TECHLICITY BLOG

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Using Real Words

For a while we've used the famous Lorem ipsum to simulate text in our mockups that we send to clients. This was an easy approach for us since we didn't have to worry about coming up with text that our clients might read and disapprove of.

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C# .NET - Hash Algorithms - MD5, SHA1, SHA256, SHA512

One of the great problems I have had with OO languages such as .NET and Java is that some tasks, that are as simple as calling a function in other languages, are complicated to no end. One such problem is with the different hash functions in .NET available via System.Security.Cryptography. In PHP if I need to get the MD5 of a string I simply call the built in MD5 function. In .NET I need to build my own MD5 function using System.Security.Cryptography and that, even though I understand why it is the way it is, can get a little annoying after a while. I have taken the liberty of simplifying this process by creating a HASH class that can be plugged into your programs as either a new class or by creating a hash.dll of out of it. The code lets you call MD5, SHA1, SHA256 and SHA512 functions and takes care of the process for you.

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4 Functions for Textarea inputs

The first two functions were solutions to a requirement where I had to convert the text within a textarea box to render within a div or span element. At first I thought it would be easy, a simple div.innerHTML = textarea.value but then another problem showed up. All text were rendered by the browser as one paragraph. Thus I needed a new line to
converter. The last two function automatically grows a textarea box vertically as a user inputs content larger than the original size, it also takes a second argument that limits the amount of characters, good for client side validation.

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Change SVN repository in Eclipse

We recently moved our SVN repositories to a bigger and better server. Long story short, we were not able to keep the same address, which didn't seem like such a big deal. One would think that a simple right click on the project->properties would be the simple fix, however it wasn't. After spending some time on it, I finally figured it out and decided to share. While I found several solutions on the net, I think this is the easiest of them all.

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Static page in CakePHP

In every dynamicly driving project there must exist some static content. While there are dozens of ways of doing this, we here at Techlicity do it in one of 2 ways. If your looking to serve up strictly static html pages such as privacy policy, AUP or just simple static description pages then you might want to skip all of CakePHP preprocessing to realize that your content is static.

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CakePHP: controller without model

Sometimes you just want to make a simple controller without an associated model or table. CakePHP makes this very easy while showing it's flexibility. CakePHP uses the variable $uses to associate a controller to a model, by default it uses the singular name of the controller or the $name variable.

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Ignore files or folders on svn update

This article covers the simple task of ignoring files on svn update. In our case, we needed to exclude our applications config files. This way we can have a DEV, QA and LIVE environment, all easily updated with svn while maintaining there respective config files.

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Always stay in sync with NTP

NTP is the Network Time Protocol. It is a standard way to keep system clocks synced. This post will go through the easy steps of getting you linux box configured to always follow the correct time based on NTP servers.

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Preserving Line Breaks in <textarea>

A common problem many first time developers come across is preserving line breaks in a textarea after a form is submitted. This article will show you how to fix this problem in PHP and JavaScript. The code can also be easily converted to any other server side language you maybe using.

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Perspectives of Social Change

Amazing Video!. Here is a video that addresses the many perspectives of how we go about social change.

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