In Magento it is possible to access a product’s attributes with a simple getter method. Let’s get the attribute test:
$_product->getTest()
This works as long as test is an attribute of type ‘text’. If the attribute is a dropdown, the method will just return the id of the selected option. To get the dropdown text, you need to call another method:
$_product->getAttributeText('test')
Lately, I wanted set up a Ubuntu Hardy DomU on an existing Debian Etch Dom0 box. Usually, setting up Debian-based DomUs is very simple with xen-create-image and debootstrap (there are tons of tutorials out there dealing with this topic), but unfortunately Etch’s version of debootstrap doesn’t support Ubuntu Hardy. I spent a surprisingly long time on searching the net until I found a solution for this problem on a french site: Installer et configurer Xen sur Debian 4.0 Etch (it’s a complete howto for Xen on Debian Etch, but it deals with the Hardy part too). The author created a backport of the debootstrap package, which enables you to debootstrap Hardy.
First, you have to create the hardy.d directory (symlink) for xen-tools.
$ cd /usr/lib/xen-tools $ ln -s ubuntu.d hardy.d
There’s a debian repository holding the backport package, however I got problems to use that repository on an amd64 box, so I downloaded and installed the package manually.
$ wget http://falcon.landure.fr/pool/etch/debootstrap/debootstrap_1.0.10_all.deb $ dpkg -i debootstrap_1.0.10_all.deb
Now you should be able to debootstrap a Hardy DomU.
$ xen-create-image \ --hostname=hardy \ --ip=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx \ --size=5Gb \ --memory=256Mb \ --dist=hardy \ --mirror=http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/
“Cygwin is a Linux-like environment for Windows.” This means, you can use linux/unix commandline tools like ls, grep and find on your Windows system. However, the default installation of Cygwin uses Windows’ default commandline terminal cmd.exe, which is not really handy. Fortunately, there’s a solution to use PuTTY as Cygwin terminal.
putty.exe, select Cygterm as connection type and enter - (dash) as command. Enter a session name (e.g. cygwin) in the text field below Saved Sessions and click on Save.putty.exe. Right click the shortcut, select Properties and append the following string to the target field: -load "cygwin". Of course you have to replace cygwin with the name of the session you saved in PuTTYcyg.As the documentation on Magento is a bit…spread around the web: here’s a collection of links to guides and hints how to deal with magento’s templating system (partially german). I will add more as I find them.
When configuring VPN connections in Ubuntu through network-manager-pptp the connections don’t get displayed until a reboot due to a bug. In the bugtracker I found a solution which makes the connections available without a reboot.
First, restart dbus
sudo /etc/init.d/dbus restart
Then run the NetworkManager applet by opening a command window with ALT+F2 and typing in nm-applet.
Just found this in PvPGN’s README 
CONGRATULATIONS!!!! WHY ?? BECAUSE YOU ARE ONE OF THE VERY VERY VERY FEW WHO READ THE README FILE!! But because the other, huge percentage do NOT, we moved the actual contents of this file into IGNOREME file because the chances for most of the people to read IGNOREME are at least the chances to read README (more than that, we believe they are really much higher). So now, go read IGNOREME with the actual contents what you would have expected here.
Wieder ein Update für den Raumbelegungs-Webservice: das Webinterface wurde (zumindest für vernünftige Browser) zum Großteil webzweinulljqueryajaxifiziert ™. Außerdem gibts mittlerweile den Desktopclient in der aktualisierten Version für die neue Basis zum Download auf der Projektseite.
Note to self: nicht hektisch zwischen Küche und Texteditor hin und her rennen - stresst nur und es kommt auf beiden Seiten nix vernünftiges raus. Btw: ich muss zurück in die Küche 
Ich hab mich mal wieder meinem Raumbelegungs-Webservice für die FH Kufstein gewidmet und das komplette System auf Basis des Zend Frameworks neu aufgebaut.
Resultat: der Code ist sauber und wartbar - das ZF nimmt einem einiges an Arbeit ab. Nur der Webservice hat einige Experimente gefordert, bis er mal lief. Ich habe übrigens nicht wie geplant Zend_Soap_Autodiscover eingesetzt, da ich damit kein funktionierendes Ergebnis hinbekommen habe. Im Endeffekt hab ich dann das WSDL-Dokument des alten Webservices kopiert und angepasst, war die einfachste Lösung und funktioniert.
Neuigkeiten:
Mehr dazu auf der Projektseite.
Just a quick tip: I’m working on a project using Zend Framework and needed to switch off layout and view renderer for a specific controller. This can be achieved by adding the following calls to the controller’s preDispatch() method:
public function preDispatch()
{
$this->_helper->layout()->disableLayout();
Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance()->setParam('noViewRenderer', true);
}