My brother-in-law and his... [more]

Another issue I ran into after reinstalling NuSphere PhpEd was that when configuring SFTP connections for uploading files. The standard permissions level for uploaded files via an SFTP connection is 0750 and 0640 for folders. I spent 30 minutes trying to determine why CakePHP was throwing Fatal error: Class 'Debugger' not found in /cake/cake_1_2_0_7692/cake/libs/debugger.php on line 159 Come to find out, it... [more]

I recently noticed that when I upgraded Vista from 32bit to 64bit, I must have chosen to install the 64bit version on a second hard drive. Unfortunately, Windows felt it was necessary to leave system files on the first drive, effectively tieing up both drives. I wanted to pull one of the drive to expand the storage in my Windows Home Server. After reinstalling a new version of Vista on a single drive, I started reinstalling all my applications. One of the applications that... [more]

If you've ever had debugging statements decimate a layout, then you need FirePHP. Like its brother-in-arms FireBug, FirePHP is a Firefox Add-on designed to help PHP developers cleanly debug code. FirePHP can also me used to debug CakePHP applications with only a few additional lines of code. First, download and install the FirePHP add-on for Firefox. Then... [more]

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If you've seen or heard the news today, I'm sure you heard that Sarah Palin failed follow state and federal proceedures by using gov.palin@yahoo.com. Sure it's not a major thing for a governor of Alaska to do, but she has higher asperations. I'd like to hear her reasoning to the sys admin that runs the government email server as to why she failed to use the government servers to send email. The [more]

As a developer, I am always cautious about allowing a framework to automagically do things for me. When I was a web developer at Sporting News, our development staff spent a lot of time analysing different PHP frameworks and open source CMS packages. We were searching for a starting point, whether it was a framework or a CMS, upon which we planned on building the latest version of www.sportingnews.com. After we settled on CakePHP, we... [more]

Back in February I took my concealed carry permit class from Dan Starks. Thus started my foray into the realm of normal citizen attempting to legally carry a concealed weapon. My wife bought me a Smith & Wesson .40 for Christmas last year. I've been to the local range a couple times and decided that I was interested in getting a CCW. Mainly because it allows you to purchase firearms in North Carolina without having to purchase a gun permit each... [more]

I wrote an article about how I think "content delivery" will be the next big thing on the internet. Today Google annouced, or maybe it was just discovered, that Google will be releasing their own internet browser, Google Chrome. This falls easily into line with the ideas I outlined in the blog entry on blog.fluidesign.com. Google... [more]

While messing with a new website that I am working on, I find a slightly annoying issue with CakePHP that doesn't seem to be documented anywhere. I was trying to store a thumb up/down record in a tinyint(1) field. A thumb up would have a value of 1 and a thumb down would have a value of -1. CakePHP was kindly(sarcism) converting my -1 to a 1 every time. It appears that CakePHP assumes that all tinyint(1) fields are actually boolean fields. Therefore, if anything other than... [more]

Ron Paul has to be one of the most courageous and honest politicians that has ever served in Congress. Mr. Speaker, we should understand that decimating the protections that our Constitution provides us against the government is far more dangerous to the future of this country than whatever external threats may exist. We can protect this country without violating the Constitution and I urge my colleagues to... [more]

AT&T recently started their closed, limited beta of their new web browsing application, code named Pogo. This browser is built upon the same source code found in Firefox 2 which was recently laid to rest with the launch of Firefox 3 last week. After receiving an invitation to download Pogo, I started installing it. Oddly enough, even though it is based on the Mozilla source code, it didn't even ask about importing my information from Firefox. [more]

One of the problems of using CakePHP with an Oracle database is that CakePHP does not utilize bind variables. One of the advantages of Oracle is that it can cache query results based on queries, as long as those queries use bind variables and not strings. An example of a query using binds looks like: SELECT * FROM my_table WHERE id = :myBind; $bingArray =... [more]

A lot has been going on over the past couple weeks. Firefox 3 was released today and appears to have set a record for most downloads in a day. AT&T's Pogo browser appears to be in limited beta now. Its visual history and bookmarks looks like a major bonus. If anyone has a beta invite, I'd love to get my hands on it. I'm headed to Denver, CO to help my... [more]

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During the development phase of a recent project, another developer and I spent a good amount of time trying to find a anayltics package to use on a new application. Our requirements were short and sweet, but it was difficult to find a package that did was we needed out of the box. We did not review any log analyzers due to the need for up to the minute stats. Requirements: Collect stats via PHP (no javascript needed on every page). Work with Oracle, not... [more]

My wife won tickets for the NASCAR All-Star Race last weekend. Since we moved to Charlotte, we've always talked about venturing over to the race track. We made it out there last year when she bought me a day at the track where I got to actually drive a NASCAR car around the track for eight laps. However, we had never experienced a race day. [more]

Since Friday was my last day as a web developer for SportingNews.com, I have been trying to reclaim my BlackJack from being attached to their Exchange server. I thought I had successfully removed the Exchange link, only to find that every single contact had been deleted along with my calendar. After scouring the net for a solution, I finally stumbled upon the answer from a comment ashvinlima wrote: [more]

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One of the major negatives of using Oracle 10g and PHP to build applications is the obvious lack of connection pooling. Without pooling, frequent connection creation and destruction can be expensive and crippling to high scalability. Oracle's traditional middle-tier connection pools were not applicable to the multi-process PHP architecture. Caching connections within PHP removed connection creation and destruction costs but did not achieve optimal connection resource... [more]

Looks like another company is joining in the fight to unseat the top two web browsers. Others have come before, all have failed. See Flock, Avant, and Opera. Now comes Pogo, by AT&T (a very unlikely development powerhouse). Many people will be turned off... [more]

I don't know who let the geeks into the marketing department, but an ubernerd had to be responsible for tacking "Veloci" onto Western Digital's Raptor line of hard drives. Western Digital picked an extremely appropriate name for its new 10,000 rpm (rotations per minute) hard drive. Dubbed the VelociRaptor, this new drive, introduced today... [read more] The new drive brings the previously... [more]

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Ritesh Agrawal aka "ragrawal" built a really nice Social Bookmarklet helper for CakePHP 1.2. It allows for the easy creation of "Share This" type links. I found that the location of the icons needed to be corrected to use CakePHP's IMAGES_URL constant. I also changed the html wrapper element from a div to li allowing better easier use with [more]

Best Buy sent me an amazing letter today. We got a Toshiba HD-A3 along with our HDTV over the Christmas season. At the time, nobody knew which high definition DVD medium would be the winner of the DVD 2.0 race. I decided, at the time, that if we were to purchase a next-gen gaming system, it would be an [more]

These jokers have ridiculously mad skills. [more]

We recently installed memcached on a couple servers. As we begin to scale up our use of CakePHP, we quickly saw a need for some type of caching solution so that every page request wasn't running the full load of queries to render a page. memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database... [more]

After getting a DNLA error 2006 on our Playstation 3 with newly updated firmware, I hit the interweb to determine if I could find a solution. When we initially setup the PS3 it had no issues locating the shared folders on our Windows Home Server and we were up and running with streaming video across our network from the... [more]

Sam Collett put together a great jQuery plugin for select box manipulation. It allows for the easy adding, removing, sorting, selecting, and copying of options in a select box without the need of loops. I downloaded the original from his site, http://www.texotela.co.uk/code/jquery/select/, and started getting it up and running. Except for the fact that you can not do a post request the... [more]

I've been working hard to get thompsonbd.com ported over to CakePHP 1.2. Originally, I had a custom build "framework" that I used to string the site together. After having worked with CakePHP at my day job for the past six or seven months, I couldn't wait to bring home the things learned while at the office and try some it out on my own site. Even after working heavily in a LAMP environment for the past four or five years, I had never... [more]

Updated: I've released a working version of the oracle connection class that does not need behaviors to utilize bind variables. We ran into some more issues using the CakePHP Clob behavior that Bobby Borisov and Nedko Penev wrote. Basically, the issue was that the original file used a reference variable to the model that was supposed to be using the behavior. However, it... [more]

This code snippet is a simple example of how I build the "Blog Archive " Element. // get list of blog entries // ------------------------ $archive = $this->Blog->BlogEntry->findAll(     null,     array(         'BlogEntry.id',         'BlogEntry.created'     ), [more]

Updated: I've made some changes to the CakePHP Clob Behavior Bobby Borisov and Nedko Penev over at chankov.net wrote a great CakePHP behavior to help with handling Oracle clob fields in CakePHP 1.2. For those of you unfamiliar with Oracle, it will only let you... [more]

For my birthday, my wife got the family together and everyone helped by another major mod for the TorRed Daytona. She did a ton of leg work to figure out all the pieces I would need to lower the Charger. One of the major negatives of the... [more]