Magento Quickies

I noticed my twitter auto-poster stopped working, so I dug up my old IFTTT password, logged in, was greeted by this and sighed. “A Problem”. Half the sigh was wondering how anyone thought this sort of error message was useful, and the other half coming from knowing exactly how this sort of error message happens. So this post is me, trying to diagnose what’s going on with a new post, and mentally doing the math on whether it will take me less time to figure this out or just gin up a quick twitter autoposter.

This isn’t new news but it was new to me. “Modern” macs have a security feature called “Full Disk Access” which sits on top of your computer’s normal security systems and prevents programs from accessing certain files/resources. This is good — but apparently something about the protections of Full Disk Access prevent cron from working on your Mac out of the box. There are solutions — but neither one is great. Option 1 is to add the /usr/sbni/cron binary to the Full Disk Access allowlist — i.e. to opt it out of the protections offered by Full Disk Access. This […]

This website is hosted as simple static files, but it’s managed via a private WordPress instance that runs from my personal computer. I’m in the middle of retiring my circa 2014 laptop for a new M1 Mac mini and migrating this WordPress system was — about as rough as I expected. What follows are some random notes in case I ever need to do this again. Also, if you’re seeing this that means everything worked like it should. Part of why I keep the WordPress install running on my local machine is so I don’t need to upgrade it (and […]

I’m not writing much PHP these days, but my general impression is the PHP 8 release has been rough on project maintainers. I spent a bit of time this weekend catching up. Back in the fall Platform.sh, a PHP cloud hosting company, posted a ten part series on changes coming in PHP 8.0. With the language released they’ve collected and updated these blog posts into a “free as in give us your contact information” ebook that does a good job of summarizing the changes. The book’s also for sale on LeanPub on a scale that slides to zero. Also back […]

I recently bought one of the new M1 Macs to replace my aging laptop, and with it came MacOS 11 Big Sur. There’s lots of foundational shifting things happening with Apple’s computers there days — one of those is the official deprecation of programming runtimes that have been shipping with OS X since its earliest days. PHP First, for for my traditional audience — PHP. When I first started up my new computer out of the box this is the message that greeted me when I checked the PHP version % php --version WARNING: PHP is not recommended\nPHP is included […]

My internets brought me this boring looking syllabus for a MacEwan University course on the unix command line. The course itself looks both useful and practical, but what piqued my interest was the slides from the first three lectures contain one of the most concise-yet-digestible descriptions of the long history of unix variants I’ve seen. Through the Bell labs years all the way to the development and release of Linux. When I got started with programming all this was the past — but it wasn’t yet the distant, historical past. Even with just the slides Nathan does a great job […]

This entry is part 5 of 5 in the series Magento Front End 2020. Earlier posts include React: Hello Web Programmer, What is Magento PWA Studio, Magento PWA Studio: Looking at the Tools, and A note on the PHP UPWARD Server. This is the most recent post in the series. Is our previous two articles we took a look at Magento’s PWA Studio. This Magento PWA solution has been a long time coming. Immediately after Magento 2’s release the limitations and — “not fully baked-ness?” — of Magento’s UI Components system were very apparent, but Magento spokespeople immediately started talking […]

I just pushed the big red button on the 2.3.5 release of Commerce Bug. This is a small bug fix release that allows Commerce Bug to run in Magento systems that have opted to remove the RequireJS library. Commerce Bug doesn’t rely on RequireJS for any core functionality — even back in 2015 I was wary enough of the new technology stack to steer clear of it. However, the UI Components debugger does hook into RequireJS, and was doing so in a way that would crash Commerce Bug if RequireJS wasn’t present. We’ve fixed this bug. This fix was prompted […]

Kristof (of Fooman and ExtDN fame) sent me a quick note yesterday about the PHP implementation of the UPWARD server. When I first posted What is Magento PWA Studio I described the split between the UPWARD javascript implementation and the PHP implementation as We say practically because there IS a PHP implementation of an UPWARD server — but this seems a concession to the traditional PHP oriented hosting ecosystem and not a place where the PWA Studio team’s heart resides. I’ll stand by my (too flowery) description, but it turns out this concession to the traditional PHP hosting ecosystem was […]

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Magento Frontend 2020. Earlier posts include React: Hello Web Programmer, and What is Magento PWA Studio. This is the most recent post in the series. In our previous article we talked a bit about the history of Magento’s architecture and where/how the new PWA Studio fits in. Today we’re going to take a quick tour of those tools to see what we have at our disposal. We’ll be touching on some technical details involving React — if you’ve never used this technology before you may want to review our primer. […]

From time to time someone will ask me if I think Magento PWA Studio will ever be “a thing” — as in a thing that a Magento developer should be aware of and could benefit from. My usual answer is usually “not like you want it to or think it will” — which is the sort of unsatisfactorily vague answer once you’re career is long enough. Today I’m going to cover some Magento history to help put Magento’s PWA Stdio efforts in context. Then, in our next article, we’ll take a brief tour of the tooling to see is there’s […]

React is not the easiest development technology to learn. A big part of the problem is the Hello World example and subsequent guide don’t do a lot to help along folks with a traditional web programming background. The Hello World tutorial can’t run without a giant in-browser IDE, and the successive guides go a little too-deep/too-fast on topics. Regardless — React is hard to ignore, and most developers working in React don’t need to think too much about it. Their lead developer tells them how to manage props/state and which files to edit, and/or they learn a few boiler-plate copy/pastes […]

In a rare bit of “spam that was useful”, Perforce (who I guess own the Zend brand now?) published/publicized a white paper on how to get started with PHP Extension development. I don’t think there’s anything in here that isn’t up on the PHP Internals Book website or in the long out of print Extending and Embedding PHP — but the same information in a different form can often lead to different results. Worth a read if you want to dabble in PHP Internals development.

If you’re creating code for other Node.js developers to use, chances are you’ll need a dash of run-time type checking. While TypeScript can help you with your types on a per-project basis you can’t force third party programmers to use it. Node’s built-in util module provides a number of useful methods for detecting the type of a variable. Many of the methods for detecting base javascript types (vs Node.js specific types) were deprecated in Node.js 4.0 (release in September of 2015). The methods still exist, but may disappear in a future Node.js release. However — the deprecation docs include alternatives […]

What went wrong with the libdispatch. A tale of caution for the future of concurrency.. This post from “Thomas“, the creator of the OS X/Mac OS utility TimeMachineEditor crossed my desk the other day. I remember when Apple announced Grand Central Dispatch (the branded name for libdispatch) as a thing, and being surprised that desktop systems developers were borrowing patterns (queues) that seemed to work well in the world of web applications. As I’m not an Apple developer I filed this away in my head as an example of asynchronous programming and went about my life. Beyond the specific points […]

A quick primer (from curl’s most well known maintainer) on requesting websites from servers before you’ve officially changed their DNS entries. A quick TL;DR; if you’re conserving mouse clicks For non-SSL/HTTPS sites it’s as simple as changing the HOST header — curl --header "Host: example.com" http://127.0.0.1/ If you’re using SSL/HTTPS, things are a bit more complicated. In for this case you’ll want to use the --resolve option curl --resolve example.com:443:127.0.0.1 https://example.com/ Here you’ll make the request to the actual URL, and resolve tells curl which IP address to use. There’s more context in the article about why this is necessary.

If you had trouble starting applications or saw a lot of “beach-balling” on your Mac last week it’s almost certain that Apple’s OCSP service was to blame. This article from Jeff Johnson (an independent Mac and iOS developer) gives a good high level overview of the problem before jumping into some equally good deep level details. Given Developer ID has been a thing since 2012 it’s remarkable that something like this hasn’t happened before. Based on this Twitter thread it sounds like a failed OCSP check isn’t always grounds for denying an application starting, so maybe it’s just latency from […]