Digital Business of the Year :: Space 48

I’ll start this one with saying what I always say when asked about my work: very proud to be part of the amazing team at Space 48, we’re making digital history there! 🙂

Joke aside now, recently we won a pretty important award in the North-West, an award that doesn’t recognises only one project of ours, but the “overall”, the entire team: Digital Business of the Year, after we were shortlisted in no less than 4 (four!) categories. The awards ceremony was held in Manchester (don’t remember the exact location, its all confusing for me 😛 ), but you can read the entire article in our blog post.

Mage registry key “_singleton/core/resource” already exists

Ever had the “Mage registry key “_singleton/core/resource” already exists” error in Magento and can’t get rid of it? First of all, if you search this on Google, don’t believe anything you read in the first 2-3 pages of results (pages > 3 don’t matter anyway, that’s a black hole…). Even found a champ claiming to “solve” the issue by clearing the cache in index.php EVERY TIME a page was loaded… What’s the point in having a cache engine then? Especially if you’re using the EE version!

Anyway, check if you have APC installed on the box and tweak the 

apc.shm_size

in the apc.ini file.

Hope this helps anyone.

Holiday, part I

Finally, me and the family are going away for our first holiday this year,  around here, somewhere. From what I hear, its’s supposed to be really nice, hopefully I’ll recharge my batteries.

So no laptops, no sites, no PHP, no nothing. Just enjoying my free time with my family, taking loads of photos and visiting the area (already have an itinerary planned by “The Wifey” 🙂 )

/me off…

Refresh the checkout success page in Magento

Something useful when working on the “checkout success” page in Magento, whether it’s just styling, implementing some tracking JS codes or whatever open up app/code/core/Mage/Checkout/controllers/OnepageController.php in your favourite editor (mine is PhpStorm, btw) and on line (approx, at least for Magento EE) 275 you’ll find the successAction() method.

In there, comment out lines 278-281 286-291, so the method looks like this:

public function successAction()
{
    $session = $this->getOnepage()->getCheckout();
//        if (!$session->getLastSuccessQuoteId()) {
//            $this->_redirect('checkout/cart');
//            return;
//        }

        $lastQuoteId = $session->getLastQuoteId();
        $lastOrderId = $session->getLastOrderId();
        $lastRecurringProfiles = $session->getLastRecurringProfileIds();
//        if (!$lastQuoteId || (!$lastOrderId && empty($lastRecurringProfiles))) {
//            $this->_redirect('checkout/cart');
//            return;
//        }

//        $session->clear();
        $this->loadLayout();
        $this->_initLayoutMessages('checkout/session');
        Mage::dispatchEvent('checkout_onepage_controller_success_action', array('order_ids' => array($lastOrderId)));
        $this->renderLayout();
}

IMPORTANT: if you’re using a version control system (e.g. GIT), DON’T COMMIT your changes. Actually, don’t EVER change the Magento Core directly. Remember to undo your changes to this file when you’re done testing.

 

Hope someone will find this useful.

Long weekend off

Cool, so my looooong weekend is here. Due to the Easter Bank holiday (Friday and Monday), took Thursday off as well. And today we’re waiting for some friends to visit us (they live in London) and right after getting them from the train station, we’re off to (re)visit The City of Chester. Really beautiful city, really really beautiful!
For the moment there’s an inner struggle for me, can’t decide if Chester or Edingurgh. Will let you know when I decide, might be a while 🙂

Cheers

Server change

So, I changed my hosting provider. Again. The previous one was plain bullshit. No idea how they’re doing with bigger clients, but for smaller ones (like myself) they’re really shitty. The processes on the server were dropping for no reason, their customer relations dept. is even worse, no explanations given, etc. Therefore, for whomever may concern – stay away from some dudes called “Edis”, based in Austria.
Found another cheap VPS but this one is based in ‘Merica 🙂 Hence the slow page load if you visit my blog from Europe. Actually… no idea who visita my blog, wtf am I talking about!?!? 🙂

Anyway, that’s the news from me. And it was about f***ing time, since my last post was in October ’13!

Raspberry Pi Home Media Center

Well, I did it! Finally got my Raspberry Pi to a (very!) good use. Since I got the week off from work, I played (quite a lot) with the new gizmo in town and managed to make it a “home media center”. Which, is AMAZING if I may say so.

The first thing was to install the Raspbmc on the memory card that serves as a hard disk for the RPi, following information found online (Google really helps!) and especially from here. The memory card is not a large one, just an 8GB one, which is quite enough for the OS and whatever plugins/add-ons I may want in the future.

That was the easy part, the real challenge (for me at least, being new to the RPi world) was to add the content (movies, tv shows, etc) to the library. But in the end, it all paid off really well. After a few attempts with an 8GB USB stick, of course I  wanted something that I don’t have to unplug all day from the Pi, copy files on my laptop, plug it back in the Pi and so on. Besides, it was only an 8GB stick, as I said. Pretty lame…

Tried to plug an external USB hdd I had but found out that the RPi doesn’t support USB 3 for one, and second of all didn’t had enough power to “juice” the external drive. Obviously, I needed to power the hdd externally, before plug it into the Pi. Solved that little hiccup by buying a powered USB hub. This way, I can plug the hub in the Pi and the hdd in the hub. Simples! Another thing I forgot to mention is that the Touro Mobile actually has and USB 2/3 interface so it is compatible with the Pi after all. That’s good, otherwise that would have been a good waste of 500GB of space 🙂

Back the the TV screen now. I needed to add films and tv shows to the library. After playing (quite a lot) with the Pi’s settings (and discovered that it had a pretty nice weather add-on already installed), managed to add under the “Video” category some “sources”, and scanned the entire mounted hdd for content. Here’a s tricky one: if you put the films in a directory called “Movies” and the tv shows in a directory called “TV Shows”, the Raspbmc is smart enough to add those files into their specific library. Another thing is that its best to leave the filenames unchanged from wherever you download them, as the Pi connects to the TV Database over the internet and downloads a lot of information about the shows you’re adding to the library: images, plots, cast information, etc. The same for films, only it connects to another internet DB for films.

Of course, after all was in place I needed to control the new “home media center” somehow, and I don’t mean with the mouse or keyboard.

So, to feel more Star-Trek-ish I installed some remote control apps on my iPad, which, let me tell you, are truly amazing! You can only imagine how I felt like when controlling the Media Centre from the iPad!

There are also libraries for adding Music and Pictures, which I didn’t detailed here, but they are great as well. Oh, one more thing – you can also install some add-ons that allows you to listen to Internet Radios, Vimeo or even Youtube! You can even watch live TV on it, but for that you’le need some other external hardware. I’ll give that a try as well at some point, I’m pretty sure 🙂

Below are some images with the setup of my “Home Media Center” on a Raspberry Pi.

_DSC9625 _DSC9623 _DSC9620 _DSC9617 _DSC9616 _DSC9615 _DSC9613 _DSC9611 _DSC9610 _DSC9608

Ubuntu 13.04 WiFi driver issue

Recently I faced a weird problem at home with my WiFi. Whenever I turned my laptop on, running Ubuntu 13.04, everything else (wireless-wise) stopped working. I tried everything, but with no success. Pretty much only my wife’s laptop was still able to browse the net, but everything else was “dead in the water”: the iPad, our mobiles and our visiting friends’.

Luckly enough, I came across this post that helped me solve the issue, which pretty much sums up to this:

sudo modprobe -r wl && sudo modprobe brcmsmac

Hope this helps someone.

Lymm Dam

Lymm Dam – A panoramic view

With such a beautiful day today, all sunny & stuff, I went to see the Lymm Dam, close by (about 8 miles away). Nice view, and since “panoramic views” are my “new s**t”, got the camera with me, the tripod and here’s the result. I’m not going to bother you (or me, again) with the camera settings, no one really cares about that – just the final image. I think it looks quite alright, for a beginner 🙂

Lymm Dam

 

Note: the image is about 5MB, might take a while to download..