Laïla Atrmouh

Migrating from Chakra v2 to Chakra v3

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 10:14:15 +0000

Migrating to Chakra v3 turned out to be a pretty substantial upgrade.

TIL 1

Tue, 26 May 2020 20:14:34 +0200

I redesigned my blog. Again.

I’ve been blogging for 8 years so far and boy, this blog has travelled.

Simple HTML files hosted in a French server (Free) 👵🏼
Wordpress hosted by 1&1
Jekyll hosted on Github Pages
Gatsby hosted on Github Pages

Today, this blog is powered by Hugo and hosted by Netlify. And, of course, even though I played with plenty of cool tools, I didn’t write articles.

Docker Cheatsheet

Sat, 25 Aug 2018 19:23:42 +0000

Petit article mémo sur Docker

Getting Started

make sure that client can talk to engine + current version docker version

An image is the application we want to run. A container is an instance of the image running as a process.

Containers

docker container run –publish 80:80 nginx Left number == Host port. Make sure it’s not already used (otherwise bind error)

rm Argument list too long

Wed, 01 Aug 2018 16:22:48 +0000

You can use this command :

find . -name "*.log" -exec rm {} \;

WordPress Curl on page returns 200 but browser returns 404

Tue, 13 Mar 2018 17:37:20 +0000

I had a weird issue on a PHP script. I was returning an error 404 on a WordPress page the following way :

// At the beginning of a template page
global $wp_query;

  if ( $posts_query-&gt;post_count == 0 ) {
    $wp_query-&gt;set_404();
    status_header(404);
    get_template_part( 404 ); die();
  }

When I was accessing the error page on the browser, It worked well, I had a 404 error page displayed + the correct status code when I inspected the page (Network tab).

Permission issue with npm while installing react-devtools

Tue, 27 Feb 2018 17:14:15 +0000

I had this error once while trying to install the npm package react-devtools.

leiluspocus$ npm i -g react-devtools
npm WARN checkPermissions Missing write access to /usr/local/lib/node_modules
npm ERR! path /usr/local/lib/node_modules
npm ERR! code EACCES
npm ERR! errno -13
npm ERR! syscall access
npm ERR! Error: EACCES: permission denied, access '/usr/local/lib/node_modules'
npm ERR!  { Error: EACCES: permission denied, access '/usr/local/lib/node_modules'
npm ERR!   stack: 'Error: EACCES: permission denied, access \'/usr/local/lib/node_modules\'',
npm ERR!   errno: -13,
npm ERR!   code: 'EACCES',
npm ERR!   syscall: 'access',
npm ERR!   path: '/usr/local/lib/node_modules' }
npm ERR!
npm ERR! Please try running this command again as root/Administrator.

npm ERR! A complete log of this run can be found in:
npm ERR!     /Users/leiluspocus/.npm/_logs/2018-02-27T13_52_59_313Z-debug.log

The issue was that I was previously installing npm packages using the root user.

Getting started with React Native

Sat, 02 Sep 2017 17:31:47 +0000

It’s pretty impressive how we can simply set up a development environment without XCode using Expo.

Make sure you’re using the right Node and NPM versions and double check that there are no missing packages while doing the npm install.

I had to run these commands before running npm start on my app (created through create-react-native-app ):

Getting started with Magento

Thu, 17 Aug 2017 23:36:15 +0000

When I started working with Magento 1, I was frightened by the quantity of files and modules. The clients I worked for had several modules and a lot of things needed to be refactored, both projects were on Magento 1.

Here are some « baby steps » I followed when I began with Magento 1. I would like to remember them when I will get started on a Magento 2 project 🙂

Symfony3 Importing JS / CSS assets from a bundle in your custom templates

Fri, 30 Jun 2017 11:50:44 +0000

While implementing the PrestaImage bundle in a Symfony 3 project, I had to include the assets of the bundle in my custom template file. I had first copy / paste manually the files but I thought it was not an easy / clean way to maintain these files.

Install the assets in the public web folder

I used the magnificient CLI of Symfony :

Git Workflow Cheatsheet

Sun, 18 Jun 2017 16:55:42 +0000

I follow a pretty regular git workflow on my projects:

All my features are derived from a master branch
I merge my feature with master only after a code review (If I work with several people on the project, I ask them. Even If I’m alone on the project, I still use Github’s Pull Requests to review myself).

My Git Cheatsheet

Delete a local / remote branch

git branch -D branch_name #locally
git push origin --delete branch_name    #remote

Create a branch from a commit

git checkout -b branch_name a9c146a09505837ec03b

PHP Customize excerpt in a WordPress post

Fri, 25 Nov 2016 09:05:28 +0000

add_filter( 'get_the_excerpt', 'my_new_excerpt' );
function my_new_excerpt( $format )
{
    $format = __( ' Blabla' ); // Modify this to your needs!
    return $format;
}

Enjoy !

Pentaho - FieldHelper cannot be cast to java.lang.String

Thu, 01 Sep 2016 13:11:20 +0000

I had the following error in a « User Defined Java Class » step on Pentaho Data Integration.

FieldHelper cannot be cast to java.lang.String

Indeed, you have to use the getRow() method to convert the field you’re getting into a String or any other variable type.

public boolean processRow(StepMetaInterface smi, StepDataInterface sdi) throws KettleException, Exception
{
  Object[] r = getRow();
        if (r == null) { return false; }
        String myString = get(Fields.In, "FeedSubmissionId").getString(r);
}

Can't login to Heroku from my mac

Wed, 10 Aug 2016 18:42:11 +0000

Problem of the day : I wasn’t able to connect to Heroku from my mac. The process was blocked on the message « Installing CLI… » like if it couldn’t connect to Heroku.

MacBook-Air-de-Laila:shredder leiluspocus$ heroku login
heroku-cli: Installing CLI...
Error: getaddrinfo: nodename nor servname provided, or not known (SocketError)
/usr/local/heroku/vendor/gems/excon-0.51.0/lib/excon/socket.rb:100:in `getaddrinfo'
/usr/local/heroku/vendor/gems/excon-0.51.0/lib/excon/socket.rb:100:in `connect'
/usr/local/heroku/vendor/gems/excon-0.51.0/lib/excon/ssl_socket.rb:146:in `connect'
/usr/local/heroku/vendor/gems/excon-0.51.0/lib/excon/socket.rb:28:in `initialize'
/usr/local/heroku/vendor/gems/excon-0.51.0/lib/excon/ssl_socket.rb:8:in `initialize'
/usr/local/heroku/vendor/gems/excon-0.51.0/lib/excon/connection.rb:404:in `new'
/usr/local/heroku/vendor/gems/excon-0.51.0/lib/excon/connection.rb:404:in `socket'
/usr/local/heroku/vendor/gems/excon-0.51.0/lib/excon/connection.rb:106:in `request_call'
/usr/local/heroku/vendor/gems/excon-0.51.0/lib/excon/middlewares/mock.rb:47:in `request_call'
/usr/local/heroku/vendor/gems/excon-0.51.0/lib/excon/middlewares/instrumentor.rb:25:in `request_call'
/usr/local/heroku/vendor/gems/excon-0.51.0/lib/excon/middlewares/base.rb:15:in `request_call'
/usr/local/heroku/vendor/gems/excon-0.51.0/lib/excon/middlewares/base.rb:15:in `request_call'
/usr/local/heroku/vendor/gems/excon-0.51.0/lib/excon/middlewares/base.rb:15:in `request_call'
/usr/local/heroku/vendor/gems/excon-0.51.0/lib/excon/connection.rb:250:in `request'
/usr/local/heroku/vendor/gems/excon-0.51.0/lib/excon.rb:238:in `get'
/usr/local/heroku/lib/heroku/jsplugin.rb:246:in `manifest'
/usr/local/heroku/lib/heroku/jsplugin.rb:259:in `url'
/usr/local/heroku/lib/heroku/jsplugin.rb:149:in `block (2 levels) in setup'
/usr/local/heroku/lib/heroku/jsplugin.rb:137:in `open'
/usr/local/heroku/lib/heroku/jsplugin.rb:137:in `block in setup'
/usr/local/heroku/ruby/lib/ruby/1.9.1/tmpdir.rb:83:in `mktmpdir'
/usr/local/heroku/lib/heroku/jsplugin.rb:135:in `setup'
/usr/local/heroku/lib/heroku/cli.rb:27:in `start'
/usr/local/bin/heroku:24:in `<main></main>'

I noticed my Bluetooth was active. It worked after I disabled it.

Get XML Data won't parse XML object Pentaho

Mon, 01 Aug 2016 17:20:40 +0000

I had an issue with Pentaho today. It wasn’t able to simply parse this XML that I was fetching from Amazon Marketplace Webservice.

Here’s the data I got :

<SubmitFeedResponse xmlns="http://mws.amazonaws.com/doc/2009-01-01/">
<SubmitFeedResult>
<FeedSubmissionInfo>
<FeedSubmissionId>MY_FEED_ID</FeedSubmissionId>
<FeedType>_POST_INVENTORY_AVAILABILITY_DATA_</FeedType>
<SubmittedDate>2016-08-01T19:28:30+00:00</SubmittedDate>
<FeedProcessingStatus>_SUBMITTED_</FeedProcessingStatus>
</FeedSubmissionInfo>
</SubmitFeedResult>
<ResponseMetadata>
<RequestId>MY_REQUEST_ID</RequestId>
</ResponseMetadata>
</SubmitFeedResponse>

The step « Get XML Data » couldn’t parse it because of the xmlns attribute tag. So I had to add a step « Replace in string » that would delete this attribute.

Write a new task using Capistrano

Mon, 18 Jul 2016 16:31:43 +0000

Capistrano can be a great tool to run a task on several servers. It can be a task like uploading a maintenance page or deleting some logs :

task :NAME_OF_YOUR_TASK do
desc &lt;&lt;-DESC
This is my awesome task. Description appears in help so write it carefully.
DESC
run "rm -rf #{logs_folder}"
run "mkdir #{destination_folder}"
top.upload("index.html", "#{destination_folder}/index.html")
end

You can read more about writing Capistrano tasks here.

Quickbooks SDK - Authentification failed error (Web connector)

Sat, 09 Jul 2016 12:32:38 +0000

I used this SDK to develop an API that connects directly to Quickbooks.

I had this error once: Authentification failed when I tried to fetch data from the API. My identifiers were correct.

The problem came from some warnings I had in my program.

It may sound obvious but make sure you have no PHP errors or warning in your application. Otherwise, the web connector of Quickbooks won’t be able to read data from your API.

Using observers in Magento 1.13 can lead to slow loading issues

Sat, 18 Jun 2016 16:02:24 +0000

For one of the Magento projects I worked on, I had to implement a new action in the dropdown list of actions in the back-end.

I tried the Observer option described in this tutorial: Adding new mass action to admin grid in Magento

However, it slowed down the application because the event I was observing core_block_abstract_prepare_layout_before was triggered too many times. The Sales admin page could take around 5 to 10 seconds to load. I finally opted for the Block override option, much more elegant.

Create a copy of a Vagrant machine

Thu, 02 Jun 2016 18:09:22 +0000

Stop your vagrant machine

vagrant halt

Create the copy (it can take sometime)

vagrant package --base name_of_your_machine  --output path/to/newly/created/package

The machine name is on Virtual Box 🙂

Prototype Cheat Sheet

Fri, 13 May 2016 20:37:49 +0000

I had to deal with Prototype while working with Magento. Here’s a little cheat sheet of some very simple stuff I had to do.

Make an Ajax Request with parameters

new Ajax.Request(url, {
                   method:'get',
                   params : { data1 : 'myParam' }
                   onSuccess: function(xhr){
                    console.log(xhr.responseText); 
                    var json = JSON.parse(transport.responseText);
                    }
});

Change value of an input

$('ID OF THE ELEMENT').setValue('The new value');

Change data within a span tag

$('ID OF THE ELEMENT').update('Your new data');

Magento Custom routing

Sun, 08 May 2016 19:58:55 +0000

If you implemented several store views in your Magento shop (let’s say for French and English), if you implement a new router, he will be associated to this views.

Ex: In Magento’s default behavior,

your-store.com/my_router # KO 
your-store.com/fr/my_router # OK 
your-store.com/en/my_router # OK

The solution to this problem is to implement custom routing. Inchoo wrote an awesome article about it.

Use Meld as an external viewer for git diff on Ubuntu

Wed, 20 Apr 2016 16:50:53 +0000

This article explains very well how to use Meld as an external viewer for « git diff » on Ubuntu. Once done, you won’t have any valid excuses to escape code reviews 😉

Increase security on a WordPress site

Mon, 18 Apr 2016 16:34:14 +0000

WordPress is an extremely popular framework, which makes it easier to hack. Here are couple of ways to increase the security of your WordPress installation :

Hide your admin back-end to a list of whitelisted IPs through server rules on Apache / Nginx
Change the path to your admin back-end
Protect the wp-login.php script
Change the prefix of your tables
Use complicated passwords and change them often

For people who are not necessarily developers, the plugin « iThemes Security » does some of the steps I mentioned pretty well.

NoMethodError /Ruby/Gems/2.0.0/gems/sass-3.4.8/lib/sass/plugin/compiler.rb Undefined method start

Sat, 09 Apr 2016 16:15:08 +0000

I had the weirdest issue when initializing my compass project for Greenie.

>>> Compass is watching for changes. Press Ctrl-C to Stop.
NoMethodError on line ["402"] of /Library/Ruby/Gems/2.0.0/gems/sass-3.4.8/lib/sass/plugin/compiler.rb: undefined method `start' for #<Thread:0x007f90d1afd098 sleep></Thread:0x007f90d1afd098>
  /Library/Ruby/Gems/2.0.0/gems/sass-3.4.8/lib/sass/plugin/compiler.rb:402:in `map'
  /Library/Ruby/Gems/2.0.0/gems/sass-3.4.8/lib/sass/plugin/compiler.rb:402:in `listen_to'
  /Library/Ruby/Gems/2.0.0/gems/sass-3.4.8/lib/sass/plugin/compiler.rb:338:in `watch'
  /Library/Ruby/Gems/2.0.0/gems/compass-1.0.3/lib/compass/sass_compiler.rb:46:in `watch!'
  /Library/Ruby/Gems/2.0.0/gems/compass-1.0.3/lib/compass/commands/watch_project.rb:41:in `perform'
  /Library/Ruby/Gems/2.0.0/gems/compass-1.0.3/lib/compass/commands/base.rb:18:in `execute'
  /Library/Ruby/Gems/2.0.0/gems/compass-1.0.3/lib/compass/commands/project_base.rb:19:in `execute'
  /Library/Ruby/Gems/2.0.0/gems/compass-1.0.3/lib/compass/exec/sub_command_ui.rb:43:in `perform!'
  /Library/Ruby/Gems/2.0.0/gems/compass-1.0.3/lib/compass/exec/sub_command_ui.rb:15:in `run!'
  /Library/Ruby/Gems/2.0.0/gems/compass-1.0.3/bin/compass:30:in `block in <top (required)>'
  /Library/Ruby/Gems/2.0.0/gems/compass-1.0.3/bin/compass:44:in `call'
  /Library/Ruby/Gems/2.0.0/gems/compass-1.0.3/bin/compass:44:in `<top (required)>'
  /usr/local/bin/compass:23:in `load'
  /usr/local/bin/compass:23:in `<main>'

I solved it by using a more recent version of Ruby using RVM. RVM is pretty cool because you can switch your Ruby versions very easily. Note that I had to re-install compass afterwards.

How to add a new stock option in Woocommerce

Tue, 22 Mar 2016 18:53:53 +0000

Sometimes, clients can come up with some pretty creative ways to handle their inventory … It was the case for me with a customer who was using WooCommerce.

I had to add a third option but the stock options was not customizable. I ended up deleting the native dropdown of stock options and I implemented a custom field.

Look for a word in a group of div using only jQuery

Tue, 22 Mar 2016 18:44:23 +0000

For an old project, I had to implement a search tool in a static page. No option for me to use any server side language, I had to implement that search tool using Javascript / jQuery.

The following function’s purpose is to :

Search amongst a group of divs that have the class qa-faqs if a word is present in the content
Exclude stop-words in french and in english from the query entered by the user
List of words to exclude is in the var words_to_exclude
Order the divs by data-relevance (times the searched word appears in each div)

Please note that the following function uses the awesome plugin jQuery.highlight

VirtualBox CheatSheet

Thu, 18 Feb 2016 16:08:10 +0000

Here is a couple of commands I’ve used in a previous life while trying to resize a Vagrant machine.

List the virtual disk images used by Virtual Box

vboxmanage list hdds

Remove a hard disk from a Virtual Box registry

vboxmanage closemedium disk a5bad1ba-5ff7-4b83-87ff-adb18f05269a --delete

How to resize a hard disk for a Virtual Machine – Tutorial

Folders not appearing in the tree on the left panel - PHP Storm

Tue, 12 Jan 2016 12:05:17 +0000

At some point, my folders were not appearing anymore in my Tree on the left Panel like this fellow below.

https://devnet.jetbrains.com/message/5448105?tstart=0

I ended up reading online that it occurs when you hit « Cancel » during the load of a project. I restarted PHPStorm and let it load all the components of the project and it worked.

How to indent a large XML file (Ubuntu)

Mon, 11 Jan 2016 15:59:23 +0000

I had to indent an extremely large XML file today. I tried to use different IDE (PHPStorm, Sublime Text 3), however the file was way too large and it took a long time to process.

Best way to do that is by using command line.

xmllint --format input.xml -o indented-output.xml

Extract characters after the last dash of a String RegExp

Sun, 10 Jan 2016 16:51:21 +0000

I wanted to extract characters after the last dash of a string. Regular expression are such a powerful tool to use in these cases. Here’s the one I needed for my problem :

(\w+)[^-]*$

Please note that with PHP, you need to use the preg_match method and surround the regexp with slashes.

preg_match ('/(\w+)[^-]*$/', 'cgo3020-red-xs', $results); // returns xs in $results[0]

Here’s a pretty convenient tool to test your regexp: https://regex101.com/

PHP / Magento - Direct SQL Queries

Tue, 22 Dec 2015 11:37:54 +0000

Not the cleanest but here’s a quick solution to do a direct query on Magento. Might be faster than calling Magento’s objects ?

/**
   * Get the resource model
   */
$resource = Mage::getSingleton('core/resource');
     
 /**
  * Acccess to the database in read only
  */
$readConnection = $resource-&gt;getConnection('core_read');
     
$query = 'SELECT * FROM ' . $resource-&gt;getTableName('catalog/product');
     
/**
 * Execute the query  
 */
$results = $readConnection-&gt;fetchAll($query);

Thank you DevProblems !

SQL Magento - Get store credit balance

Mon, 21 Dec 2015 17:48:06 +0000

Valid for Magento EE 1 only. The feature of store credits isn’t native in CE edition.

select amount 
from enterprise_customerbalance 
where customer_id = @customer_id ;

SQL Magento Get the list of SKUs that are in a catalog_price_rule

Tue, 24 Nov 2015 12:16:55 +0000

The parameter « rule_id » can be viewed in the URL when you are editing the catalog price rule.

select sku
from catalog_product_entity
where entity_id in (
SELECT DISTINCT product_id 
FROM catalogrule_product 
WHERE rule_id=&lt;rule_id&gt;
);

Couple of books to read for a developer

Sun, 21 Sep 2014 18:14:45 +0000

Some co-workers recommended me some development books. I added comments in the This list will be updated and feel free to add your suggestions in the comments 🙂

Lean In – Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
- Life changing book for me. It’s a must read for every women working or not in IT. Men will be interested as well !
Cracking the coding interview
- I always prepare my interviews with this book ! It has pretty good soft-skills questions too.

Django Cheat Sheet

Sun, 22 Dec 2013 23:28:23 +0000

Here are couple of useful commands / tutorials (in french sorry!) to get started easily with Django.

Create a project

python django-admin.py startproject project_name

Manually create a subfolder for HTML templates

Running servers

python manage.py runserver

Create an application (inside of a project)

python manage.py startapp blog

You should also read the Django course of Open Classrooms to get started smoothly 🙂

Convert an image into a base64 string Javascript

Sun, 22 Dec 2013 23:26:54 +0000

Here is a little function I did to convert an image into a base64 string (JavaScript only): http://pastebin.com/Dfb8TR4g

Parsing errors JSON

Tue, 25 Jun 2013 23:26:03 +0000

Parsing JSON with the jQuery method $.parseJSON can be tricky to debug, specially when you’re using a mobile device.

Here is a list of errors I encoutered, and the reason why they were raised.

Unexpected token u The method tries to parse a undefined variable

Unexpected token o The method tries to parse [Object object]

Sessions keep refreshing CodeIgniter

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 23:22:47 +0000

I had a bug once, the sessions kept expiring even though the token was still valid.

I found out that CI_sessions were refreshing the session_id all the time. This was a database issue, be careful on the length of the columns in the database. The column that stored the session_id was too short and the token kept being re-generated since the old one couldn’t be recognized.

Create a JSON array dynamically Javascript

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 23:21:59 +0000

Using only Javascript

var res = [];
for (var i = 0; i < results.rows.length; i++) {
    res[i] = {};
    res[i]['id'] = "foo";
    res[i]['name'] = "woohoo";
}

Best ways to debug Javascript

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 23:20:37 +0000

I was looking for an equivalent of PHP’s print_r to debug Javascript Objects and I found this very cool method:

JSON.stringify(whatever_obj);

How about you ? How do you debug objects in Javascript ?

Passing arguments in an event handler Javascript

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 23:19:15 +0000

I had this problem while working on Leaflet but I think it can be generalized to the issue of passing parameters to an event handler in Javascript. With the « bind » method of jQuery, you can pass parameters by using the data property of event (the object sent when an event is triggered) :

Connect a Gumstix via Serial Eclipse Ubuntu

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 23:10:47 +0000

I was following this well-written tutorial to set up eclipse for my gumstix when I came to the part « Connect your gumstix » (with the Eclipse Terminal). Before setting up the terminal connection on Eclipse, make sure that Eclipse will have the permissions to access to the folder. I didn’t have the permissions and I had the error « /dev/ttyUSB0: No such folder error » even if my board was plugged.

Installing Bluetooth library Java Interpreter

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 23:11:53 +0000

When I was installing the bluetooth library, i was told to type the directory where Java Interpreter was installed.

Run the command:

  which java

It’s gonna answer you « /usr/bin/java », type only « /usr/bin » in the shell line and you’re good 🙂 (Mac OS X Lion)