I have been selected to be on the judging panel of the .net awards 2009. I’m very grateful to be next to some of the most prominent people in the industry. You can take part in selecting the best in the digital industry by voting yourself!

If you don’t know what the awards are about:

“The .net Awards celebrate the best in web design and development, and are brought to you by the world’s best-selling magazine for web builders - .net. The 17 categories for 2009 range from Design Agency of the Year and Mobile Site of the Year through to the Infamy Award, and once you’ve voted you can use our Twitter widget - over there on the left - to tell your friends about the Awards! This year we have a fantastic group of judges including the likes of Jeffrey Zeldman, Paul Boag, Andy Budd, Christian Heilmann, Jason Santa Maria, Jon Hicks, Ryan Carson and Jonathan Snook!”

Filed under: Press on 2009-10-18 by Damian Gaweda No Comments »

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m pleased to announce that an article I wrote has been published in a paper magazine.

The magazine itself is no less than the .net. You can find my article in the ‘technique’ section of issue 191. You can find out what’s in issue 191 here

The article itself is a tutorial on how to put together an Ajax Chat for your website and I’m very proud of it. I will post a PDF version soon.

Stay tuned.

Filed under: Press, Ajax, PHP on 2009-07-09 by Damian Gaweda 3 Comments »

Here is a little something for all of you Mac-lovers who use Windows. A quick and easy way to have Mac OS X mouse pointers on a PC running Windows XP or Vista.Although personally I’m not a Mac person, one of the first things I do after installing a fresh copy of Windows is change the mouse pointers to the Mac OS X ones. Usually this means I have to download a zip of individual pointer icons and then manually assign them to the right cursors in the Control Panel, which is a bit annoying.Well, I don’t have to do this anymore. This morning I put together a nice and easy installer that does all that manual work for me. You can download the installer using the link below.

Download Mac OS X Mouse Cursors Easy Installer

Thanks to Shinde for uploading the cursors to Winmatrix.com

Filed under: Downloads, Windows on 2008-09-21 by Damian Gaweda 62 Comments »

Today, while integrating SecPay (aka PayPoint) payment gateway with an ecommerce site I’m working on, I came across a very annoying problem with PHP’s SOAPClient implementation.

When talking to a SOAP interface the first thing you want to do is obviously connect to the endpoint:

This looks correct and innocent, however it produces this nasty error:

Changing SOAPClient parameters doesn’t help and disabling wsdl cache in php.ini doesn’t do much either.

After googling a bit I found a couple of bug reports. It turns out PHP has issues talking to endpoints over SSL. *Sigh*.

Here’s a workaround I came up with to force PHP to connect:

As you can see the idea is simple. Just turn off error reporting before instantiating soapclient and restore it afterwards.

I hope this helps some of you frustrated by this bug.

Filed under: PHP on 2008-08-14 by Damian Gaweda 4 Comments »

There are numerous articles describing tunnelling Samba over SSH with putty. In this post I will show you how to set up Samba tunnelling for everyday use without putty running all the time.

Things you need before you start:

• A SSH server between you and the shares you want to connect to. It may be running on the same machine as the shares you want to access.
• File Sharing (Windows) or Samba (Linux) configured correctly on the machine you want to access. Make sure your firewall lets the SSH server connect to your Samba or Windows shares.

1st Step: Create a local loopback interface

We need to create a loopback interface on your local computer first. There is a lot of HOWTOs on the web describing this. I suggest you read this one. As soon as you have the loopback working and putting properly forwarding ports to the local loopback interface, go to step 2.

2nd Step: Set up the tunnelling app

So you have the forwarding working now. Technically, that’s all you need. However, if you plan to use shares on a daily basis, there are a few things you will notice:

• It’s annoying to have the putty window open all the time,
• If you close it, your shares will become unavailable,
• If your network goes down for a while, putty won’t be able to reconnect your ssh session.

There’s a solution to these problems: a tunnelling tray application. Personally, I like myentunnel. It’s a simple wrapper for plink.exe from the putty package. Sitting quietly in the task-bar’s tray, it’s unobtrusive and reconnects automatically after a network failure.

Install and run myentunnel. Then set your hostname, username and password stuff in the Settings tab and go to the Tunnels tab. Add the Samba port and IPs in the Local box, press Save and then Connect. If putty connected and forwarded the ports properly, myentunnel should work without a hitch too.

If you have multiple servers to connect to, you can create server profiles. Read the myentunnel documentation for details.

That’s all, enjoy.

Filed under: Windows, Linux on 2007-07-15 by Damian Gaweda 2 Comments »