PHP ini file user_agent configuration option

Today I discovered the user_agent php.ini configuration option. Basically it allows you to specify the user agent PHP uses when it sends HTTP requests for files. I was screen scraping some data from Wikipedia (processing URI schemes) and it was replying with a 403 error, presumably because they’ve banned the default PHP user agent. Anyway I just changed my user agent to a copy of my one from Firefox and things started working. Pretty handy option!

How To Set Cron to Run Every 5 Minutes

Thanks to this handy document How To Set Cron to Run Every 5 Minutes I now my crontab configured so that my jj5-test repo gets updated every five minutes. It’s the sort of thing I generally do in a post-commit hook, but in this case that won’t work owing to the way the servers are configured (the files are in my account and not owned by the www-data user the commit-hook runs as).

So to configure cron I issued the command:

 $ crontab -e

And then to update my svn working copy:

# m h  dom mon dow   command
*/5 * * * * cd /home/jj5/web/test && svn update > /dev/null

How to open file links in Firefox 1.5 and above

Found some instructions about How to open file links in Firefox 1.5 and above and I’m going to try it out just as soon as I can reset my browser.

Basically you add something like the following to your user.js file which is in C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[Profile]\user.js.

user_pref("capability.policy.policynames", "localfilelinks");
user_pref("capability.policy.localfilelinks.sites", "http://www.example.com");
user_pref("capability.policy.localfilelinks.checkloaduri.enabled", "allAccess");