PHP: Change UTC time to local time

Did you know that you can quickly change UTC time stamps to Local time by doing the following:

//make sure your time is set
date_default_timezone_set('America/New_York');

$datetime = '2004-02-12T15:19:21+00:00';

//convert the given datetime string to time
$newDatetime = strtotime($datetime);

//re-contruct to format
$newDatetime = date('Y-m-d H:i:s', newDatetime);

It’s so obvious, but I only wished, I knew this before trying all sort of crazy stuff.

Unit Testing your AJAX requests with Zend Framework and PHPunit

I ran into a problem yesterday, when trying to create a couple of unit tests using PHPunit along side the Zend Framework.

If you want to unit test an action in a controller that checks the request to see if is an XML HTTP Request using the isXmlHttpRequest() method provided by the Zend Framework, then you will definitely run into a problem.

isXmlHttpRequest() pretty much checks to see if the $_SERVER['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH'] is set with ‘XMLHttpRequest’, if not, then returns FALSE. I thought that by setting the server variable with XMLHttpRequest directly will allow me to bypass the check.
read more

Fix GIT Lock after GIT Crash

If you ever see the following message when trying to commit your code to a GIT repository.

If no other git process is currently running, this probably means a
git process crashed in this repository earlier. Make sure no other git
process is running and remove the file manually to continue.

read more

Installing Zend Studio on Ubuntu 64-bit

Today I tried to install Zend Studio 7.0 on the latest 64-bit version of Ubuntu (9.10). Initially, it would just throw an error. (exec: 2481: /tmp/install.dir.2855/Linux/resource/jre/bin/java: not found). Since, the error was related to the installer not being able to find the java JRE that came bundled with the installer, I decided to install with the system’s JRE using:

./ZendStudio7_0_0.bin LAX_VM /usr/bin/java

That seemed to do the trick, but, once the installer had finished. Trying to open Zend Studio would give me an error (Failed to execute child process “/usr/local/Zend/Zend Studio-7.0.0/ZendStudio” (No such file or directory)). At this point I was about to give up, until I did a little bit of research and found that the problem was more simple that I imagined. read more

Maintaining PHP session when using CURL.

Working now on some iGoogle like dashboard for the system I’m developing.

I was trying some stuff out with CURL and was having a hard time to maintain my current session when making a curl request to another page. I needed to stay authenticated in order to retrieve my widget.

Here is my initial code:

$strCookie = 'PHPSESSID=' . $_COOKIE['PHPSESSID'] . '; path=/';     
$ch = curl_init($rssFeedLink); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); 
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_COOKIE, $strCookie ); 
$response = curl_exec($ch); 
curl_close($ch); 

The problem with that piece of code is that it was generating a new session id instead of sending my current session.

The solution? read more