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Aspell and Curly Quotes

Published: January 13, 2017

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aspell really doesn’t like curly quotes…

$ echo "This really shouldn’t fail" | aspell list
shouldn
$
$ echo "This really shouldn't fail" | aspell list
$

I ran up against this issue looking into adding a spell check featured for jekyll-pre-commit.

Understanding How A Magento 1 Module Works

Published: January 11, 2017

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As a developer, there’s a good chance you spend more time reading code than you do writing it. In the world of Magento, a lot of that time will be spent reading through the source code of custom and community modules.

In this post, I’ll provide some tips to help you understand how these modules work.

Why Local Profiling Alone Is Insufficient For Performance Optimization

Published: January 3, 2017

When your goal is to make a web site load faster, the first logical step is to hook your local development environment up to a tool like XHProf, or Blackfire. This is definitely a good thing to do to get some sense of how the code is executing and where the bottlenecks are. However, if this is the only thing you do to review performance, there’s a good chance you’re going to miss something. Let me tell you what else is needed and why.

A Level-Headed Assessment Of CVE-2016-10033 And CVE-2016-10045

Published: December 28, 2016

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Titles like “Critical PHPMailer Flaw leaves Millions of Websites Vulnerable to Remote Exploit” or “PHPMailer Bug Leaves Millions of Websites Open to Attack” are great if you’re looking for clicks. However, when you take a closer look, you’ll see that these aren’t exactly accurate.

Here, I’ll take a level-headed look at recent vulnerabilities found in PHPMailer, CVE-2016-10033 and CVE-2016-10045.

Faster Search With ripgrep

Published: December 23, 2016

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Between massive log files and big code bases, if you’re a developer, there’s a good chance you spend a lot of time searching.

grep is typically the old standby here. I know I’ve used it just about every day for as long as I can remember.

However, there’s a new kid on the block that goes by the name of ripgrep (executable as rg) that’s really stirring things up. Let me show you what there is to like about ripgrep.

Skipping A Number In An HTML Ordered List

Published: December 21, 2016

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When writing an ordered list, numbers usually go sequentially up from 1, to 2, to 3 and so on. Anyone with the most basic knowledge of HTML knows that these lists should be represented with the <ol> element.

Markup

<ol>
  <li>HTML</li>
  <li>CSS</li>
  <li>JavaScript</li>
</ol>

Result

  1. HTML
  2. CSS
  3. JavaScript

However, what happens when you want to skip a number?

In this post I’ll outline why one might want to do this and provide the solution for achieving the desired result.