Mac OSX: Add Hosts to Local hosts file
September 14th, 2009 | Author: Sunny
I was in the hospital for awhile, so I have not had a chance to update my blog.
Yesterday I installed OpenSuse to my VM on my Mac Pro because I wanted to play with Magento, so I installed Apache, PHP, and mySQL with all necessary modules. Everything is going well, and Magento(1.1.3) finally installed successfully with it’s sample data today(it was a bitch until I changed the hostname to localhost.com!) . However, I set my VM hostname as localhost.com, and I would like to access it from my OSX Safari. And of course, my DNS records localhost.com as something else on the internet, but not pointing to my VM’s IP address.
So what should I do? I have to change the “hosts” file on my Mac. It is located at “/private/etc/hosts“. In order to edit it, you have to grant yourself as root privilege, but by default “root” account is disabled in OSX. Therefore, you will use command “sudo“. For example, I use vi for editing, I will type “sudo vi /private/etc/hosts” in my terminal windows, and it will prompt me to enter a password(which it should be your admin password on OSX). Once you get authorized, you should be able to edit the hosts file.
To enter a new hostname in hosts file, in a new line at the end, type in IP address, then Tab, and the hostname. Once saved, Mac OSX should resolve the hostname to that IP address.
Flex – Playing with Twitter API and solving the cross-domain problem
March 27th, 2009 | Author: Sunny
Today I wrote a small and simple Flex program with Twitter API. Here is my code:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" backgroundImage="@Embed(source='image/twitter_bg.png')" height="50" width="850" layout="absolute" creationComplete="twitterService.send()">
<mx:Script>
<![CDATA[
import mx.rpc.events.ResultEvent;
import mx.collections.ArrayCollection;
[Bindable]
private var Feed:Object;
public function twitterHandler(event:ResultEvent):void {
Feed = event.result.user;
}
]]>
</mx:Script>
<mx:HTTPService id="twitterService" url="proxy.php" result="twitterHandler(event)" />
<mx:HBox width="800" height="41" verticalCenter="1" x="0" verticalAlign="middle">
<mx:Spacer x="0" y="0" width="15"/>
<mx:Image source="@Embed(source='image/twitter_logo_header.png')" width="126" height="25"/>
<mx:Image source="{Feed.profile_image_url}" width="30" height="30"/>
<mx:Label text="{Feed.screen_name}" fontSize="16" color="#2896AD" width="83"/>
<mx:Label text="{Feed.status.text}" width="498" fontSize="12" color="#084755"/>
</mx:HBox>
</mx:Application>
and you can see the result here: http://sunnycyk.hk/twitter/
It may look easy, but actually it takes me sometime to figure out how to make it works. The code was working fine in debug mode with Flex, but it did not work on release mode. I was wondering why and searching on internet, and finally figure out it is because of security reason.
There are couple methods you can try, but I just used a easy way to do it by adding a proxy.php file. What proxy.php does just requests data from the remote domain site (for my case, it is “http://twitter.com/users/show/skyc999.xml”), and regenerates the output so that your flash player will think that you are working with a local XML file.
When my flash file runs, it will call proxy.php. Then proxy.php will grab XML file from Twitter, and generate the XML output to my flash file. Because my flash file only calls the local file, it does not voliate the flash player security policy setting, and everything works again!
The proxy.php only contains two line of code:
<?php
$dataURL = "http://twitter.com/users/show/skyc999.xml";
readfile($dataURL);
?>
If you are a twitter user, you can try my program(download it?) and replace the skyc999 in $dataURL with your screen name.
This example just gives a basic idea how to work with cross-domain files and Twitter API. Hope it can help you (and me) 
WordPress Theme – My header.php
March 24th, 2009 | Author: Sunny
This is code for my header.php:
<?php
/**
* @package WordPress
* @subpackage mySmallProgramTheme
*/
?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" <?php language_attributes(); ?>>
<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="<?php bloginfo('html_type'); ?>; charset=<?php bloginfo('charset'); ?>" />
<title><?php wp_title('«', true, 'right'); ?> <?php bloginfo('name'); ?></title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_url'); ?>" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> RSS Feed" href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> Atom Feed" href="<?php bloginfo('atom_url'); ?>" />
<link rel="pingback" href="<?php bloginfo('pingback_url'); ?>" />
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="<?php get_bloginfo('url') ?>/wp-content/themes/mysmallprogramtheme/image/favicon.png" type="image/png" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
<?php if (is_singular() ) wp_enqueue_script('comment-reply');
?>
</head>
<body>
<div id="page">
<div id="header">
<div id="headerimage">
<a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>" ><h1><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></h1></a>
<div class="description"><?php bloginfo('description'); ?></div>
</div>
First, I have setup some header information with bloginfo() in the Header tag. You may just take a look how I did that because you mostly will put the same header as mine.
After the Header Tag, I defined a Wrapper layer “page”
<div id="page">
This is the wrapper for all contents in my blog. In this wrapper, usually you will define four different parts(or layers).
1. Header
2. Content
3. Footer
4. Sidebar
And for this example, this file is called header.php, so I will define our “Header” layer here. Next 5 lines, I have defined my “Header”:
<div id="header">
<div id="headerimage">
<a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>" ><h1><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></h1></a>
<div class="description"><?php bloginfo('description'); ?></div>
</div>
In the header layer, I have defined another wrapper called “headerimage”. This is because I want to wrap my Blog title and description in my header layer.
Later on, I will show you how I created index.php for my content layer. footer.php for my footer layer, and sidebar.php for my sidebar layer.
One more thing I forgot to mention, in header section, there is a php code:
<?php if (is_singular() ) wp_enqueue_script('comment-reply');
?>
is_singular() will check if this page is a single post (only one post on the page, and actually there is a template file called single.php that you may also define it yourself or by WordPress default template. single.php is liked index.php which I will call my header, sidebar, and footer files here except it only displays one post per page). In my case, I only want to include javascript for replying a comment when someone land on single.php, or else the code should not be included.
So, it looks pretty simple right? However, don’t forget the code above has no decoration, so you will have to define your own CSS style for each layer and wrapper, or otherwise you will only see plain text on your header.
body {
font-size: 62.5%; /* Resets 1em to 10px */
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
background: #ffffff;
color: #333;
text-align: center;
}
#page {
border: none;
background:url(image/layoutbg.png) repeat-y bottom center;
}
#header {
background: url(image/headerpic.jpg) no-repeat top center;
}
#headerimage {
width: 830px;
height: 195px;
}
#header h1 {
font-size:36px;
text-align: center;
color: #903;
}
#header a, #header a:visited {
text-decoration: none;
color: #903;
}
#header a:hover {
text-decoration:underline;
}
#headerimage .description {
font-size:14px;
text-align: center;
color: #666;
font-family:Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
font-style:italic;
}
body {
margin: 0px 0 20px 0;
padding: 0;
}
#page {
margin: 0px auto;
padding: 0;
width: 830px;
}
#header {
margin: 0 0 0 0px;
padding:0;
height:195px;
width: 830px;
}
#headerimage {
margin: 0;
}
#header h1 {
margin: 0;
padding:70px 0px 0px 0;
}
#headerimage .description {
margin: 0;
padding:1px 15px 0 0;
}
Please forgive my mess. I defined them twice because I kinda modified from the default WordPress Theme which it separates the style of structure and coloring in two parts. You may just group them in one depends on what you like.