Articles
Longer write-ups on frameworks, tooling and the decisions behind them.
Write-ups on Symfony and Doctrine, WordPress, PHP, servers and DevOps, and the tooling in between. Browse the sections below, or search for the error or task in front of you.
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09/29/2026
Mixamo FBX in Blender 5: Fix T-Pose, Scale and Bone Errors
Mixamo FBX imports into Blender with no error and still comes out wrong. Which importer you use sets your options, and four silent failures explain the rest.
09/29/2026
Mixamo Retargeting in Blender and When to Skip Mixamo
Retarget a Mixamo clip onto your own Blender rig with Auto-Rig Pro, Rokoko or your game engine, and see when Quaternius, Cascadeur or AccuRIG is the better source.
09/29/2026
Mixamo Walk Cycle in Blender: Fix Sliding and Snap-Back
Mixamo walk cycle sliding, snapping back or walking on the spot in Blender? Choose In Place or root motion first, then loop, flatten or blend it.
09/27/2026
grep exit status: 0, 1 and 2 explained
grep exits 0 when it selected a line, 1 when it selected none, and 2 on an error. Here is what -q, -c, set -e and pipelines do to that.
09/27/2026
PHP 8.5 pipe operator (|>): when it beats nested calls
PHP 8.5's |> pipe operator passes a value through a chain of single-argument callables. Examples, where it beats nesting, and the errors it throws.
09/27/2026
Git: src refspec matches more than one
A branch and a tag in your local repository share a name, so git push can't tell which to send. Push the full ref name or rename the tag.
09/27/2026
Git worktree for parallel AI coding agents: setup and traps
Run several AI coding agents on one repo without collisions: one git worktree per agent. The errors you will hit, what stays shared, and safe cleanup.
09/26/2026
Native CSS vs Sass: nesting, :has(), @container and @scope
Do you still need Sass? Native CSS nesting, :has(), container queries and @scope cover most of it. What each replaces, the traps, and a demo to paste.
09/26/2026
npm 12 install scripts: allowScripts and min-release-age
npm 12 blocks dependency install scripts by default. How to approve the ones you need with allowScripts, add a min-release-age cooldown, and the traps.
09/26/2026
Dev Drive on Windows 11: set it up, move npm and pip caches
Dev Drive is Windows 11's ReFS volume where Defender scans in performance mode. What it needs, how to create one, how to move package caches, and the traps.
09/15/2026
A 403 Isn't a Broken Link: Bot Blocking in Link Checkers
Link checkers report pages as broken when the site is really just refusing a script. How to tell a dead link from a blocked one, with a small Python check.
09/15/2026
ln -sin Git Bash Copies Instead of Linking (and Exits 0)On Windows, Git Bash's ln -s quietly makes a copy, not a symlink, and reports success. Here's why, how to get a real symlink, and how to check you got one.
09/15/2026
mysqldump | gzipMade a 20-Byte Backup That Said It WorkedA piped backup reports only the last command's exit code, so a failed mysqldump still produced a 20-byte .gz marked completed. The fix is pipefail, plus a check.
09/12/2026
.webp images don't render in classic email clients
An automated .webp-everything pipeline breaks the moment an image has to go into an email -- classic clients like Outlook still don't render .webp.
09/10/2026
grepExits Zero When It Finds the Word FAILEDA CI gate piped test output through grep for readability, and a red build passed anyway -- because grep succeeds when it finds a match, even the word FAILED.
08/17/2025
Tech careers for students, with AI in the room
So many young adults and high-schoolers seem to be disheartened with the rise of AI in tech. Those young minds who LOVE to write code are being dissuaded to even bother studying the art of software development and…
08/17/2025
Why is school car-line pickup still typed in by hand?
Here’s a practical application that can help schools with parent pickup and reduce unpleasant tasks and time burdening school staff.
08/17/2025
Find broken images on your site with a free plugin
Migrations break image paths quietly - the page still loads and the picture is simply gone. Three ways to find every one of them: a WordPress plugin, a browser tool that works on any site, and the network tab.
05/27/2024
Mixamo Walk Cycle in Blender: Loop It in Two Steps
A Mixamo walk cycle plays once and stops. Making it cyclic is two steps - and which one you need depends on whether you exported with In Place ticked.
05/27/2024
Tapo vs Kasa cameras: it came down to ONVIF
Both are TP-Link, both use much the same software, and only one will talk to anything but its own app. Two years on, that difference decided which line survived.
04/03/2024
Windows Dictation stuck on Initializing: the fix
Windows dictation hangs on "Initializing..." and stays there. A reboot clears it, and so does ending one background process. But there is a second cause with the same symptom, and ending the task does nothing for it.
11/07/2020
Git: dst refspec matches more than one
Git refuses the push because the name you gave matches both a branch and a tag. It will not guess. Here is how to see which refs collided, and three ways out depending on whether you still want both.
04/02/2020
Deploying a Node.js Server with Dreamhost
I’d like to shout out David Herron from TechSparx for writing a quick and easy to follow tutorial for deploying Node.js on a Dreamhost server! Super easy instructions and examples to follow, worked like a charm!
01/25/2016
Doctrine: joining entities with no association
In Symfony using Doctrine, if no association is available for two entities, you can still join them and treat them like they have a relationship. To do so, you have to use the “Join: WITH” method.
11/30/2015
Extending a parent Twig block with parent()
Define a block in a child template and it replaces the parent's version completely - which is rarely what you wanted for a block holding stylesheets or scripts. parent() puts the inherited content back.
04/28/2015
Show the logged-in user in a Twig template
The snippet everyone has saved uses app.user.username, which throws on every supported Symfony. Here is the version that works, which check to guard it with, and how to greet somebody by name rather than by email address.
04/14/2015
Dynamic field names in Twig with attribute() and ~
Dot notation cannot reach a property whose name you are building in the template. attribute() takes the name as a string, the tilde concatenates it, and `is defined` keeps the loop from throwing on a gap.
03/24/2015
Doctrine field type mappings: tinyint is a boolean
A MySQL tinyint is mapped to boolean regardless of its declared length, so a column holding 0 to 100 comes back as true. The full type table, and the two ways to get an integer back.
08/06/2014
CollabPress: project management inside WordPress
Some people are so enamored with these shiny new project management tools that load so nicely on our smart phones that they forget it should be a transparent part of the project and not a task and part of the process of…
03/16/2014
Need multiple contact forms on your WordPress website?
There are plenty of contact form plug-ins for WordPress. I’ve used a few that I thought would be good but turned out to be barely functional, clunky, and/or buggy.
03/15/2014
Redirect a webpage with PHP
Three lines, and three ways to get it wrong: output before the header, no exit after it, and a 301 the browser then caches forever. Which status you choose matters more than the code does.