Gone are the days of opening an album, clicking on a photo and downloading each and every image one by one! (Needless to say, you should already be seeing the enormous time saver implications here)

Install FacePAD as you would any normal Firefox add-on/extension and once installed, set the language preference under Options on the Firefox Add-ons page. Now all that is left is to browse to Facebook, find an album you wish to download, right-click and select “Download with FacePAD”.

If your default download path in Firefox is set, you’ll get a javascript prompt to confirm and after clicking yes, all the photos contained in the set will be added to Firefox’s normal download manager and start downloading.

Couldn’t be any simpler! :)

Download Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8442

Related Link: http://lazyrussian.com/my-projects/facepad-facebook-photo-album-downloader-2/

• Commit text changes by pressing CTRL+Enter. (Pressing Enter on its own will just start a new line obviously!)
• With all text selected, you can hide the selection colour with CTRL+H to see an accurate preview. Useful when working with colour in particular!
• CTRL+Shift+Left or Right arrow keys selects the whole next or previous word.
• CTRL+Shift+< or > decreases or increases the font-size by 2 points.
• CTRL+Shift+ALT+< or > decreases or increases the font-size by 10 points.
• CTRL+ALT+Left or Right arrow keys increase or decrease letter kerning by 100.
• ALT+Left or Right arrow keys increase or decrease letter kerning by 20.
• CTRL+ALT+Up or Down arrow keys move the text baseline up or down by 10.
• ALT+Up or Down arrow keys move the text baseline up or down by 2.
• CTRL+Shift+L, R or C aligns the paragraph of text left, right or center.

Finally, and although not a keyboard shortcut, double clicking on the T icon in the layers panel will actually select all text in that layer.

Useful.

The amount of times I want to send an email to myself containing the exact data I just mentioned above for later reference is a lot, so this little add-on is certainly proving to be one hell of an effort saver! :)

To use, simply install as normal and once installed, set the necessary mailer preferences by clicking on the Options button under the Email This! entry on the add-ons page. Once set up, Email This! now becomes usable via either a toolbar entry or a right-click context menu option.

All that, all that is left is now to browse to a page, highlight a passage of text and click send! Brilliant I tell you! :)

Add to Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3102

Related Link: http://lazyrussian.com/my-projects/email-this-firefox-extension/

So how does one go about forcing a script to stay alive infinitely until it eventually finishes its job?

(Note: You really don’t want to apply what follows to an infinite loop snippet of code!)

Well, PHP does hand us the nifty set_time_limit() function that basically restarts PHP’s built in timeout counter, setting it to zero and then changing the new timeout value to the number of seconds specified in the function call. So for example, if the timeout default is 30 seconds and you call set_time_limit(20) 25 seconds into script execution, the script will now be able to run 45 seconds before timing out.

Now calling the function with a seconds parameter of zero is said to remove the time limit altogether, though in practice you may find that this doesn’t always work exactly how it should.

If for example your long-running script is based on a long loop operation, the easiest way to ensure your script doesn’t time out is to call the set_time_limit function with a specified timeout duration of say 20 seconds for each and every loop iteration.

This will in essence keep resetting the timeout counter and extending the maximum execution time, thus resulting in a script that has a potential to run just about forever! :)

[Unless of course you are running your script under II7 on a Windows Server 2008 machine where you'll have to adjust some additional Windows Environment parameters! Something to note though is that this function won't work if you are running PHP in SAFE mode. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a workaround for this instance! :( ]

Related Link: http://php.net/manual/en/function.set-time-limit.php

So let’s put down the code then shall we?

function utf16_to_utf8($str) {
    $c0 = ord($str[0]);
    $c1 = ord($str[1]);
 
    if ($c0 == 0xFE && $c1 == 0xFF) {
        $be = true;
    } else if ($c0 == 0xFF && $c1 == 0xFE) {
        $be = false;
    } else {
        return $str;
    }
 
    $str = substr($str, 2);
    $len = strlen($str);
    $dec = '';
    for ($i = 0; $i < $len; $i += 2) {
        $c = ($be) ? ord($str[$i]) << 8 | ord($str[$i + 1]) :
                ord($str[$i + 1]) << 8 | ord($str[$i]);
        if ($c >= 0x0001 && $c <= 0x007F) {
            $dec .= chr($c);
        } else if ($c > 0x07FF) {
            $dec .= chr(0xE0 | (($c >> 12) & 0x0F));
            $dec .= chr(0x80 | (($c >>  6) & 0x3F));
            $dec .= chr(0x80 | (($c >>  0) & 0x3F));
        } else {
            $dec .= chr(0xC0 | (($c >>  6) & 0x1F));
            $dec .= chr(0x80 | (($c >>  0) & 0x3F));
        }
    }
    return $dec;
}
 
function convert_file_to_utf8($csvfile) {
    $utfcheck = file_get_contents($csvfile);
    $utfcheck = utf16_to_utf8($utfcheck);
    file_put_contents($csvfile,$utfcheck);
}

To convert a file simply call the convert_file_to_utf8() function and pass to it the file path of the file you wish to convert. The function then uses the PHP function file_get_contents() to pack the input file’s contents into a string variable which is then passed to the main converter function which converts the string from UTF-16 to UTF-8 encoding if necessary. Finally, we use file_put_contents() to stuff the resulting string back into the original file, overwriting the original file contents.

Nice and simple really.

So just what is going on here?

In most cases you will be using a string construct to send your SQL command, in other words, mysql_query() will be sending along a string SQL statement to be processed by the database. However, recall that backslashes usually need to be escaped in order to display a backslash, and in PHP for example, escaping characters is done by using a backslash – so in other words to display a backslash in a string, you actually need to put down two of the things: \\

However, when pushing your escaped string through to the database, remember that mySQL also needs to escape the backslashes it receives via your SQL statement, meaning that in actual fact you need to be double escaping your escaped backslashes!

To make this simpler to understand, you want to use this in your SQL string: \\\\. So what happens now is that the PHP script escapes the above to \\ which is then passed along to mySQL which then further escapes it to \, leaving you with a nice shiny backslash in your record as a result.

Got it?

Anyway, naturally PHP makes things a little easier for us by providing the handy mysql_real_escape_string() function which will handle the escaping of all special characters for use in a SQL statement, even taking into account the current character set of the connection specified!

Now you know.

Related Link: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.mysql-real-escape-string.php

The function first checks to see if the string passed to it is prefixed with a Byte Order Mark (BOM), and if the necessary BOM exists, the function continues to convert the rest of the string to its more compact UTF-8 format.

Obviously if no BOM is present, the function leaves the input string unchanged.

function utf16_to_utf8($str) {
    $c0 = ord($str[0]);
    $c1 = ord($str[1]);
 
    if ($c0 == 0xFE && $c1 == 0xFF) {
        $be = true;
    } else if ($c0 == 0xFF && $c1 == 0xFE) {
        $be = false;
    } else {
        return $str;
    }
 
    $str = substr($str, 2);
    $len = strlen($str);
    $dec = '';
    for ($i = 0; $i < $len; $i += 2) {
        $c = ($be) ? ord($str[$i]) << 8 | ord($str[$i + 1]) : 
                ord($str[$i + 1]) << 8 | ord($str[$i]);
        if ($c >= 0x0001 && $c <= 0x007F) {
            $dec .= chr($c);
        } else if ($c > 0x07FF) {
            $dec .= chr(0xE0 | (($c >> 12) & 0x0F));
            $dec .= chr(0x80 | (($c >>  6) & 0x3F));
            $dec .= chr(0x80 | (($c >>  0) & 0x3F));
        } else {
            $dec .= chr(0xC0 | (($c >>  6) & 0x1F));
            $dec .= chr(0x80 | (($c >>  0) & 0x3F));
        }
    }
    return $dec;
}

Thanks Andrew, this was exactly what I was looking for! :)

Related Link: http://www.moddular.org/log/utf16-to-utf8

Now jQuery 1.4 has gone and simplified the logic for us by supplying us with a function neatly named first(), which when in action looks something like this:

$(‘li’).first() …

However, if you are not up and running on the 1.4 library just yet, there is an older way of doing this, using either the built in selector :first or by making use of the specific object selector function, namely eq().

Using the built in selector method, your code would look like this:

$(‘li :first’) …

On the other hand, using the eq() function will leave you with this:

$(‘li’).eq(0) … (where 0 is basically the beginning index of the returned object array)

In any event, using either one of these three methods will result in jQuery returning only one object, namely the first object it encountered when applying the initial selector value.

Useful.