Javascript snippets
Lately I have been doing some javascript development and I have written a couple of functions which I find really useful. I almost find the code snippets to be used on all sites I work on so I thought I would share them with you. Both the snippets are written using the jQuery library.
Opening urls in a separate window/tab in a xhtml strict environment
The target attribute is not a valid attribute in xhtml strict and your site will fail to validate if you use it, so to get around this you can use replace your target attribute with the rel attribute. Adding the rel=”external” attribute on your anchors that points to an external source and adding some javascript solves the problem.
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<a href="http//www.klunde.net" rel="external" title="Klunde.net">Kristian Lunde</a>
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function externalLinks() {
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$("a[rel='external']").each(function() {
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$(this).attr('target', '_blank');
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});
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};
The code here is pretty self explaining, but to describe it briefly, the javascript function must be invoked once the DOM is loaded (see code further down on the page). The function loops through all anchors that have the rel=”external” attribute and add the attribute target=”_blank”. I guess this is a bit of a hack, but it works and it keeps the clients happy 
Creating spam proof mailto: anchors
It is a well known fact that if you add your email address on a site in a plain mailto anchor you will be flooded by spam after a while. You can easily avoid this by adding a little bit of javascript on your site.
It works simply by printing out the email address as plain text replacing the @ with a ” AT ” and add the email addresses in a div or which ever element you prefer and add a set class to that tag. Then you run a small snippet of javascript that find all the elements with that class, I have chosen the class name “email”. The script replaces the content in all the elements with the email class with the proper html anchor. This can not be picked up by web crawlers and it displays the links properly for the user. All browsers without javascript support / enabled will of course only see the post AT somesite.com.
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<div class="email">post AT somesite.com</div>
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function createMailTo() {
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var c_email_field = $('.email');
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if($(c_email_field).length > 0) {
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$(c_email_field).each(function()
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{
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var email = $(this).html().replace(' AT ', '@');
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$(this).html('<a href="mailto:' + email + '" rel="nofollow" title="' + email + '">' + email + '</a>');
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});
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};
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};
Running this script would transform the code into:
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<a href="mailto:post@somesite.com" rel="nofollow" title="post@somesite.com">post@somesite.com</a>
Putting it all together
I have but together a simple example to illustrate the functions in action with all code and functionality. You should be able to copy this code save it as a .html file and run it in your browser.
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<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
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<html>
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<head>
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<title>Javascript snippets</title>
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</head>
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<body>
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<a href="http://www.klunde.net" rel="external" title="Klunde.net">Kristian Lunde</a>
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<div class="email">post AT somesite.com</div>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
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<script type="text/javascript">
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function externalLinks() {
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$("a[rel='external']").each(function() {
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$(this).attr('target', '_blank');
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});
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};
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function createMailTo() {
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var c_email_field = $('.email');
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if($(c_email_field).length > 0) {
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$(c_email_field).each(function()
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{
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var email = $(this).html().replace(' AT ', '@');
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$(this).html('<a href="mailto:' + email + '" rel="nofollow" title="' + email + '">' + email + '</a>');
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});
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};
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};
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$(function() {
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externalLinks();
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createMailTo();
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});
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</script>
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</body>
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</html>
On the move
I am currently switching both domain host and web host, and in that case this site might be down for a little while. I am about to replicate the site to my new web host so hopefully it will be a minimum of down time.
I have chosen to leave servetheworld.net which has been my web host since 2003, they have done a great job, but the time has now come to move to a web host which can provide me with some more advanced features.
I have chosen webfaction.com as my new web host. I chose them because they offer a multitude of different applications, for instance svn, python, ruby on rails and of course PHP. They also offer ssh access.
I chose 123-reg.com to host my domain names, that was done out of convenience, they are well known, large and hopefully know what they are doing 
Installing nutch 1.0 on OSX
Today I started to work on a little project that required a crawler, and Nutch seemed to do most of what I needed. The nutch team conveniently released Nutch 1.0 late in March 2009, so I had a brand new release to test out. Installing nutch 1.0 on a mac is not as straight forward as I thought, I ran into a lot of unexpected issues and here is my cook book description of how to successfully install nutch 1.0 on your mac.
- Download the latest source code from the Apache SVN repository http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/lucene/nutch/. I tried running it from the tarball without success, I also tried to compile the source from the tarball, but a post on the nutch forum clearly states that this will not work.
- Set your JAVA_HOME and NUTCH_JAVA_HOME variables, again this is not straight forward, they both need to point to your real installation of Java 1.6 (earlier versions of Java will fail). I sat these variables to: /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6/Home, I could not get the /Library/Java/Home symbolic link to work properly.
- Compile the source code using Ant (I built it in Eclipse).
- Setup your nutch configuration, by following the tutorial by Peter P. Wang
- Run your first crawl with: ./bin/nutch crawl urls -dir crawl -depth 3 -topN 50
Most of the issues I encountered was related to the Java version and the fact that using /Application/Utilities/Java/Java preferences application do not really change the JAVA_HOME directory /Library/Java/Home properly. So make sure you have set both JAVA_HOME and NUTCH_JAVA_HOME, and that your OSX does not fool you when it pretend to be symbolically linking to the 1.6 installation.
Good luck.
Getting the default option of a ubercart product attribute
In Orange Bus we are currently busy building a new web shop for a clothing company. We are building this web shop on Drupal 6 and Ubercart 2. While I was doing some tuning of the product page (built as a node template) on this site I suddenly realized that even though you can get most of the information needed in from the $node object, you are unable to get the default options of each attribute.
In my case this attribute was the sizes of the products (small, medium, large and so on), the node object contained all the attributes but not the default options. It is not at all complicated to get this information but you do need to add some custom code to get a hold of the default options. I would argue that this should be included in the default node object, which really should not be a big deal adding. I guess I should add a patch for this, instead of going around the problem which is what I do and describe here.
To get a hold of this I had to call a ubercart specific function called uc_product_get_attributes function. This function takes a node id as parameter and return all an array of all the attributes related to the node. The array contain a set of attributes objects and these object contain all the information available on each attribute.
My solution was to call the uc_product_get_attributes function and get the default_option variable from the attribute object, see code example below.
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//get all attributes related to the node
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$attributes = uc_product_get_attributes($node->nid);
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//get the id of default size of the product
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$default_size = $attributes[1]->default_option;
It is simple, but it took me about an 30 minutes to determine the problem and adding a solution. Hopefully this will save someone the job of solving the same problem.
My 7 things
The 7 things have been all around the PHP community for a while now, and I got tagged by Christer a while ago. So I guess I should go around and publish my seven things:
- I am an assisting nurse graduate
- I have a 3 year old daughter
- Expired dairy products are some of the most disgusting things I know
- I dream of some day having a small cabin by the lake, without any internet or television?!?
- I often think about how it would be like to be the only person alive on the earth. (Something similar to the “I am legend” movie, without the zombies).
- I took dance lessons when I was a kid, however I really suck at dancing.
- I drink way to much Pepsi
Those seven things were not really interesting at all, but it was all I could get together for now. Who knows someday I just might publish: “the top 1000 things you did not know about me”
My lucky seven bloggers which I tag are:
- Ms. Ramona Zachariassen
- Mr. Mike Parker
- Ms. Torunn Seim Skrogstad
- Mr. T. Dancer
- Mr. Jan-Petter Jensen
- Mr. Michael Odden
- Mr. Magne Thyrhaug
Here are some rules that must be followed by anyone who decide to follow up:
* Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
* Share seven facts about yourself in the post – some random, some wierd.
* Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
* Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.
The revolution
I have experienced a revolution the last week. Last Wednesday I was provided with a new phone by my employer Orange Bus, it was an……. Iphone.
I never really understood the big thing with the Iphone, until now, my requirements and expectations from a phone so far has been calling, and sending and receiving text messages. So as you might imagine getting an Iphone was quite a revolution for me, and it have changed my entire understanding of a mobile device, and I am tempted to say that it actually have changed my life to some extent.
Now I am surfing with my (I)phone, I read my emails, I listen to podcasts, check the weather reports, I find directions and I watch youtube videos!?! I am also using it to the regular things like calling and text messaging of course.
I have had other phones before which had wlan, a decent browser and a couple of GB of memory but their user interface and screen size have not been appealing enough for real usage.
I have to hand it to Apple, that is one piece of craftsmanship they have created.
Thank you Apple for revolutionizing my mobile world.
Flowplayer, https and the streamnotfound “problem”
Lately I have been working on a project which used Amazon S3 to provide videos to Flowplayer on a website. This was working superbly until we added a link to a video using the https protocol. This broke the Flowplayer on Internet explorer 6 and 7 and Safari, and we got a:
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streamNotFound, clip: 'https://someurl'
Solution: Amazon S3 supports both http and https, so replacing https with http solved the problem. This problem probably occurs because the web browser is unable to cache the data from the https url and therefore the Flowplayer is unable to play the video.
Interestingly enough Firefox had no problem at all running Flowplayer and https urls.
Merry Christmas
I wish you all a very merry christmas 
Hello Standard ML (of New Jersey)
Back when I was at the university we had a course called “Programming languages”, there we learned a little something about a lot of known and less known programming languages. One of these languages was Standard ML, and I remember that I was quite fascinated with that language, it was so different from everything else we had learned. Since then the functional languages have become a bit more common, with Erlang, F#, Clojure, Scala and Haskell as some examples (more functional languages can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Functional_languages). I have not used any functional languages since then and I thought I would just briefly refresh my memory by installing Standard ML and try the most basics of the language.
Installation
I am currently using a Mac so installing sml-nj was really simple. I downloaded the mac .dmg package from http://www.smlnj.org/ and ran the installer. the system was installed by default at /usr/local/smlnj-110.68. I added the path to my .profile file, which enables me to start sml without being in the sml bin root folder.
When that was done I could start the sml shell (just type sml in your shell):
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kristian-lundes-macbook-pro:sml kristianlunde$ sml
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Standard ML of New Jersey v110.68 [built: Thu Sep 4 16:23:20 2008]
Example 1: Start standard ML
(To exit the sml shell use key combination: CTRL + D).
First touch – Hello World
I always do a Hello World programming in a new language. Even though I have been playing around with Standard ML before I do not remember a hole lot of it, so I start from scratch.
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- "Hello World";
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val it = "Hello World" : string
Example 2: Print “Hello World”
The – is the sml prompt, to end a expression the semi-colon is used. So to write Hello World all you have to do is to apply quotes around the text and end it with ; and hit enter. The result gives us the text and the data type.
The first function
To do a Hello world proved to be quite simple, so lets take it a bit further and write a function which prints the hello world text.
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1. – fun hello ():string = "Hello World";
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2. val hello = fn : unit -> string
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3. – hello();
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4. val it = "Hello World" : string
Example 3: The first function
The function itself is a one liner seen on line 1 in the example above. The function is created using the fun keyword, the function is named hello and have no parameters which result in the (). The function return a result of the data type string, this is defined with the :string element, The content of the function start after the equal sign, and is just a print of the hello world text. To end the function close semi-colon.
When creating a function which is compiled we get the response seen in line 2. This tell us that hello is a function and that it return a string. I believe the unit text mean that the function does not take any parameters (I might be wrong).
To execute the function just type the name of the function, see line 3 in the example above, this result in printing out the “hello world” text as seen in line 4. Line 4 tell us that the result of the function is “Hello World” and the data type is a string.
Functions with parameters
Now we have created our first function, but a function usually need one or more parameters, so let us have a look at that. The next function is a simple echo function which just print the text to screen.
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1. – fun echo (s:string):string = s;
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2. val echo = fn : string -> string
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3. – echo("Hello World");
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4. val it = "Hello World" : string
Example 4: Function with parameter
Line 1 in example 4 define the function, it takes one parameter s as a string, the return data type is also a string and it just output the string to the shell. When the function is executed in line 3 the parameter is “Hello World” and the result is seen in line 4.
To add more than one parameter just add a comma between the parameters. Remember to define a data type on all the parameters.
Example 5 is a function which takes to parameters and sum the two parameters together before returning the result.
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1. – fun sum(x:int,y:int):int = x + y;
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2. val sum = fn : int * int -> int
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3. – sum(10,20);
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4. val it = 30 : int
Example 5: function with multiple parameters
Lambda expressions
Lambda expressions is also known as anonymous functions, and create a function without any name. This is used quite frequently in sml and are written as seen in example 6.
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fn() => print "Hello World";
Example 6: lambda expression.
The example 6 do not do much except print out the Hello world text when it is called. Naturally a lambda expression must be called as part of another function or code snippet.
Load a function from file
To load sml code from a file just use:
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- use "../sml/myfile.sml";
Where you replace ../sml/myfile.sml to point to your file.
Resources
This is the best online introductions I have found so far are:
www.pllab.riec.tohoku.ac.jp/smlsharp/smlIntroSlides.pdf
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/riccardo/prog-smlnj/notes-011001.pdf
A short FAQ:
http://www.smlnj.org//doc/FAQ/index.html
I really have not showed anything of the fancy stuff you could go about and build with Standard ML, but hopefully I am able to spend some more hours playing around with standard ML and write another blog post.
2.5 applications I really miss in OS X
In a previous post I wrote about my new life running on a MacBook Pro and OSX. It has now been over a month since I switch over to this unix hybrid, and I am quite liking it. It is very stable, I almost never turn off my mac, but I put it to sleep, this is working fine and my last reboot is over two weeks ago. I have also gotten used to some of the new weird keys on the keyboard and the shortcuts, but I am not yet as efficent on a mac as I am/were on ubuntu/windows. During the last few weeks I have discovered that Apple and other in most cases provide me with the applications I need, but not always, and here is the list of applications I really miss:
1. TortoiseSVN
Windows application which integrates itself with Windows Explorer and provide a SVN client. I would say that this is the best graphical SVN client I have ever used. SVNX which I currently use on the mac is not a very good replacement.
2. Kate / Notepad++
Kate is a KDE text editor for unix based systems. Notpad++ is Kates equivalent on Windows. Both editors provide a simple and intuitive user interface, and a lot of syntax highlight files for all the obscure programming languages you can think of.
I know Mac have the TextMate application, but that is third party software and you have to pay €48 or something for a license, and that is probably what I probably will do. The TextMate application is really good and provide most if not all the functionality that Kate and Notepad++ provide.
In my desperation for a good text editor I almost went off and tried to install KDE on Mac, but that was said to be experimental and could break my entire system. So that is a no go for now. The article however was really interesting:
URL: http://www.simplehelp.net/2007/07/22/how-to-install-kde-4-in-os-x/.
I still miss my ubuntu system and will probably go off and install parallels or vmware and ubuntu, just to have it accessible