The <a href="https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/install-macos.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">AWS guide</a> is still a good starting point for this. The main piece I had trouble with was using `aws --version` once it was installed.

*Prerequisite:* have Python3 and Pip3 installed

## Quick answer:
Adjust $PATH so it has the path to the AWS executable.


## Longer answer:
### 1) Find where it installed AWS

The guide says to use `which python3` - but when I installed Python it installed it to my user, not the system. 

When you run `pip3 install awscli --updgrade --user` it should spit out something like this
```
... awscli in ./Library/Python/3.8/lib/python/site-packages (1.18.18)
```
The **"./"** indicated it is a local path, NOT the system path. You can confirm by checking 
```
ls -la /Users/<insert_user_name>/Library/Python/3.8/bin/aws
```

### 2) Edit `~./bash_profile` and add the path
```
export PATH=/Users/<insert_user_name>/Library/Python/3.8/bin:$PATH
```

### 3) Reload the profile
```
source .bash_profile
```
### 4) Test - `aws --version`. It should output
```
aws-cli/1.18.18 Python/3.8.2 Darwin/17.7.0 botocore/1.15.18
```

Installing AWS CLI on Mac

Setting up composer to use a private repo is pretty easy... after you've done it once. There are a few things that can trip you up, such as the naming of the package and the version to include. The <a href="https://getcomposer.org/doc/05-repositories.md#using-private-repositories" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">docs</a> for getting the configuration set up got me about 95% of the way there.

This guide assumes you already have a *composer.json* file created, and you're looking to add a new private repository to that.


## Part 1: Bitbucket configuration
Composer is going to need access to your Bitbucket account in order to fetch the private git repo. An OAuth consumer can be used to give composer access.
1) In Bitbucket, go to your "Bitbucket Settings" page `https://bitbucket.org/account/user/<username>/`

2) Click "OAuth"

![Click OAuth](/images/posts/using-a-private-repo-with-composer-and-bitbucket/oauth_link.png)

3) Click the "Add consumer" button

![Click the "Add consumer" button](/images/posts/using-a-private-repo-with-composer-and-bitbucket/consumer_button.png)


4) Fill in the name, description, callback URL (this can be anything - composer won't use it but it is required by Bitbucket), select This is a private consumer, and select Repositories: Read for the permissions.

![Consumer config part 1](/images/posts/using-a-private-repo-with-composer-and-bitbucket/consumer_config_pt1.png)

![Consumer config part 2](/images/posts/using-a-private-repo-with-composer-and-bitbucket/consumer_config_pt2.png)


## Part 2: Composer configuration
Using the *Key* and *Secret* from the OAuth consumer you created in part 1, you will need to add an *auth.json* file in composer's home directory.
```
vi ~/.composer/auth.json
```
```
{
 "bitbucket-oauth": {
 "bitbucket.org": {
 "consumer-key": "myKey",
 "consumer-secret": "mySecret"
 }
 }
}
```

## Part 3: Configure composer.json
1) Add your private repository to the configuration so composer can look there for packages. The URL for the repo can be found in Bitbucket by clicking the "Clone" button in the top right of the repository view.

![Package URL](/images/posts/using-a-private-repo-with-composer-and-bitbucket/package_url.png)

```
"repositories": [
 {
 "type": "git",
 "url": "https://aerosox@bitbucket.org/aerosox/dataconverter.git"
 }
]
```

2) Require the package in *composer.json*. With either of these methods.
- CLI: `composer require aerosox/dataconverter`
- Edit `composer.json`

```
"require": {
 "aerosox/dataconverter": "master@dev"
 }
```

## Troubleshooting
1) the package name in the *require* matches the name from the `composer.json` configuration for the package you are including.

```
// composer.json from aerosox/dataconvert

{
 // even though the git repo is configured as aerosox/dataconverter.git, this name *could* be anything. This is what composer is going to be looking for when it searches for the package to install.
 "name": "aerosox/dataconverter",
 "description": "Convert data formats",
 "type": "library",
 "authors": [
 {
 "name": "Levi Jackson",
 "email": "aerosox@gmail.com"
 }
 ],
 "autoload": {
 "psr-4": {
 "DataConverter\\": "src/"
 }
 },
 "require-dev": {
 "phpunit/phpunit": "^6.5"
 }
}
```
2) I saw a lot of guides say to load the package as `"aerosox/dataconverter": "master-dev"`. I initially thought that *master-dev* was a composer standard, but it's not. If you want to use that, you'd want to set up an alias in the package so it can be found.

```
"extra": {
 "branch-alias": {
 "master-dev": "actual-branch-name"
 }
}
```

Using a private repo with composer and bitbucket

I was discussing the speed of filtering an array with a colleague and I had been under the assumption that using PHP *array_*\* functions are considerably faster than using a loop (foreach, for, while) . I could not find evidence of that when I was doing some Google searches though so I decided to do a little bit of a speed test on my own.

For all of these tests I set up the following beforehand:

```
ini_set('memory_limit', '500M');
$data = range(0, 1000000);
```

## Test 1: array_filter vs loops
| Type | Time |
| ---- | ---- |
| foreach | 0.37 |
| while | 0.58 |
| for | 0.61 |
| array_filter | 0.74 |


```
// array_filter loop average 0.74 seconds
$start = microtime(true);
$data = array_filter($data, function ($item) {
 return $item%2;
});
$end = microtime(true);

echo $end - $start;

// Foreach loop average 0.37 seconds
$start = microtime(true);
$newData = array();
foreach ($data as $item) {
 if ($item%2) {
 $newData[] = $item;
 }
}
$end = microtime(true);

echo $end - $start;

// For loop average 0.61 seconds
$start = microtime(true);
$newData = array();
$numItems = count($data);
for($i=0;$i<=$numItems;$i++) {
 if ($data[$i]%2) {
 $newData[] = $data[$i];
 }
}
$end = microtime(true);

echo $end - $start;

// While loop average 0.58 seconds
$start = microtime(true);
$newData = array();
$numItems = count($data);
$i = 0;
while ($i <= $numItems) {
 if ($data[$i]%2) {
 $newData[] = $data[$i];
 }
 $i++;
}
$end = microtime(true);

echo $end - $start;
```


## Test 2: array_map vs loops
| Type | Time |
| ---- | ---- |
| foreach | 0.65 |
| while | 0.69 |
| for | 0.76 |
| array_filter | 1.38 |

```
// array_map average 1.38 seconds
$start = microtime(true);
$data = array_map(function ($item) {
 return $item+1;
}, $data);
$end = microtime(true);

echo $end - $start;

// For loop average 0.65 seconds
$start = microtime(true);
$newData = array();
foreach ($data as $item) {
 $newData[] = $item+1;
}
$end = microtime(true);

echo $end - $start;

// For loop average 0.76 seconds
$start = microtime(true);
$newData = array();
$numItems = count($data);
for($i=0;$i<=$numItems;$i++) {
 $newData[] = $data[$i]+1;
}
$end = microtime(true);

echo $end - $start;

// While loop average 0.69 seconds
$start = microtime(true);
$newData = array();
$numItems = count($data);
$i = 0;
while ($i <= $numItems) {
 $newData[] = $data[$i];
 $i++;
}
$end = microtime(true);

echo $end - $start;
```

## Test 3: array_walk vs loops
| Type | Time |
| ---- | ---- |
| foreach | 0.65 |
| while | 0.69 |
| for | 0.72 |
| array_filter | 0.76 |

```
// array_walk average 0.72 seconds
$start = microtime(true);
$data = array_walk($data, function ($item) {
 return $item+1;
});
$end = microtime(true);

echo $end - $start;

// Foreach loop average 0.65 seconds
$start = microtime(true);
$newData = array();
foreach ($data as $item) {
 $newData[] = $item+1;
}
$end = microtime(true);

echo $end - $start;

// For loop average 0.76 seconds
$start = microtime(true);
$newData = array();
$numItems = count($data);
for($i=0;$i<=$numItems;$i++) {
 $newData[] = $data[$i]+1;
}
$end = microtime(true);

echo $end - $start;

// While loop average 0.69 seconds
$start = microtime(true);
$newData = array();
$numItems = count($data);
$i = 0;
while ($i <= $numItems) {
 $newData[] = $data[$i];
 $i++;
}
$end = microtime(true);

echo $end - $start;
```

## End Notes
I was incorrect when I thought that *array_\** functions are faster! Albeit the speed difference is pretty negligible when talking about using it once or twice during page execution. I won't stop using the *array_\** functions because of my findings, they still offer a cleaner way of writing the code. I will only second guess using them when I am writing code that has the potential to be processed thousands of times.

*I tested these with a pretty basic data set. Speed may vary depending on the type of data being used as well as the version of PHP (I used 5.5.4).*

Are array_* functions faster than loops?


I was working with [Grunt](http://gruntjs.com/) the other day attempting to update some legacy code to use [uglify](https://github.com/gruntjs/grunt-contrib-uglify) and I kept getting errors such as:
```
>> Uglifying source path/to/file.js failed.
Warning: Uglification failed.
Unexpected token punc «(», expected punc «:».
Line 12 in path/to/file.js
 Use --force to continue.

Aborted due to warnings.
```

 When I went to line 12 I saw absolutely nothing wrong. It was a comment block like the following:
 
 ```
 /*
An unobtrusive comment goes here
*/
```

I tried removing the file from the list being included and it happened again. Same error different file. Everything I was reading said it was most likely invalid Javascript doing it, but since I write code perfectly, that could not be the case. Fast forward 10-20 minutes and I found this [issue on Github](https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS2/issues/521) that sounded similar. A comment from [Eric Range](https://github.com/ericrange) advised that their code editor had added a line ending of "\n\r" to the file and that caused their build to fail. So I took a look at line endings and sure enough, a handful of the files were using "\n\r". I did a find/replace and changed them all to just a single new line ("\n"). I attempted to uglify it once more and yet again I was shown an error! I was beginning to think uglify and I were not going to be good friends.

```
Running "uglify:build" (uglify) task
{ message: 'Unexpected token: eof (undefined)',
  filename: 'file.js',
  line: 3032,
  col: 0,
  pos: 129381,
  stack: 'Error\n    at new JS_Parse_Error (/path/to/node/node_modules/grunt-contrib-uglify/node_modules/uglify-js/lib/parse.js:196:18)\n    at js_error (/path/to/nodenode_modules/grunt-contrib-uglify/node_modules/uglify-js/lib/parse.js:204:11)\n    at croak (/path/to/nodenode_modules/grunt-contrib-uglify/node_modules/uglify-js/lib/parse.js:678:41)\n    at token_error (/path/to/nodenode_modules/grunt-contrib-uglify/node_modules/uglify-js/lib/parse.js:682:9)\n    at unexpected (/path/to/nodenode_modules/grunt-contrib-uglify/node_modules/uglify-js/lib/parse.js:688:9)\n    at block_ (/path/to/nodenode_modules/grunt-contrib-uglify/node_modules/uglify-js/lib/parse.js:1000:28)\n    at /path/to/nodenode_modules/grunt-contrib-uglify/node_modules/uglify-js/lib/parse.js:974:25\n    at function_ (/path/to/nodenode_modules/grunt-contrib-uglify/node_modules/uglify-js/lib/parse.js:979:15)\n    at expr_atom (/path/to/nodenode_modules/grunt-contrib-uglify/node_modules/uglify-js/lib/parse.js:1187:24)\n    at maybe_unary (/path/to/nodenode_modules/grunt-contrib-uglify/node_modules/uglify-js/lib/parse.js:1357:19)' }
>> Uglifying source path/to/file.js failed.
Warning: Uglification failed.
Unexpected token: eof (undefined).
Line 3032 in path/to/file.js
 Use --force to continue.

Aborted due to warnings.
```

I looked at the differences between the files that worked and the ones that failed. The only difference I found was that the failed files used tabs instead of spaces (they were created at a time when there was no convention for tabs vs spaces). So I converted the files that were using tabs to spaces and tried again. Bingo! It worked perfect.

### Final Solution

My final solution was to change all files to use unix line endings ("\n") and to convert tabs to spaces.

GruntJS "Warning: Uglification failed."


This is a super quick and simple post... but maybe it'll save someone time down the line. I sure won't make the mistake again. I spent more time than I would like to admit figuring out this issue. There are a lot of posts sprinkled around about different causes of the error, none of which were the cause of my error.

Given the following RequireJS config: 

```
require.config({
    "baseUrl":"\/path\/to\/dir\/",
    "paths":{
        "jQuery":"jquery.js"
    }
});
```

I was trying to do the following: 
```
require([jQuery], function ($) {
    console.log($);
});
```
That gave me the dreaded "jQuery not defined" error!

### Solution

Add quotes around "jQuery"!
```
require(["jQuery"], function ($) {
    console.log($);
});
```
Without the quotes jQuery was being treated as a Javascript variable instead of a string. So when it was looking for the jQuery dependency it did not exist. "jQuery" on the other hand does.

RequireJS "jQuery not defined"

Took a little bit of digging because a lot of the solutions were related to different versions of CKEditor. I finally came across [a solution on stackoverflow](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18250404/ckeditor-strips-i-tag).

Add this to your CKEditor config.js file and the font awesome tags will stick around.

```
config.protectedSource.push(/<i[^>]*><\/i>/g);
```

 What the answer doesn't say is *why* this works though. If you look at the [documentation](http://docs.cksource.com/ckeditor_api/symbols/CKEDITOR.config.html) it says that what you push into protectedSource is "List of regular expressions to be executed on input HTML, indicating HTML source code that when matched, must **not** be available in the WYSIWYG mode for editing." So this keeps the tags intact because source mode of CKEditor does not get HTML validation, whereas the WYSIWYG mode does.</i[^>

CKEditor 3.x is stripping out font awesome tags

I had a strange issue where CrashPlan Pro wouldn't start up. I kept getting the error "Cannot connect to backup engine". After reviewing some <a href="http://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/Latest/Troubleshooting/Unable_To_Connect_To_The_Backup_Engine" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">help docs from CrashPlan</a> it was still not working. Every time I tried to start the CrashPlanService it would start and immediately stop. The log files weren't much help to me, they were just letting me know what I already knew, it had started and stopped for some strange reason.

A lot of the results that come up when you Google "CrashPlan Pro cannot connect to backup engine" show solutions where users were able to increase their memory from 512M to 1024M and it would resolve it. For me, when I went to `C:\Program Files\CrashPlan\CrashPlanService.ini` and checked what was there, it already had 1024M, so I figured maybe it wanted more. So I set it to 2048M to see if that would work. Nope.

After fruitlessly trying other things such as updating Java, turning it off and then on again, saying pretty please, I finally caved and sent their support team a message about it along with the log files from my attempts to start the service. They replied back within a few hours that I should try lowering the memory used from 1024M to 512M. So I gave that a shot, and to my surprise it started up perfectly! My guess is that since the computer has some other memory intensive applications running, it was trying to use more memory than was available at the time.

## Solution
So the final solution was to open up the file `C:\Program Files\CrashPlan\CrashPlanService.ini` and to update `-Xmx1024m` to `-Xmx512m`

Crashplan Pro won't start


I have gotten the *" This diff includes files which are not valid UTF-8 (they contain invalid byte sequences). You can either stop this workflow and fix these files, or continue. If you continue, these files will be marked as binary."* quite a few times lately. I tried various things like using SublimeText to save as UTF-8, and nothing seems to work. I was convinced there was an invalid character being appended somewhere in the file on save. I stumbled across this post about [stripping invalid UTF-8 characters](http://jbuckley.ca/2011/05/stripping-invalid-utf-8-characters-from-a-file/).

Following that suggestion I tried the following: 
```
iconv -c -f UTF8 -t UTF8 /Users/Levi/Desktop/file.php > /Users/Levi/Desktop/file.php
```
It kept spitting out an empty file though for some reason. After a bit of head scratching I realized it may be writing to the file it was reading to it, which would mean that it was creating a new blank file.php, reading from file.php and encoding, and saving file.php. So it was doing this on a blank file! So what you need to do is save it to a new file name.
```
iconv -c -f UTF8 -t UTF8 /Users/Levi/Desktop/file.php > /Users/Levi/Desktop/file-new.php
```

After all that you may be thinking that fixed this, right? I was still getting the same error message so I decided to do some debugging and try and isolate the line it had an issue with in arcanist. After var_dump'ing down the path the diff takes in libphutil and arcanist I found out the reason I was continually getting the error was because the string it was sending to phabricator was the git diff of the file. So even though I removed the invalid character in the new revision, the old revision still had the invalid character.

### So how do you get around this?

The only way I could get around this issue was to: - edit the original file, remove the invalid character - push that live - merge that branch in with my dev branch - arc diff So after all the debugging the issue was not with the current file, but with the original file I was editing... which was to say the least a little frustrating to find out. So if the original file has an invalid character, your best bet is to edit the original to remove that character and push that live before diff'ing your branch.

"not valid UTF-8" in your phabricator diff?

I came across "Invalid UTF-8 Sitemap contains CO or C1 control codes" in WMT tools the other day. The sitemaps had recenlty been changed from a normal www.sitename.com/sitemap.xml to www.sitename.com/sitemap.xml.gz (the compressed version).

I looked through the uncompressed version of the sitemap and didn't see anything out of the ordinary characters-wise. When I ran it through some UTF-8 checks it came back as valid, so I was at a loss as to what was causing the error.

What do you do when you need some answers? Google it! The [only post I found with that error message had 0 replies](https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/56cWijxmgqY) and it wasn't posted by someone having a PHP problem. After broadening my search a little bit I came across this useful [stackoverflow post](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5270665/gz-compressing-an-xml-sitemap-file-with-php) that alluded it was because fopen/fclose were appending characters that were not being encoded. Switching to gzopen, gzwrite, and gzclose worked perfect for me. gzwrite is binary-safe, so best guess would be that fwrite was including a PHP_EOL in the file that was resulting in the error. 

```
$xml = '
<urlset
 xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
 xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
 xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
<url>
	<loc>http://www.sitename.com/</loc>
	<lastmod>2014-03-14T09:39:11-04:00</lastmod>
	<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
	<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
</urlset>
';
$gz = gzopen('sitemap.xml.gz','w9');
gzwrite($gz, $xml);
gzclose($gz);
```

Invalid UTF-8 Sitemap contains CO or C1 control codes


*Something awesome that I didn't find out about until I was finishing up the install on Mavericks is that you can copy files/data over to the new install if you are installing Mavericks on another HD or partition in the same computer! So what I ended up doing was creating a new install, copying the data over, and I was all set! It allowed me to ensure that I always had a working copy of OSX to use.*

I made the switch to OSX and have been running Lion for nearly a year and a half now. I had skipped over Mountain Lion because I didn't want to go through the hassle of upgrading everything. After a little debating about whether to upgrade to Mavericks, I decided to go for it because I didn't want to fall too many versions behind and I also wanted some of the small things like the updated Calendars and the compressed memory! I figured it wouldn't be a cake walk though and so I decided to install it on another HD I had been using before attempting to upgrade my existing Lion install (I was pleasantly surprised to find I had the ability to copy data from Lion to Mavericks after installing it on the partition though!)

## Some problems I ran into

*   Using Unibeast to put the installer on the partition I was to install Mavericks on. I figured it would be easier so I didn't need to worry about using a USB drive. When I booted up and selected the partition it started to spin the apple wheel, but then it clonked and restarted. After a few failed attempts at this I decided to follow the instructions online and use a flash drive :) In retrospect this wouldn't have worked anyway because you need to have a clean formatted HD to install it on.
*   The monitor would go black after selecting the USB drive to boot from. I solved this by unplugging my second monitor that was using the VGA port and to just use the HDMI port.
*   I could not load up Mavericks without using these flags on install "GraphicsEnabler=Yes PCIRootUID=1 -v -f". (The -v turns on verbose mode, it lets you see what it is doing as it installs so you can use it to debug if it failes. The -f forces the it to load the kexts directly and to now use a cache. GraphicsEnabler=Yes tells OSX it is ok to play around with the graphics settings to try and get ideal settings. I have not figured out exactly what the PCIRootUID=1 does, but I believe it has something to do with enabling/disabling the PCI slot and/or permissions to the PCI slot the graphics card is using.
*   No mouse and keyboard once you get to the installer? I had originally selected the 'Legacy Support' option in Unibeast so that my USB drives would work since I have an 1156 socket motherboard. That wasn't working and suggestions online were to not select that and copy over the DSDT file from the Lion install that it did work on.

## My final process was to:

1.  Create a bootable USB using Unibeast.
2.  Copy the DSDT file from /Extra/ into the /Volumes/USBDRIVENAME/Extra/ directory.
3.  Restart and boot into the installer with the following flags "GraphicsEnabler=Yes PCIRootUID=1 -v -f"
4.  Format the HD I want to put Mavericks on to use the GUID EXT format.
5.  After install it asks you to restart. It should bring you to a bootloader where you should pick the new HD you installed Mavericks onto. Use the same flags from step 3 when booting.
6.  Copy data if you want to from another OSX install or proceed to the next step.
7.  If you haven't already grab a copy of [MultiBeast](http://www.multibeast.com/)
8.  Once you load into OSX you should open up MultiBeast and do the 'Quick Start'. If you have an existing DSDT file that worked for you, you can import that or you can stat from scratch. Work your way through the settings and adjust as needed. If something doesn't work when you restart you can open it back up and look around for anything you may have missed related to the device malfunctioning.
9.  **(Possible)** I had a last step you may not have if you are not installing mavericks on a different HD than your current install. After I installed Mavericks and restarted (and removed the USB bootloader) I tried booting up and every time I selected Mavericks it would start to load and then crash and the computer would restart. After a little bit of going in circles and redoing MultiBeast it clicked that the issue may be the bootloader. I realized I was still using the old bootloader I had installed with Lion. So what I did was install a new bootloader on the Mavericks HD and set that to be the first HD in the boot order. After I did that and restarted it booted up perfect!

## My parts list

##### (I didn't upgrade anything from my Lion install, so these are all 2+ year old parts)

*   Intel Core i5-760 Processor 2.8 GHz 8 MB Cache Socket LGA1156
*   Thermaltake Silent 1156 CLP0552 92mm CPU Cooler For Intel Socket LGA1156
*   Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST31000528AS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" (eventually I will make the leap and buy an SSD...)
*   XFX HD-465X-ZDF2 Radeon HD 4650 1GB 128-bit DDR2 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready Video Card
*   GIGABYTE GA-H55-USB3 LGA 1156 Intel H55 HDMI USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard
*   Mushkin Enhanced Silverline 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) Desktop Memory Model 998768
*   CORSAIR TX Series CMPSU-650TX 650W ATX12V / EPS12V SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80

## Other thoughts:

- When my monitor went black and I was reading about other causes one of the predominant ones was that the graphics card was being used instead of the onboard graphics. So if it still isn't working for you, try removing the graphics card and using the onboard one. **Some of the sites I used to help me debug my issues:** [Enable USB Legacy Support](http://biosx86.blogspot.com/2013/10/no-usb-mouse-and-keyboard-fix-for-os-x.html) [Copy the DSDT from your previous version of OSX](http://www.tonymacx86.com/mavericks-desktop-support/112666-mouse-keyboard-not-working-during-installation-4.html#post_message_688107) [http://www.macbreaker.com/2012/01/list-of-common-hackintosh-boot-flags_29.html](http://www.macbreaker.com/2012/01/list-of-common-hackintosh-boot-flags_29.html)

Hackintosh upgrading to Mavericks

I've had a broad understanding of how PHP maintains and stores variables, but recently I did some more reading about it so that I could understand a solution on stackoverflow better.

## zvals Container
When you assign a variable it creates a "row" in what is known as a *zval container*. At this stage I find it easiest to think of them like table rows, or an array item. They contain:
- Type of the variable
- Value of the variable
- a boolean value for *is_ref*. This lets PHP know if the variable is a <a href="http://php.net/manual/en/language.references.php" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">reference</a>
- *refcount*, which contains how many variables point to this value. This doesn't always mean it is a variable assigned by reference. If for instance you do

```
// refcount is 1 after you set this
$a = 'Levi Jackson';
// refcount is 2 after this point
$b = $a;

// refcount for $a is 1 and $b is 1
$b = 'Jackson Levi';
```

It is important to note that the zvals table does not include variable names. Those are stored in what is called a *symbol table*.

## Symbol Table
There is a symbol table for each level of scope (global, functions, methods, etc...). as well for certain types value types. Scalar values like a string are pretty straight forward, at the most basic level a symbol table maps a variable name to a zval slot. *<a href="http://php.net/manual/en/features.gc.refcounting-basics.php#example-388" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Compound Types</a>* such as arrays and objects create separate symbol tables for their properties. So for an object like the following:

```
Class Person{
public $name;
public $email;

public function __construct($name = '', $email = ''){
 $this->name = $name;
 $this->email = $email;
 }
}

$levi = new Person('Levi', 'test@test.com');
```

This would add an entry for `$levi` in the global symbol table and then it would create two more symbol tables for both properties name and email.

## Garbage Collection
Once a variable in the zval container has 0 for a refcount it is deleted from memory. An interesting example posed on the php.net site though shows where you can lull yourself into the false idea that all of your values have been removed from memory. For instance, given the following

```
$tmpArray = array( 'name' => 'Levi');
```

You have a symbol table for `$tmpArray` as well as for `$tmpArray['name']`. If you were to then unset(`$tmpArray`) that would remove the value for `$tmpArray`, but the key 'name' would still exist because it still has a refcount of 1 since it has a value of 'Levi'. So to remove that you would need to unset(`$tmparray['name']`) and then `unset($tmpArray)` to remove both from memory.


Pretty interesting stuff, and I hope to do some more reading on the internals of PHP soon. One of the more interesting things I've come across recently related to the above is that the foreach loop has the potential to copy the array it is looping (and rightly so) if the refcount for the array variable is more than 1.

http://php.net/manual/en/features.gc.refcounting-basics.php

PHP zvals and symbol table(s)

I answered<a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17892290/passing-a-session-variable-getting-errors/17892633#17892633" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"> this question on stackoverflow</a> the other day and it led me to question why `$_SESSION[1] = 'Something';` doesn't work in PHP &lt; 5.4 (5.3, 5.2, etc...). Give it a try, it should give you a notice along the lines of

```
Notice: Unknown: Skipping numeric key 1 in Unknown on line 0
```

I found this <a href="https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=42472" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">bug report</a> when I was researching which says that the reason it throws the notice is because "false/true/null/etc are not valid key names". To me that isn't a great answer though because normal arrays can have numeric keys. Luckily <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/users/185544/wiseguy" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Wiseguy</a> replied to my answer and pointed out that the PHP docs used to say 

> The keys in the `$_SESSION` associative array are subject to the same limitations as regular variable names in PHP, i.e. they cannot start with a number and must start with a letter or underscore. For more details see the section on variables in this manual. I guess this was a side effect of `register_globals`. Curiously, the docs no longer state this. Perhaps this limitation was removed when the `register_globals` option was removed in PHP 5.4.0

I wasn't sure how register_globals fit into this though. I did some digging and was close to posting on stackoverflow to get some feedback about it! So I started working from a different angle, forget about it being a $_SERVER specific issue, maybe that didn't have anything to do with it. That landed me on the <a href="http://php.net/manual/en/language.variables.superglobals.php" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">super globals page</a>.

## Super Globals
Not to regurgitate info, but super globals are global variables in scope in any part of a script without the need to prepend them with a 'global' keyword. With register_globals on PHP would create variables for all of the child items in the super global. For instance:

```
$_SERVER['Levi'] = 'Levi Jackson';
```

This would create a variable $Levi that has the value of 'Levi Jackson'. So if you had set a key of `$_SERVER[1] = 'Levi Jackson'` it would try and create a variable `$1` set to 'Levi Jackson'. Which if you are familiar with <a href="http://php.net/manual/en/language.variables.basics.php" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">variable basics</a> is a big "no no".

## PHP 5.4
Not that PHP 5.4 removed support for register_globals you can now use numeric keys with your super globals like $_SESSION. Enjoy.

$_SESSION doesn't allow numeric keys in PHP < 5.4

I've had this one partially written for a while, so I figured I would finish it out so that anyone who needs that extra shove has yet another reference to read from!

I was a native Windows user for many years. I used XAMPP for all my local development and life was good. I won't get into all the details of how or why I started using Mac, but suffice to say I enjoy it a bit more than Windows. There are a lot more tools available out of the box that I don't need to install and finagle with. Anyway, I started using MAMP instead of XAMPP when I made the switch. As you may or may not know MAMP is a tad bit different than XAMPP is out of the box. MAMP defaults the webserver to use port 8888 and the MySQL database to use port 8889\. While those are not really problems, they are something to pay attention to as they add a couple more steps into the process of setting up subdomains.

The first thing you want to do is figure out the subdomain you want and edit your hosts file to include it.

```
sudo vim /private/etc/hosts/ 
```

I added in the line: 
```
127.0.0.1 levi.local
``` 

Then I went over to my virtual host file in MAMP located at */Applications/MAMP/conf/apache/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf* and I added the following: 
```
<VirtualHost *:8888>
 ServerName leadingchange.local
 DocumentRoot /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/usm/leadingchangenetwork>
 <Directory /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/usm/leadingchangenetwork/>
 Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
 AllowOverride All
 Order allow,deny
 allow from all
 </Directory>
</VirtualHost>
```

Pay attention the *VirtualHost* line to note that it has apache listening on port 8888\. Now if you restart apache/mysql and visit http://levi.local:8888 it will load the site that would normally show up at http://localhost:8888/levi/

Setting up a local subdomain/virtual host on MAMP


A few months back I had built and started using a Hackintosh running OSX 10.7.4 using the guides from [www.tonymacx86.com](www.tonymacx86.com) as my base. After a few hiccups where I lost sound , everything has worked very nicely! Prior to installing OSX I had been running the Windows 8 developer preview and had been enjoying playing around with it. So this past week I picked up a new hard drive from Newegg so that I could install Windows 8 on it now that is has been released into the wild.. My full plan was to partition this new 1TB drive into two 500GB chunks so I could install Windows 8 on a piece and use the other for Time Machine in OSX.

I purchased the Windows 8 Pro upgrade so my first step in this process was to install Windows 7 on the new hard drive. After it booted into the installer I partitioned and attempted to install only to be greeted by a nice error saying "Windows cannot be installed, error code 0X8030024". Nice and descriptive eh? I took to Google to figure out the issue and found several solutions:

*   Reformat the new hard drive
*   Unplug any other hard drive that has an OS on it (my OSX install)
*   Pray to the heavens

Since it was the easiest I tried reformatting the drive in the hopes it was that easy. Nope. So I shut everything down, opened the computer up and unplugged the power and SATA cable going to my first hard drive. I left the SATA cable plugged into the motherboard though for what it is worth. I rebooted and waited while Windows unpacked the files yet again... and bingo. I was able to run through the install process perfect. 

After that finished I put in the Windows 8 upgrade disc and restarted the computer. After a long pause (about 2-3 minutes) of what I think was supposed to be the Windows 8 logo spinning (it had frozen in position) the installer started. It was easy to walk through and setup and just as quickly as Windows 7 was installed so was Windows 8.

Overall it was a quick process. It took me about an hour to install the new hard drive, debug why W7 wasn't installing, and then to finally install everything. I would say the bulk of that time was waiting for the installers to finish though. So relatively simple. I imagine if you are trying to dual boot from the same hard drive you might run into issues with the bootloader which is why I chose to go for a new hard drive rather than partitioning.

Dual booting OSX 10.7.4 and Windows 8 from separate hard drives

Just a little background info, I have been doing more and more work locally using [XAMPP](http://www.xamp.org). Because the files are being worked on locally until they are worthy of being put into a live site there is a lot of room for murphy to make my day worse. Every once and a while I would backup my files onto my external drive just in case something happened to my computer. This while better than nothing, was not the best solution.

## Dropbox

For anyone that doesn't know what<a hef="http://www.dropbox.com" target="_blank">Dropbox</a> is - it a fantastic service that allows you to sync files between multiple devices. Dropbox creates one directory usually called "My Dropbox" that syncs anything inside of it to the cloud.

## Thoughts on using Dropbox

My initial thought was to just copy and paste the files to My Dropbox. Backing the files up daily would definitely be an improvement over my first method of using my external to backup once a week. I always try and figure out pros and cons to anything I do, it helps me to prepare for the worst. The biggest con I had was that if I backed up daily, what happens if I worked for 23.5 hours one day and just as I am backing my files up the computer crashes?

## Past experience with SymLink

I had done some work with Ruby/Rails on my web host a couple years ago that required me to setup a SymLink from the root of the server to a directory accessible on the web. I wondered if it would be possible to create a SymLink between the directories on my computer so that it would continually sync the files I am working on in real time.

## Junction to sync the files

After one quick Google search I came across [Junction](http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896768.aspx), a Windows utility that creates a link between directories.

> Quick tip: If you place junction.exe in C:\WINDOWS you can execute the junction command from anywhere in the command prompt.

## Steps to create junction

1. Move the folder you want to sync with Dropbox into "My Dropbox".
2. Jot down the path to "My DropBox" (c:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents\My Dropbox) and "htdocs" (c:\xampp\htdocs).

4. Open the command prompt (Start => Run OR hold down the windows key and press "R" and enter CMD into the prompt and press enter).
5. > junction "c:\xampp\htdocs" "c:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents\My Dropbox\htdocs"

6. It should prompt you with the directory created and the directory it targeted.

For more information on syncing with Dropbox visit [their wiki](http://wiki.dropbox.com/TipsAndTricks/SyncOtherFolders).

Creating a junction to sync files from anywhere on your PC with Dropbox


The other day at work I was given the task of updating all page URLs to always use the trailing slash. On the surface it seemed like a pretty simple request, drop in a RewriteCond and RewriteRule into the host file and call it a day. For those that are looking for the final code, here is what I used: 

```
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} !=POST
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}$1/ [R=301,NE]
```

Everyone else, read on as I explain how I got to that.

### Version 1, tested on my virtual machine

```
# This looks at the URI for the page and if it does not have a trailing slash already it moves on to the next condition. If it does have a trailing slash, it stops checking and serves the page.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$

# This checks that the requested path is not for a file. If it is, just serve the file
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

# If it gets to this point, redirect the url to the version with the trailing slash
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}$1/ [R=301,NE]
```

 *\* One thing to note: when I was reading up on checking to make sure the file exists I found a lot of sources saying that apache 2.2 needs the %{DOCUMENT_ROOT} but that apache 2.0, %{REQUEST_FILENAME} contained the absolute path. So if you are having trouble with that line, check the version of apache and double check what path it is checking for the file at.* I gave this a few test runs and noticed a few things wrong with it.

1.  Some of our forms had been hard coded to use URIs that did not have trailing slashes. This means that when the data was POSTed it would 301 redirect and NOT pass along the POST data. So the forms would be useless.
2.  Some of our code that referenced files actually had a RewriteRule further down that mapped the path to the directory. So the second RewriteCond to see if the requested path was a file was returning false (allowing it to continue onward). For example: http://domain.com/directory/filename.xml mapped to http://domain.com/anotherdirectory/filename.xml. So when it didn't find the file at http://domain.com/directory/filename.xml it would redirect to http://domain.com/directory/filename.xml/

### Fixing the form URIs

My options for fixing the form paths were to either update all of the actions or to figure out a way to ignore POST requests. Sure enough I found I could use the %{REQUEST_METHOD} to ignore POST requests. I was turned on to by this [stackoverflow question.](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8541932/how-to-prevent-mod-rewrite-from-handling-http-post-requests)
```
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} !=POST
```

### Fixing the file paths that have URL rewriting already in place

The situation was similar to this. Request a path like http://domain.com/directory/filename.xml and that would be rewritten to /anotherdirectory/filename.xml. In my situation the files in that directory were more often than not referenced with an absolute path ending in the file extension. So I was able to just add another RewriteCond that excluded URLs in that directory from being processed.
```
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/directory/(.*)
```

### Debugging mod_rewrite

While working on this I found it useful to do some debugging when I found instances that didn't work as I expected. I enabled logging so that I could see the route an incoming URL takes when it comes in. To turn it on you can add this to the conf file for apache:

```
# This path must be writeable by the web server
RewriteLog /var/log/apache2/rewrite.log
RewriteLogLevel 5
```

Once activated you can _tail_ the file to view it in real time as you access the page. These were some helpful pages I used to help me out when I was working on this: [http://apache-http-server.18135.x6.nabble.com/mod-rewrite-loaded-but-not-writing-or-logging-td4746292.html](http://apache-http-server.18135.x6.nabble.com/mod-rewrite-loaded-but-not-writing-or-logging-td4746292.html) [http://amandine.aupetit.info/135/apache2-mod_rewrite/](http://amandine.aupetit.info/135/apache2-mod_rewrite/)

mod_rewrite add a trailing slash to all pages


I was just reading up on some PHP while I work on one of my final projects and I came across the topic of *passing by reference*. Which if you are not familiar with it, this is the [PHP.net reference page](http://php.net/manual/en/language.references.pass.php). I had no idea that it existed and it instantly reminded me of the past three weeks of C++ where we have been discussing and using [pointers](http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/pointers/) as a means of "returning" more than one value from a function.

A good explanation of a reference is:

> "References are a way to have multiple variables referencing the same variable container using different names -- so whatever name you're using an operation on that variable will always have an effect on the others." - [Johannes Schlüter](http://schlueters.de/blog/archives/125-Do-not-use-PHP-references.html)

My experience with pointers and passing by reference has been in the classroom and so the only benefit I have seen is that you can modify variables outside of a function. Check this snippet out for instance:

```
function addOne(&$input){
    $input++;
}
$var = 1;

addOne($var); //returns 2.
```

## Conclusion

I don't know that I would really pass by reference outside of the classroom at this stage as I have not encountered a situation where I *needed* to return or modify more than one value at a time.

Passing by reference in PHP


So what I found out tonight was that you cannot format an external hard drive over 100GB at least (probably a lot lower) with the Windows GUI. You need to take it to the command line to achieve format it. The steps I took to format a Seagate Freeagent are:

1.  Goto Start > Run
2.  Enter in CMD and press enter
3.  Type in *format /FS:FAT32 DRIVELETTER:* and press enter
4.  It may ask you to enter the *volume label*, just enter what it shows up as in My Computer when it loads up normally
5.  It will give you the final confirmation - press "Y" and hit enter

There you have it, sit back and enjoy a cold while you wait for the drive to finish.

Formatting external hard drive to FAT32


So I was puttering along with a project I came across a situation I have come across before. How to delete information from a table that is related, such as deleting a user, their profile, and any other information associated with said user. In the past I had just executed as many queries as it took to get the job done. This isn't the best option though for one big reason.

## Performance

The more results a query returns, the more system resources it uses. So executing multiple queries can often times end up with the server doing more work than necessary. So my suggestion is to create a multi-table query that narrows the results using the _where_ clause.

Imagine a scenario where you had the following tables, keep in mind the tables are in no way what I would use for an actual site, they are far from being normalized:

```
CREATE TABLE `User_Info` (
  `User_ID` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `User_Type_ID` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `User_Title` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  `User_Address_ID` int(11)NOT NULL,
  `User_Profile_ID` int(11)NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`User_ID`)
  FOREIGN KEY  (`User_Address_ID`)
  FOREIGN KEY  (`User_Profile_ID`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=80 DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;
```

```
CREATE TABLE `User_Address` (
  `User_Address_ID` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `User_Address` varchar(100) NOT NULL,
  `User_Town` varchar(100) NOT NULL,
  `User_State` varchar(100) NOT NULL,
  `User_ID` varchar(100) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`User_Address_ID`),
  FOREIGN KEY (`User_ID`),
) ENGINE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=80 DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;
```

```
CREATE TABLE `User_Profile` (
  `User_Profile_ID` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `User_Name` varchar(100) NOT NULL,
  `User_Password` varchar(100) NOT NULL,
  `User_ID` varchar(100) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`User_Profile_ID`),
  FOREIGN KEY (`User_ID`),
) ENGINE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=80 DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;
```

## The acceptable solution

My old method would have had me doing multiple queries

```
DELETE FROM User_Info WHERE User_ID=1;
DELETE FROM User_Address WHERE User_ID=1;
DELETE FROM User_Profile WHERE User_ID=1;
```

## The better solution

The better way to do this is of course as I said above using one query.

```
DELETE FROM User_Info, User_Address, User_Profile
USING User_Info
WHERE User_Address.User_ID = User_Info.User_ID
AND User_Profile.User_ID = User_Info.User_ID
AND User_Info.User_ID =  1;
```

If you are interested in learning other methods of doing multi-table deletes, check out this site that uses [joins](http://www.haughin.com/2007/11/01/mysql-delete-across-multiple-tables-using-join/) to accomplish the same result.

Delete rows from multiple tables


I was thinking about the future of my web site the other day. One of the questions I began to think about was, _what if I decide to change to a different Content Management System (CMS)?_ Which was never really a problem before because I did not have much content to move over. In the past I had pages for my portfolio, about me, contacting me, and that is about it. Now that I have begun to write on my site as well, I now have to worry about how to preserve the content. The two areas I am concerned with are:

*   Moving data from one database to another.
*   How to handle URL rewriting so that my pages don't suddenly go AWOL in search engines.

## Set-up

Say you have an existing table in a database called DB1,
```
CREATE TABLE `Event_Info` (
  `Event_ID` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `Event_Type_ID` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `Event_Title` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  `Event_Date` varchar(100) NOT NULL,
  `Event_Address` varchar(100) NOT NULL,
  `Event_Town` varchar(100) NOT NULL,
  `Event_Desc` longtext NOT NULL,
  `Event_Inserted` varchar(100) NOT NULL,
  `Event_Updated` varchar(100) NOT NULL,
  `User_ID` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `Event_Pending` varchar(255) NOT NULL default '0',
  PRIMARY KEY  (`Event_ID`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=80 DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;
```

You are tasked with moving over the id, title, town, and description to a new database/table to be used with a different application. I put together this test table to move the information into, it is located in a database named DB2.

```
CREATE TABLE `event_stuff` (
  `eventID` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `eventTitle` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  `eventTown` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  `eventDesc` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`eventID`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;
```

## Moving the data

So what we need to do is **select** the title, town, and description from _Event_Info_ and **insert** it into _event_stuff_. The first step is to write a query that selects the data from _Event_Info_. In the past when I have transferred info between two tables I have used a subquery to get the values to insert. Something along the lines of this, INSERT INTO Table_One VALUES(SELECT field1,field2,field3 FROM Table_Two). I tried to set something like this up and ran into one problem, I am working not between tables but between databases.

## The query

After reading some documentation on the MySQL site and spending a couple hours working out queries. I figured that I must need to reference the database somehow but I really could not find adequate information about it and so I finally gave in and went to [Stackoverflow](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1786963/is-there-a-way-to-transfer-info-from-one-database-into-another-database/1787003#1787003). There I found out that I didn't need the schema files as I thought I might have and all I needed to do was reference the database. The final query that worked flawlessly for me was

```
INSERT INTO DB2.event_stuff (eventTitle,eventTown,eventDesc) 
SELECT t.Event_Title, t.Event_Town, t.Event_Desc FROM DB1.Event_Info t;
```

Something I learned from this query is that you can set an alias for a table _after_ you use it! I had always been under the impression it was like PHP, PERL, ASP, etc... in that you needed to instantiate the variable before using it. I wonder if MySQL reads the whole query before executing it? Anyway, if you have any input let me know, if there is a more efficient way to do this with **one** query I would be interested to see that.

Part two will cover URL rewriting so there isn't a loss in ranking with the search engines.

Blog posts