profile

When building certain roles or playbooks, I often need to add a new directory to the global system-wide $PATH so automation tools, users, or scripts will be able to find other scripts or binaries they need to run. Just today I did this yet again for my geerlingguy.ruby Ansible role, and I thought I should document how I do it here—mostly so I have an easy searchable reference for it the next time I have to do this and want a copy-paste example!

In this case, my_custom_path_var would refer to the path you want added to the system-wide $PATH. Now, on next login, you should see your custom path when you echo $PATH!

XHProf, a PHP extension formerly created and maintained by Facebook, has for many years been the de-facto standard in profiling Drupal's PHP code and performance issues. Unfortunately, as Facebook has matured and shifted resources, the XHProf extension maintenance tailed off around the time of the PHP 7.0 era, and now that we're hitting PHP 7.1, even some sparsely-maintained forks are difficult (if not impossible) to get running with newer versions of PHP.

Enter Tideways.

Tideways has basically taken on the XHProf extension, updated it for modern PHP versions, but also re-branded it to be named 'Tideways' instead of 'XHProf'. This has created a little confusion, since Tideways also offers a branded and proprietary service for aggregating and displaying profiling information through Tideways.io. But you can use Tideways completely independent from Tideways.io, as a drop-in replacement for XHProf. And you can even browse profiling results using the same old XHProf UI!

If you use Mac OS X, add the following line to your .bash_profile:

Whenever you need a password (like when you're registering a new account or resetting your password because yet another online service you used was hacked), just fire up the Terminal and type in passme. Then paste the password that's copied to your clipboard into the password fields, and into your password manager (I use 1Password).

This alias simply uses openssl to generate a random base64-encoded string with 48 characters (you can change that value to whatever you want). If the online service you use doesn't allow 48 characters in the password field, you should file a support request with that online service, telling them they're being silly only allowing X characters in a password.

A project I'm working on required a user's signature be displayed on the user's blog posts (only on the page—not in blog teaser listings), and after much wrangling, I figured out how to put the 'Biography' (one of the user profile fields) into the nodes when they were viewed individually.

Here's the snippet (to be placed into node.tpl.php or node-blog.tpl.php):