There are 2 articles written in February, 2012

Automatically upload screenshots in XFCE4

on February 13, 2012. in Development, Programming, Software. A 2 minute read.

XFCE4 has a nice little tool for making screenshots - xfce4-screenshooter. My only gripe with it is that it can’t automatically upload the images to a server and give me the URL to the image (to be honest, it can, but it uploads the images to a shady looking website, and I don’t like that). And then one day I saw Evan Coury’s GtkGrab - a set of scripts which does exactly what I want! But, sadly, that’s for Gnome. So, based on Evan’s work, I put together this little script:

Zend Framework full page cache tips

on February 11, 2012. in Development, Programming. A 2 minute read.

When I started rewriting this blog, I knew from start that I want to use Zend Framework’s full page caching,
as, I think, that’s the best cache for this purpose. Not much going on
on the front end, much more reads than writes, no ajax or any other
"dynamic" content. While implementing the cache, I ran into two issues.

The
first problem was that the cache files were created, but they were
never valid - on each request a new cache file was created. It was a
noob(ish) mistake - I had two calls to Zend_Session::startSession() in
my code, which made the session ID always to change which made the cache
validity test to fail. Removed the second call and all was well. Or so I
thought…

I moved the code to staging to run some final tests
before pushing it live, but the cache started failing again. This time
the cache files weren’t even being created! The same code works on my
machine, fails on staging. The only difference was that I had turned off
the loading of Google Analytics in the development environment. But…
that can’t be it, right? Wrong. On every request the values of the GA
cookies are different. The full page cache has a set of settings which
dictates what variables are taken into account when creating an ID for
the cache: make_id_with_xxx_varialbes where "xxx" is one of get, post, files, session, cookie and by default all are set to true. Setting make_id_with_cookie_variables to false made the cache to disregard the always changing GA cookies which made the cache start working again.

So,
if Zend Framework’s full page cache starts failing for you, check the
contents and behaviours of all the variables - get, post, files,
session, cookie - and play around with the cache settings until it
starts working again.

Happy hackin’!