Self-signed SSL certificates not working with MAMP and Chrome
I use MAMP Pro for most of my PHP development and Chrome has annoyingly been blocking the self-signed SSL certificates MAMP generates, saying the certificate is not valid and “Your connection is not private”:
Thankfully, I found an easy solve to fix this. These steps assume you’ve created a host in MAMP. You’ll need to go to the SSL tab of the host you are trying to fix and
- Check the SSL button
- Click the self-signed certificate button.
- Fill in the fields in the dialog modal and click Generate
- You’ll be prompted to save the certificate. Choose whatever location you’d like.
- Click on the circle with the arrow to open the directory where the certificate was saved.
- In the finder window that opens, double click the .crt file (be sure it’s the same file name that’s in the SSL window in case you have multiple).
- In the Add Certificate window, click Add. I testing adding it to login and system and both worked, so add whichever you prefer.
- In the Certificates Window, double click the certificate. It’s easier to filter by name if you have a lot of items.
- In the next modal window, choose Always Trust from the dropdown.
- Close out the next confirmation window, and you’ll be prompted to authenticate with your mac login to save the updates.
Go back to Chrome, and reload the page and the certificate should work now:
How to get shape type in Visio using VBA?
I’m working with a Visio 2016 file with over 100 tabs and need to extract the data (mainly text, connector from/to, and shape) for data processing for a processing engine. I was trying to figure out how to get the shape type name in Visio using VBA. For example, in a flowchart, I’m trying to figure out how to tell if a shape is a process, decision, data, etc. The
visShape.Typeproperty seems to always return 3 which appears to be visTypeShape from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/api/visio.visshapetypes. After hunting through all the available properties on the Shape object, I found that the shape.Master.Name property will return the shape name, but you need to check if it’s Nothing first in case it’s not a shape.
I didn’t do that and it kept breaking the script originally because some of the pages had text fields and the first few items on the first sheet I was working with were text boxes. Hopefully this snippet will save you the time I wasted figuring it out.
Public Sub GetShapeAndID()
Dim visShape As Shape
For Each visShape In ActivePage.Shapes
If Not visShape.Master Is Nothing Then
Debug.Print visShape.ID & " - " & visShape.Master.Name
End If
Next
End SubHow to get website average latency in BASH
I was working on a project today and wanted to be able to get the average latency for an API that I was working on. Performance is a concern because we’re running the API over a VPN, and then SSH tunneling over to another server. I wanted a quick way to do it and wrote a little bash function that will calculate the average for me. I couldn’t find an example on how to do this online so I’m sharing in case anyone else runs into the same issue.
This is tested on Mac only. Add these two functions to your .bashrc and do a shellupdate in terminal to load the latest, or just grab my dotfiles from my github: https://github.com/gregvarghese/dotfiles
curlb(){
curl -s -o /dev/null -w '%{time_starttransfer}\n' "$@"
}
# Usage:
# latencyavg [# of times to run] [URL]
function latencyavg()
{
time=0.00
for (( c=1; c<=$1; c++ ))
do
num1=$(curlb $2 -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, sdch' -H 'Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8,ja;q=0.6' -H 'Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1' -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/50.0.2661.86 Safari/537.36' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' --compressed)
echo "$c - $num1"
time=$(echo "$time + $num1" | bc -l)
done
echo "Total Time $time"
echo $(echo $time / $1 | bc -l)
}Usage example:
latencyavg 20 https://www.godaddy.comHow to fix npm WARN checkPermissions Missing write access to /usr/local/lib/node_modules
A friend was running into an error when using node to install a package. When installing the package he was getting the error “npm WARN checkPermissions Missing write access to /usr/local/lib/node_modules”. The fix turned out to be pretty simple and he just needed to take ownership of the node_modules folder.
Open terminal and run this simple snippet to fix the problem:
sudo chown -R $(whoami) /usr/local/lib/node_modules/How to remove wrapping tags in PHP Storm
How often do you code something and need to delete a wrapping link or div? I was using PHPStorm and had grabbed some code from another file that had links in the tags which weren’t needed in the new file. I didn’t want to manually remove each link and after a quick look around PHPStorm’s menus, discovered that PHPStorm has a really useful command to remove the wrapping element for you.
Select the element, then from the menu, choose Code > Unwrap/Remove… or use the keyboard shortcut, Command + Shift + Backspace and then choose the appropriate wrapping element to remove.
How to Prevent Raspberry Pi Zero from Blanking or Sleeping
I was setting up a Raspberry Pi Zero in an office to use for displaying a slide show of pictures on a TV in the waiting room and dismayed to learn it would constantly go to sleep after a few minutes. I researched and tried setting the consoleblank=0 in config.txt with no luck along many other solutions, but learned none of them worked for the Raspberry Pi Zero.
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install xscreensaverI’m not sure why, but I got an error that some dependencies were not installed. If that happens to you as well, run this command in terminal:
sudo apt-get --fix-missingand then run the install for xscreensaver again
sudo apt-get install xscreensaverNow under Preferences, you’ll see a new option for screen saver:
On the Display Modes tab, you’ll see a drop down for Mode. Choose “Disable Screen Saver”:
Your raspberry pi zero will now no longer go to sleep.
How to fix VMWare Fusion Pro 10 “Cannot find a valid peer process to connect toâ€
I recently got a new mac and was migrating a VMWare Windows Virtual Machine from my other computer. When starting the virtual machine, I received a random message from VMWare Fusion saying “Cannot find a valid peer process to connect to.”
The fix was rather simple as it was just Apple blocking VMWare from running. To fix it, follow these steps:
- Open System Preferences by searching in Spotlight or clicking the gear icon in the dock.
- On the top row there is an icon for Security and Privacy – Click that icon
- Near the bottom of the screen that appears the following statement
“System software from developer “VMWare, Inc.” was blocked from loading” - Click Allow
Windows 7 & 10 How to Bulk Unblock Blocked Files
While setting up a new computer, Windows was throwing up warnings that files transferred from a backup drive might be unsafe. The files were text and images, so the warnings were safe to ignore but the directory had over one thousand files. Rather than unblocking each file manually, Windows PowerShell makes it easy to unblock files in bulk.
Load up Windows Powershell:
- Press Win + R on the keyboard to open the Run dialog.
- In the Run box, type powershell
For one folder without subdirectories, this snippet will do the trick.“$env:userprofile\Downloads“ tells PowerShell to use the Download folder for the logged in user and unblocks all files in it. Change this to the folder path you need if it’s not the Downloads folder.
get-childitem “$env:userprofile\Downloads“ | unblock-file
If you have sub-directories and need to unblock everything, use the -Recurse flag:
dir “$env:userprofile\Downloads“ -Recurse | Unblock-File
Want to see a report of files to be unblocked before running it? The -WhatIf flag will show you without executing.
dir “$env:userprofile\Downloads“ -Recurse | Unblock-File -WhatIf
How to automatically install gulp dependencies
I created a website where I’m using gulp to create a minified version and had to switch to another computer. For whatever reason, gulp install wouldn’t install the dependencies automatically, even when using the “npm-install-missing” plugin.
Add this script to the beginning of your gulpfile.js before the requirements, and when you run gulp, it will install the dependencies automatically. Be aware you’ll need to rerun your gulp command after the script completes.
(function(){
var r=require;
require=function (n){
try{
return r(n)
}
catch(e){
r('child_process').exec('npm i ' + n,function (err,body){
try{
console.log('Module "' +n + '"" not found, installing.\n' + body )
return r(n);
}
catch(e){
}
})
}
}
console.log('""Please re-run gulp.\n' + body )
})()
Chrome Anchor Link Not Working Fix
One of my single page sites that had been live for months with no changes suddenly had the menu stop functioning in Chrome only. I can’t find an exact reason for the break, but I did find a cross-browser JavaScript solve that fixes the issue nicely. Just add the snippet to your site and the links should work automatically. Note that this fix requires jQuery but can be converted to VanillaJS.
/* Navigation Fix -----------------------------------------------------*/ $(function() { $('a[href*="#"]:not([href="#"])').click(function() { if (location.pathname.replace(/^\//,'') == this.pathname.replace(/^\//,'') && location.hostname == this.hostname) { var target = $(this.hash); target = target.length ? target : $('[name=' + this.hash.slice(1) +']'); if (target.length) { $('html, body').animate({ scrollTop: target.offset().top }, 1000); return false; } } }); });
Someone reached out to me today for help as the fix broke their WordPress site. If you’re using WordPress, this version uses the compatibility version of jQuery they provide out of the box. Be sure to place it in a javascript file and not your functions.php. Rui was kind enough to confirm the fix also works for Drupal 7. Â
/* WordPress Navigation Fix -----------------------------------------------------*/ jQuery(function ($) { $('a[href*="#"]:not([href="#"])').click(function() { if (location.pathname.replace(/^\//,'') == this.pathname.replace(/^\//,'') && location.hostname == this.hostname) { var target = $(this.hash); target = target.length ? target : $('[name=' + this.hash.slice(1) +']'); if (target.length) { $('html, body').animate({ scrollTop: target.offset().top }, 1000); return false; } } }); });