Richard Castera - Explorations in Software Development
Richard Castera - Explorations in Software Development
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Show hidden files on Lion

January 7, 2012 No Comments

To enable hidden files/folders in finder windows:

  1. Open Finder
  2. Open the Utilities folder
  3. Open a terminal window
  4. Copy and paste the following line in
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    defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES
  5. Press return
  6. Now hold ‘alt’ on the keyboard and right click on the Finder icon
  7. Click on Relaunch

You should find you will now be able to see any hidden files or folders. To revert:

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defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles NO
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Written by: rcastera
Resources

Taking Screenshots in Mac OS X

October 28, 2011 No Comments
1
Command-Shift-3:

Take a screenshot of the screen, and save it as a file on the desktop

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Command-Shift-4, then select an area:

Take a screenshot of an area and save it as a file on the desktop

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Command-Shift-4, then space, then click a window:

Take a screenshot of a window and save it as a file on the desktop

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Written by: rcastera
Resources Scripts Web Server

Drupal – How to install Drush

August 27, 2010 3 Comments

What is Drush?

It’s a command line shell and scripting interface for Drupal. The Drush Package Manager allows you to download, enable, disable, uninstall, update modules/themes/profiles/translations from the command line in a very simple way (apt-get style) – just type,

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drush dl views

and

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drush pm-enable views

in a Drupal directory to install the Views project! Additionally, the Drush Package Manager also allows you to update all your modules and even Drupal core with just one command,

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Written by: rcastera
Resources

5 ways to test the Usability of your E-commerce Site

August 20, 2010 9 Comments

Usability testing is a technique used to evaluate a product, service or website by testing it on users and it’s good practice to perform tests in combination with Split testing. Having an e-commerce site myself, I had to pay special attention to the elements on pages and where my products are positioned in relation to the page. There are so many variables involved in optimizing the usability of page such as dimensions, colors, copy, etc. If users cannot find your product, then they cannot buy it either.

There are many methods for studying usability, but the most basic and useful is done through user testing. Here are some tools to help you in studying if your missing out on sales, and what you can do to improve conversions.

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Written by: rcastera
Resources Scripts

Magento – Get the Total Price of items currently in the Cart

June 10, 2010 12 Comments

Ever wanted to get the total price of items in your Magento cart? Here you go:

PHP
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<?php echo $this->helper('checkout')->formatPrice(Mage::getSingleton('checkout/cart')->getQuote()->getGrandTotal()); ?>
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Written by: rcastera
Resources Scripts

Magento – Contact Form Not Submitting Bug

June 7, 2010 5 Comments

Since the new release of Magento, people have been encountering a lot of problems. One of them in particular, seem to be the contact form. The error is, “Unable to submit your request. Please, try again later.” If you’re on Magento 1.4 and get this error when submitting the contact form, that’s because your template (theme) is not fully compatible with 1.4. Your Magento theme is overriding the form.phtml file with its own version, which doesn’t have the new line in it. Here’s what you’ll need to do to quickly fix this error:

Open this file in your theme folder:

XHTML
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app/design/frontend/default/YOUR_THEME/template/contacts/form.phtml

And add the following hidden field somewhere before the submit button:

XHTML
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<input id="hideit" style="display: none !important;" name="hideit" type="text" />
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Resources Scripts

Google Analytics – How to manually Track Clicks on Outbound Links

May 20, 2010 6 Comments

You can use Google Analytics to track clicks on links that lead away from your site. Because links that lead away from your site are not automatically tracked, you will need to manually tag all outbound links you want to track. To do this, you’ll add some JavaScript customizations to your page and to the links you want to track.

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Written by: rcastera
Resources Thoughts

Magento extensions and modern e-commerce

May 16, 2010 3 Comments

For an online retailer, choosing an e-commerce software platform is one of the most important decisions. Depending on the size of the business, the key requirements could vary from robustness and scalability critical for large retailers to the need for simplicity and flexibility for small store owners. Perhaps it is the ability to effortlessly meet the diverse needs of disparate audiences that has made Magento one of the fastest growing e-commerce applications globally. Already, the Magento e-commerce suite has carried out over US$25 billion in transactions via the 30,000+ merchants who rely on this platform, including some from the Internet Retailer Top 500 list. No wonder then that the platform continues to receive international acclaim, most recently from well known research organization Forrester Research which highlighted Magento as ‘unique’ among various e-commerce technology providers.

One of the key contributors to Magento’s rising popularity as the platform of choice is its ‘flexibility’ and the control that it puts in the hands of the online merchant. Unlike some of the other ‘closed’ or even open source e-commerce platforms, Magento does not place restrictions on business flows and processes. With over 1700 Magento extensions already available (and counting..), technology complements the business rather than business being shaped by the limits posed by technology.

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Written by: rcastera
Resources Scripts Web Server

Enable cURL with XAMPP

May 3, 2010 3 Comments

cURL is disabled by default in your XAMPP installation. To enable it, you have to modify the php.ini files in your XAMPP folder. Follow the steps below to get it up and running.

  1. Locate the following files:
    INI
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    C:\Program Files\xampp\apache\bin\php.ini
    C:\Program Files\xampp\php\php.ini
    C:\Program Files\xampp\php\php4\php.ini
  2. Uncomment the following line on your php.ini file by removing the semicolon.
    INI
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    ;extension=php_curl.dll
  3. Restart your Apache server.
  4. Check your phpinfo if curl was properly enabled.
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Resources Scripts Web Server

How to setup a local web server on your computer using XAMPP

April 3, 2010 20 Comments

Web development work should always be done locally. When developing a website, all the development work should be done on a local LAMP Stack environment installed on your computer. That way, the production time is greatly reduced and you can fully test your work before launching.

When you are completely done developing your project, the migration to the live server is seamless. Here are the simple steps to install a local server on your PC to easily develop websites.

This article applies to the installation on Windows 98, NT, 2000, 2003, XP and Vista, of Apache, MySQL, PHP + PEAR, Perl, mod_php, mod_perl, mod_ssl, OpenSSL, phpMyAdmin, Webalizer, Mercury Mail Transport System for Win32 and NetWare Systems v3.32, Ming, JpGraph, FileZilla FTP Server, mcrypt, eAccelerator, SQLite, and WEB-DAV + mod_auth_mysql.

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About me

Hello, my name is Richard Castera. I have more than 12 years of experience architecting, implementing, leading and launching large scale, high performance software products in a fast-paced agile environment.

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