Month: September 2016

Apple Wireless Mouse on Windows

delboy1978uk, , , , , , 2 Comments

So I left my work laptop’s PSU in Scotland. Oops! I also left my cheap mouse alongside it (I hate the touchpad thingy). So that left me with my Apple Wireless Magic Mouse, the touch sensitive one.

Once you hook it up with Bluetooth, you’ll notice the touch scroll doesn’t work. 😦
So let’s fix that!

As you know, Mac can run Windows using a thing called Bootcamp, which has the drivers we need. Download either the 32 or 64 bit version depending which Windows you are running. https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1336?locale=en_US

Using 7-zip or something similar, right click the downloaded exe and and extract it somewhere. Once extracted, go into the BootCamp31ToBootCamp303 folder.

Look for a file called Binary.MultiTouchMouse_Bin. Right click on that, and extract the files somewhere. These are our drivers!

Once you’ve done that, run DPInst.exe, which will install the drivers.

Scroll now works! But ah! Macs scroll the opposite way around, like a touch screen, we push the page up or down. If you’d like to flip the scroll “wheel”, do the following:

  • Open Control Panel > Devices & Printers > Bluetooth Devices
  • Right click and choose Properties
  • Select HID compliant mouse, and click properties
  • Choose the Details Tab
  • Select Device Instance Path, note the value
  • Open regedit (Start > regedit)
  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
  • System
  • Current Control Set
  • Enum
  • HID
  • Now follow the device instance path from the mouse properties
  • Device Parameters
  • Double Click FlipFlopWheel
  • Change 0 to 1 (turn flip flop wheel on)
  • Now disconnect and reconnect your mouse

Your mouse now works exactly the same way in Windows as it does on your Mac. Have fun!

Creating DOMElements from HTML strings

delboy1978uk, , , , , , Leave a comment

DOMDocuments are cool, and a really nice way of dealing with HTML in an OO fashion. However, sometimes, we have an HTML string element which we need to add to our Document. Here’s how you do it:

    function createNodesFromHTML(DOMDocument $doc,$str) 
    {
        $nodes = array();
        $d = new DOMDocument();
        $d->loadHTML("<html>{$str}</html>");
        $child = $d->documentElement->firstChild->firstChild;
        while($child) {
            $nodes[] = $doc->importNode($child,true);
            $child = $child->nextSibling;
        }
        return $nodes;
    }


        $dom = new DOMDocument();
        $icon = '<i class="fa fa-remove"></i>'; // This is our string

        $button = $dom->createElement('a');
        $button->setAttribute('href', '/whatever/delete/12345');
        $button->setAttribute('class', 'btn btn-sm btn-danger');
        
        // This is us turning the string(s) into nodes we can add
        $nodes = createNodesFromHTML($dom, $icon);
        $button->appendChild($nodes[0]);
        
        $dom->appendChild($button);
        echo $dom->saveHTML();

Disable register_globals on a legacy PHP app

delboy1978uk, , , , , Leave a comment

As any decent developer knows, register_globals was a terrible idea, a security risk, and turned ON by default in old versions of PHP!

Thankfully it was removed in PHP 5.4. However, if you are stuck developing on a site that used register_globals, you may find yourself in a situation where seemingly you can’t upgrade beyond PHP 5.3.

However, it’s not all bad news, we can put a piece of code in place which emulates register_globals. This will let us turn it off. It still means your code is less than secure, but of course that’ll be fixed in time as you upgrade and refactor the site, right?

To emulate register_globals, just add the following code to one of your initialisation/bootstrap scripts:

// Emulate register_globals on
if (!ini_get('register_globals')) {
    $superglobals = array($_SERVER, $_ENV,
        $_FILES, $_COOKIE, $_POST, $_GET);
    if (isset($_SESSION)) {
        array_unshift($superglobals, $_SESSION);
    }
    foreach ($superglobals as $superglobal) {
        extract($superglobal, EXTR_SKIP);
    }
}

Now you can turn it off in php.ini. Why is it so bad though? Well, have a look at this:

code

Looks like nothing should happen on that page, right? nothing has been defined.

WRONG! try adding ?loggedIn=anything to the end of the URL:

loggedin

Removing Firefox Inspect Element (we use FireBug!)

delboy1978uk, , , , , , Leave a comment

Just a quick one! We all know and love Firebug, but you might get annoyed when you right click to inspect element, only to find you clicked on ‘Inspect Element (Q)’ instead of ‘Inspect Element with Firebug’. So lets get rid of the one we don’t use!

inspect

It’s real easy. Browse to about:config, and proceed past the warning.

config

Set extensions.firebug.hideDefaultInspector to true.
Set devtools.inspector.enabled to false.
Problem solved!

inspect