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Minor Pixaria Update

I've released a minor update to Pixaria Gallery which fixes a couple of issues in the previous edition and improves the workflow for the shopping cart. It's not an important update so if you've only just installed a previous version, I wouldn't panic about getting this one

More details of the changes can be found in the file change log and release notes but here's the important stuff:

1. Fixed an issue with reversed order of results when ordering image search results by file name in the admin area.
2. Fixed a regression bug in the image manipulation library which could cause an error in the Flash upload tool on servers where open_base_dir restrictions are in effect.
3. The 'continue shopping' button on the cart homepage now takes the user back to the page they were on before they started the purchase process.

Pixaria Hosting Offer

Any Pixaria users thinking about their web hosting options might like to check out HostPost, a new web hosting service created by a fellow Pixaria user and photographer*. Eschewing the common limitations of bandwidth and storage space, HostPost offers pretty much unlimited everything from databases to mailboxes and disk space to sub-domains.

While a few companies offer unlimited space I offer everything within the package with absolutely no limits. Bandwidth, space, databases, sub domains, mailboxes - all unlimited. I call this package 'Totally Unlimited'.

'Totally Unlimited Plus'. This offers all the unrestricted benefits of the above only this is 'MULTI DOMAIN HOSTING'. This means unlimited true domains within the same package all the same great unlimited features.

HostPost packages start at:

• GBP 100 per annum or GBP 10 per month for the Totally Unlimited package
• GBP 120 per annum or GBP 12 per month for the Totally Unlimited Plus package

As a Pixaria user, you can get a massive 40% off your first year by quoting the promotional code Pixaria09 when prompted to do so in the shopping cart.

For more information, check out the website here: http://www.hostpost.co.uk/

*This is not an endorsement as I have not used this service. I've posted this because it may be of interest to current and future Pixaria users.

Pixaria 2.6.2 Now Available

The latest and greatest Pixaria Gallery, version 2.6.2, is now available and is a recommended update for all registered users. This release is primarily a bug fix release but includes a couple of notable improvements to back end image editing, a new Spanish localisation and a new bundled version of Smarty which offers various important security improvements.

Version 2.6.2 also finalises some significant changes to how original, high-res image files are referenced by the front end so make sure that you consult the release notes to see if this change will affect you.

Full details of all the changes and bugs fixed are in the release notes and file change log. To get the update, simply drop me an e-mail and I will send it over.

How to get a vCard file onto an iPhone

Here's a little off topic post which isn't Pixaria related but might be of use to other people so I thought I'd share it here. It follows a call for help I had from a friend setting up an iPhone on Windows. The issue was that he was having lots of problems importing a vCard file (vcf) exported from an LG Viewty into Outlook so that the contacts inside it could be synchronised with his new iPhone.

If you're a new iPhone user on Windows, it's possible that you will run into problems if you try to import a vCard file containing multiple contacts from your old phone into Microsoft Outlook. This is due to Outlook's notoriously weak support for the vCard format which means that it will only recognise the first contact in the file. If your old phone contained hundreds of contacts and you don't want to manually re-enter them on the new one, this can be a major headache...

Fortunately, there is an easy way to bypass this issue and all you need is the vCard file e.g. mycontacts.vcf and an e-mail account such as Gmail set up on your iPhone.

Thanks to the iPhone's excellent vCard support, you can import the contacts directly onto your iPhone by e-mailing the vCard file (as an attachment) to an account that can be accessed directly on your iPhone. When you open the vCard attachment, you will be prompted to save the contacts to your address book and hey presto, you're done.

Counting Code

I've recently been asked to count the number of lines of code in a project at work and assumed that this would be easy to do. It turns out that it isn't as as simple as you might think because the Unix word count command 'wc' doesn't allow for counting lines in files in subdirectories.

Fortunately, thanks to a few nifty Unix commands and some helpful hints on the web, I was able to get the answer to the problem which is the following command:

for file in `find . -name \*.php -type f`; do cat $file; done | wc -l

In this example, I'm using *.php to recursively count the number of lines in PHP files but the same approach will work on other file types too such as HTML or JavaScript.

Armed with this command, I was able to establish that my project has 67,000 lines of PHP which seemed like a lot until I did the same on Pixaria and found it 116,000 lines of code..!