Sina Salek Official Site - Blog

Drupal Module: CSS JS Total Control is here to rescue the themers

admin — Thu, 30 Jul 2015 19:46:39 +0000

When we create themes in Drupal, there are great number of reoccurring tasks that we have to do like adding IE conditional comments, remove or replace some core or contributed modules CSS/JS files to prevent conflict with the theme, putting some JavaScript at the bottom of the page or even adding inline CSS or JS files. The module which i'm going to introduce, makes it possible to take care of all those tasks and even more with no special knowledge and no programming.

NEW Drupal Module : Entity Soft Delete (Entity Recyclebin/Trashbin)

admin — Thu, 12 Jun 2014 09:56:55 +0000

In multi user systems, it's usually much safer not to let users change the contents entirely in case there was a mistake or when it was needed to know what has changed by whom and revert the change if required. Drupal supports content revisioning and there are already some contributed modules that exploit this extremely useful feature like revisioning. However when it comes to content deletion, revision system can no longer be used because when a content is deleted, it gets removed from database entirely including all its revisions.

Entity soft delete module has been developed to address this limitation.

NEW Drupal Module : Hook Post Action

admin — Wed, 04 Jun 2014 11:13:01 +0000

Currently Drupal core does not offer any hook to do actions after a node/entity is inserted/updated/deleted in Database. So for example you can not send an email mentioning the node after the node is inserted because Drupal uses SQL transactions and the node is not yet fully written to database when hook node presave is called so if for any reason the transaction is rolled back, users will receive a false mail.

So Hook Post Action module introduces several new Drupal hooks to overcome this limitation

Yet another method to simplify making multipage/multistep Drupal forms

admin — Sun, 19 May 2013 14:59:47 +0000

In Drupal there are many different methods to turn long forms into multipage/multistep forms. The most known one is perhaps the great ctools module or even custom solutions using Drupal’s form API. However as you may agree with me none of these solutions are really that easy, specially when it comes to Ajax. Therefore many developers in Drupal community tried or still trying to find an even easier method. What I’m going to introduce to you is yet another magical method :).

Drupal Module : Calendar Systems needs your help

admin — Tue, 14 May 2013 15:31:21 +0000

Calendar system requires a very tiny core patch to fully work, The patch was already proposed to core by a fellow developer, so i rewrote it to meet core requirements and set it to needs review (Thanks to Gaelan and wuinfo for helping in completing the patch). The good thing is that the patch is not only for Calendar Systems it's a generic patch that introduces a new hook to make it possible for third-party modules to alter format_date function. If we can get it into core it might even be possible to back port it to Drupal 7

You can read more about the history of calendar system module and even what a calendar system is

Doing it in Drupal way : Merging all slider modules

admin — Sat, 11 May 2013 15:22:06 +0000

While ago i was looking for an slider module (implementation of JQuery UI slider module), surprisingly i couldn't find any solution except jSlider Form API which wasn't exactly what i was looking for. So i did what every good Drupal developer does, I wrote a generic slider module and shared it on Drupal.org (jQuery UI Slider Field). I even implemented "jSlider Form API" features.

Several months later and after i published several new minor versions, one of the users mentioned that there is in fact another slider module similar to mine!! SliderField and it was quite old too. He suggested joining forces to prevent duplicate modules. and that's what i did and even more.

Drupal Module : image_style_argument

admin — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 14:37:23 +0000

Drupal has a very powerful image manipulation UI, so why write code when we can easily use that for any purpose?! The problem is we can't! The reason is image manipulation UI only accepts one argument which is the source image. All other parameters and options are static.

What's my job!!!

admin — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 17:56:55 +0000

It’s funny that whenever someone asks me what I do it takes me few seconds to respond. And the answer I give not at all describes what I do! I usually say I work in the computer field! Or I produce software!! But why ?

Getting ready for my fifth software development team

admin — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 10:19:41 +0000

It was several years ago when i started assembling my first software development team, although i didn't have the experience i have today it was a success and the team delivered the expected result. Back then i didn't have any well thought work-flow and my decisions were mostly based on each particular case and experience. today however it's quite different and i take these task very seriously.

Is Linux as Vulnerable to Virus attacks as is Windows

admin — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 15:19:25 +0000

In the past few years i read and heard many times that the reason for Windows' vulnerabilities and specially virus attacks is simply because much more computers are running it and it could have been the same for Linux (aka GNU/Linux)!.

First of all i'm glad that this kind of discussions are pupping up so often these days, because it means that Linux's user base is increasing and it attracts more attention everyday. However this point of view also shows its authors' limited understanding of how GNU/Linux and Open Source community work. GNU/Linux is NOT WINDOWS, yes they're both operating systems but they have many fundamental differences. Lets highlight some of these differences and see how they affect the main topic of this article.

Another way to mirror two folders under Linux & Windows

admin — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 14:08:03 +0000

There are many tools and utilities for syncing files and folders, and yet there are even more. In this tutorial i'll introduce you to several reliable free command line and visual utilities for mirroring a folder into another folder.

This tutorial was originally part of another article but i came up with a much better solution for that one and there was no longer any need for this part so i decided to publish it as separate tutorial. It's not unique but all the same some people may find it useful.

Importing SVG to Photoshop, OpenSource is here to help

admin — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 14:46:59 +0000

SVG is a standard format for vector graphics, Most modern browsers support SVG out of the box. But there is a problem! How to make and edit SVG files?!

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is a family of specifications of an XML-based file format for describing two-dimensional vector graphics, both static and dynamic (i.e. interactive or animated).

The SVG specification is an open standard that has been under development by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) since 1999.

Moving Users, Document and settings, or Home folder to another partition or disk

admin — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 18:03:40 +0000

System partition (Where operating system is installed) is usually target for viruses, bad sectors, out of disk space (Which is quite common in Windows Vista and the next versions due to the winsxs folder's uncontrolled size increase) specially in Windows. You may need to re-install or even format your entire system partition, in situations like this the main problem is how to backup your data if your haven't lost it already!! Although it's possible but it's not easy, Unlike Linux , Windows does not have any official live CD so you would have to use command line or connect your disk to another system and wait until it backups your data and then you can start re-installing Windows, it's a very time consuming process and not every one has multiply OSs or PCs.

Using a different disk for users' data can also improve performance in Multi Tasking. Also If you're a Linux user there is another advantage. Using another partition for users's data allows trying other distributions - which is quite common among Linux users - without having to be worried about data loss.

Some tips about writing Resume

admin — Fri, 28 May 2010 11:03:28 +0000

After reading over 200 hundred resumes in the past three years and rejecting most of them before and after interview and test due to the fake information, It seems that most people believe that putting everything they even though of into their resume really helps, but does it?

Drawing organization charts easily with OpenOffice Draw

admin — Tue, 25 May 2010 03:08:45 +0000

I don't know whether you've heard of OpenOffice or not. OpenOffice is perhaps the best alternative to Micro$soft Office currently available. It's a collection of applications that work together closely to provide the features expected from a modern office suite. Many of the parts are designed to be alternatives to those available in Microsoft Office.

But what's the different between these two popular office applications ?

Time to start taking online privacy seriously

admin — Thu, 13 May 2010 02:47:10 +0000

Online privacy has always been one my concerns, and the reason is the fact that as a software developer i know what's happening behind the scene. I believe that it's up to us (Software developers) to let the people know that their privacy is getting violated every hour even when they're not a member of any social network!!!.

A blog post by Larry inspired me to write this post,

Earlier today, one of the people I follow tweeted that his young (under 5, I believe) daughter had just done something stupid. Nothing illegal or immoral, just the sort of embarrassing and sometimes destructive stupidity that young children tend to get into. And he then tweeted it.

Which means that his under age daughter's actions are now part of the permanent archive of the US government.

Using Actionscript 3 Tween for everything

admin — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 00:06:30 +0000

If you ever used actionscript 3 then you probabely know that tween class does not work with anything other than simple numeric object properties. This is an issue sometimes becuase you might want to tween a function! or a property of a child object or even an string! There are plenty of third-party classes out there for extending the Tween class, but if you don't need all other features they offer and prefer to keep your swf's size small i must tell that there is solution , a rather easy one actually.

What we're doing to do is using dynamic objects,

Migrating from Subversion to Bazaar (Including special guide for Sourceforge projects)

admin — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 19:27:16 +0000

It's about the sixth years since my first commit using Subversion, Moving from CVS to Subversion was really amazing, Subversion was superior in many ways and it served me well. But the age of centralized version control systems is over, we need much more powerful VCSs to deal with huge projects. Now days we should to be able to work with anyone, on anything, anywhere , at anytime, and also keep track of all this activities.

As part of my research project (Comparing Popular Version Control Systems) i decided to start with Bazaar and migrate one of my Subversion Sourceforge projects to this new VCS in order to have a better understanding of how it actually works. And also test the migration utilities because if you can't migrate your code's history then that would be a huge problem.

Firefox on Debian/Ubuntu/Kubuntu and Adobe Flash Player issues

admin — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 01:52:02 +0000

After installing Firefox 3.6 on my Kubuntu using repositories here i realized that it can no longer play flash contents! I did a little bit search and found this solution. Unfortunately it didn't fix my problem so i decided to run firefox from terminal in order to see what's really wrong.

Upgrading Drupal 5 to Drupal 6, Part 1

admin — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 22:16:06 +0000

I think it's a perfect time and perhaps the last change to start planning for safely upgrading our good old Drupal 5 websites to Drupal 6 (If any remained), Drupal 5 will be deprecated as soon Drupal 7 final comes out. Some module maintainers already removed Drupal 5 releases from their projects which is a trouble for website running Drupal 5.

Linux Shell Bridge (Passing variables from scripting langauges like PHP to Linux Shell)

admin — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 19:21:09 +0000

It might sound strange at first but i must say that it's very useful specially if you have shell scripts as part of your application. Usually For making this scripts as automated as possible there should be a way to reuse the application's configurations (ips, passwords , etc) and not having to update a separate configuration file whenever anything changes in the application. It's not limited only to this and can be used to pass any kind of variables.

Firefox can be very beautiful

admin — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 09:18:19 +0000

Firefox 3.7/4.0 is going to be very beautiful, But those version are not yet available, what should we do now?!

Mail Logger, Drupal's most have module for all websites

admin — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 08:50:02 +0000

Unfortunately there is no way to know that the email has been correctly delivered right after sending it. Therefore when someone send a message using Drupal's Contact form or any other modules, he may receive a "Successful message" but the site owner may never receive that message due to the wrong email address , network failure , mail server problem or blocking by spam protector.
This might cause some misunderstanding , loosing a great job opportunity or etc.

Sorting two dimensional array like query result by sub array's key in PHP

admin — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 21:20:00 +0000

PHP offers dozens of functions for sorting arrays, but unfortualey non of this functions support sorting by sub-key's value out of the box. It's very useful when you want to sort the result of a query by an specific column.

Sample :

How to mirror/sync a remote ftp folder with a local folder

admin — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 11:46:31 +0000

lftp is one of the best utilities currently avaiable for working with ftp servers.

How to find Linux bash script path (Self Path)

admin — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 03:30:47 +0000

Writing smart programs using bash script is not easy, there are many issues along the way and one of them is what i'm going to describe here.

Sometimes it's require for bash scripts to know their location, for example when they are part of a package and there are other require files (on the same location) for them to run properly, and it's also not possible to change the path to where they're located simply because they also need the current directory.

Drupal's Acquia Marina Theme patched version!

admin — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 01:15:32 +0000

In Drupal it's possible to overwrite and extend a theme using sub-themes! So i usually create a custom theme for my site as a sub-Theme of a base theme and try to put all the site specific stuff to that theme instead of the base theme, although it's tricky! and sometimes i have to spend hours finding a workaround for not completely implemented sub themming features but i think it worth it.

Get the latest Linux Kernel news in the simplest way

admin — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 17:20:53 +0000

Linux Kernel is the heart of the opensource movement, because it allows users to have a complete open source operating system. With every release it brings lots of cool new features to the Linux community. Although it's very important piece of software, propely the more important the any other software in open source community it's unknown to many users. The are two reasons for this.

PHP's forward compatible version compare

admin — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 23:41:11 +0000

Sometimes the code is forward compatible, for example when it's compatible with all future PHP5 releases, put PHP's version_compare function does not support this (Perhaps because they know that they always break compatibility with every minor release!!!). This function supports .x, for the above example it's : 5.x

It's also shared here

Unix like smart recursive file/folder copy function for PHP

admin — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 05:50:25 +0000

PHP's file system manipulation functions are not as complete as they should be specially when it comes to manging recursive folders. For addressing part of this issue i decided to write a smart function which can handle recursive file/folder copy easily.

As you may have noticed there are feature that i didn't have time to implement , so if you have time to extend this function please notify me as well :). It's also shared here

Alpha support for PHP's imagecopymerge function

admin — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 05:39:31 +0000

I've just checked PHP's issue tracker and a core developer says that this function (imagecopymerge) was never meant to support alpha channel! and they refused to commit the provided patch! so ridicules Anyway i tried rodrigo's workaround and it worked quite well, thanks rodrigo for sharing it. I came up with another idea which is much faster than his solution, (it may need a little bit more memory)

My favorite quote in "I AM Legend" (The Movie)

admin — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 08:20:53 +0000

He had this idea. It was kind of a virologist idea. He believed that you could cure racism and hate... literally cure it, by injecting music and love into people's lives. When he was scheduled to perform at a peace rally, a gunman came to his house and shot him down. Two days later he walked out on that stage and sang.

"Ergonomic Computing" research project updated and also renamed to "Ergonomic Office"

admin — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:26:26 +0000

What's new in this revision :

Content is now categorized and new information about ergonomic chairs and a special section for programmers added.

See for yourself : Ergonomic Office

"The Echo Maker" novel by Richard Powers

admin — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:13:46 +0000

The story

Richard Powers's novel, The Echo Maker (2006), tells the story of Mark Schluter, a young man of 27 who is nearly killed in an accident with his truck. He recovers but seems to be suffering from Capgras, a condition in which the patient believes that some of his loved ones have been replaced by doubles. Mark thinks his sister Karin has been replaced by someone who looks exactly like Karin, but he is certain she is only a robot or a stand-in. He calls her Kopy Karin and Karbon Karin. The evolution of the syndrome is far from positive. The condition seems to spread. Mark begins to believe it is not just Karin who has been replaced. His dog, his house, his old town and some of his best friends all seem to be replaced by stand ins.

Issue : INIT: no more processes left in this runlevel [SOLVED] !!

admin — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 11:55:14 +0000

Issue : INIT: no more processes left in this runlevel

This is one of the issues i had for several months, i couldn't find any specific information about it and never had time to trace it in order to find a solution. But today i managed to fix it by reading many threads and articles and then tracing it from the beginning , since i'm not the only one with this problem i decided to share it.

I used CentOS 5.3 for this tutorial , but it might be still useful even if you're using a Debian based distribution.

Most of my posts are related to Linux , But what is linux?!

admin — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 11:06:51 +0000

As you might have already noticed most of my blog posts and tweets are related to Linux. Unfortunately not everyone knows about Linux so i guess it's time to introduce it.

CentOS/RHEL5 does not detect some onboard network cards +Videos

admin — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 18:08:08 +0000

CentOS's kernel is a very old kernel comparing to many other distributions. The reason is stability but some times it gets annoying.

For example today i wanted to upgrade CentOS 5.2 server at work to 5.3. to make this process as trouble free as possible i cloned the server into another computer but once it booted , i noticed that it doesn't detect new computer's on board network card! and it was impossible to do the upgrade without Internet.

Take online typing courses and improve your typing speed

admin — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 15:52:48 +0000

typingweb.com is a website for learning typing and getting certification, its interface is really good and user friendly and it's also a web application which means that you don't need to install anything on your computer, the only thing you need is a web browser.

The certification is not free, about $40. So if you don't want to become a typist it does not worth it, and if you want to become one then make sure that the certification is creditable and accepatable by employers.

Google acquires reCaptcha

admin — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 12:01:49 +0000

I'm using reCaptcha on my website, and it's a very feature rich and easy to use captcha. and i just noticed that Google is accurring reCaptcha, they want to use it to index old books and newspapers which are difficult to read by computer.

What does that mean?

It means that whenver you enter the text version of the captcha you're seeing , you're actually also helping Google to convert books into text for free!

Read the whole story...

My site's new update

admin — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 09:27:26 +0000

I've upload a new version of my website yesterday , it has several new features :

How to dump all MySQL databases into indivisual files at once

admin — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 16:26:19 +0000

I had to move 264 databases from one Linux server (Fedora) to another (CentOS), hard copying /var/lib/mysql wasn't a good idea because version of two MySQL databases were different and i had to repair all the tables after move so i decided to write a very short and usefull bash script.

It dumps all the databases but each database into a different file :

Old comments , Old memories

admin — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 06:38:04 +0000

I managed to review, approve, cleanup all the old comments today. It was very inspiring reading visitors' and friends' opinion about me , my (old) website and my posts after all this years. Unfortunately many of my friend's blogs are no longer available due to the Persianblog's disappearance, wish if i could find them again.

My Site, Twitter & Facebook

admin — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 01:39:33 +0000

I can now update both Twitter and Facebook through pidgin at once. and also my website is also connected to twitter.
So basically :
Twitter -> My Site
My Site -> Twitter -> Facebook (I'm about to test this once right now)
Pidigin -> Twitter -> Facebook

My weblog is up and running

admin — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 07:46:28 +0000

After about 3 years, i've decided to start blogging again :). It's going to be much more than just a blog actually.

Is Windows 7 really much better than Vista

admin — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:35:56 +0000

The short answer is NO!

Couple of days a ago i discovered a very amazing bug in Windows Vista, after searching for a fix on the internet i realized that many pople have the same problem. And not only it does not have any fix currently but also it's exists also on Windows 7 (And all Vista based operating systems like Windows Server 2008 etc).

Rest of the story :

IE8 Story : Is microsoft a complete lier?!

admin — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 23:03:03 +0000

One of my colleagues sent me this link : Windows Internet Explorer 8: Get the facts. And after reading for few seconds, i said that oh my God. how shameless! what a lies!

Ubuntu 9 released!

admin — Fri, 01 May 2009 00:22:59 +0000

I just installed on my VirtualBox (Both Kubuntu and Ubuntu) , fast and solid. Kubuntu because of KDE 4 it still has various issues, as i said before KDE 4 is my desktop choice so i won't move my workstation to Linux until it become stable :).

What I've been doing while I've not been posting

admin — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 04:53:01 +0000

Well, as usual i'm very busy with many different projects.

I need to spend lots of time reading and researching on various topics to keep myself uptodate, my mind has longer any interest in solving complex problems, i guess it's very tried. hopefully i'm going vacation soon.

There are other news as well,

One of the projects has been finished finally!

admin — Sat, 17 May 2008 22:33:00 +0000

I just finished one of the projects that i've been working on for more that a month. I've done some great things in this project that i want to write about them here.

1. One of the developing issues that i wanted to solve for such a long time is Difficulty of implementing websites with AJAX. If you're a programmer you definitly know that it's not easy. But why?

There is few important reasons :

My new official website is finally stable

admin — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 12:30:09 +0000

Currently i'm trying to add more information about the project i've done. and also preparing my new weblog in my free time (If i have any!)