Doug Black dougblackjr

Overview

Below are two techniques to help debug the WSOD (white screen of death), usually a 500 server error, in an ExpressionEngine site. The Basic-Debugging option will be suitable in most cases and is specific to ExpressionEngine. The Advanced-Debugging is generic and applicable to any PHP based software. If the basic debugging does not work, try the advanced.

If you get a WSOD you will need to first get your site to reveal an error before reporting it to EllisLab or the add-on developer. Simply reporting "I get a white screen" does not give the developer enough information to assist you. An error message on the other hand will point the developer to the source of the issue.

A slightly updated version of this doc is here on my website.

Why I Like Go

I visited with PagerDuty yesterday for a little Friday beer and pizza. While there I got started talking about Go. I was asked by Alex, their CEO, why I liked it. Several other people have asked me the same question recently, so I figured it was worth posting.

Goroutines

The first 1/2 of Go's concurrency story. Lightweight, concurrent function execution. You can spawn tons of these if needed and the Go runtime multiplexes them onto the configured number of CPUs/Threads as needed. They start with a super small stack that can grow (and shrink) via dynamic allocation (and freeing). They are as simple as go f(x), where f() is a function.

	$ cd ~
	$ sudo curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer \| sudo php
	$ sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer
	$ sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/composer /usr/bin/composer

	then you can run
	$ sudo composer install

	public class CookieController {

	/*
	* コンストラクタ
	*/
	public CookieController() {

	Cookie counter = ApexPages.currentPage().getCookies().get('counter');

	if (counter == null) {

	//in the model
	class User extends Eloquent {

	protected $softDelete = true;

	}

	//in the migration, to create a soft delete column
	$table->softDeletes();

	<?php
	/**
	* Array2XML: A class to convert array in PHP to XML
	* It also takes into account attributes names unlike SimpleXML in PHP
	* It returns the XML in form of DOMDocument class for further manipulation.
	* It throws exception if the tag name or attribute name has illegal chars.
	*
	* Author : Lalit Patel
	* Website: http://www.lalit.org/lab/convert-php-array-to-xml-with-attributes
	* License: Apache License 2.0

	<!-- Prevent FOUC (flash of unstyled content) - http://johnpolacek.com/2012/10/03/help-prevent-fouc/ -->
	<style type="text/css">
	.no-fouc {display: none;}
	</style>

	<script type="text/javascript">
	document.documentElement.className = 'no-fouc';
	// add to document ready: $('.no-fouc').removeClass('no-fouc');
	</script>

	# to generate your dhparam.pem file, run in the terminal
	openssl dhparam -out /etc/nginx/ssl/dhparam.pem 2048

	# United States Postal Service (USPS) abbreviations.
	abbreviations = [
	# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_territories_of_the_United_States#States.
	"AK", "AL", "AR", "AZ", "CA", "CO", "CT", "DE", "FL", "GA", "HI", "IA",
	"ID", "IL", "IN", "KS", "KY", "LA", "MA", "MD", "ME", "MI", "MN", "MO",
	"MS", "MT", "NC", "ND", "NE", "NH", "NJ", "NM", "NV", "NY", "OH", "OK",
	"OR", "PA", "RI", "SC", "SD", "TN", "TX", "UT", "VA", "VT", "WA", "WI",
	"WV", "WY",
	# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_territories_of_the_United_States#Federal_district.
	"DC",

	$ redis-cli
	> config set stop-writes-on-bgsave-error no