz” beta test

Stephen R — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:48:59 +0000

In the last couple weeks I have been working on a significant update to Andy Skelton’s Quiz plugin for WordPress. Andy gave me some feedback, which led to further fixes, and I think it’s working pretty well.

As of this morning I have turned off the Spam Karma plugin, which has been protecting this blog from comment spam¹ for a few years now. In its place I have activated a beta version of Quiz.

What the plugin does is add a question to the Comments form, which must be answered correctly before a comment is submitted. You can set a default question, set a different question per-post, or choose for a particular post to not have a question.

This is pretty close to a release version, I think, but I would appreciate some feedback from the community. It requires (I think) WordPress 2.5.

You can download it here: Quiz 1.1 beta 5

Note: If you have been using Andy’s version 1.0, the Q&As you have entered previously should still work, but you will have to re-enter your settings on the new admin page (no more editing PHP files). Also, rather than using pseudo-shortcodes, you now enter the Q&A in a regular meta box on the Edit Post screen. If there is demand, I may restore the ability to continue using the shortcode method, but for now it is gone.

[Update: If upgrading from 1.0, you must deactivate it and reactivate once to set the default preferences.]

1: I am, however, still running Bad Behavior as well.

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