Bug Features - Free bug report and feature request service for your Web site.

And I thought my XOOM was dead...

Dan — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 20:27:55 GMT

Strangely it seems to be a very common experience - the Motorola XOOM tablet freezes on a blank screen and won't turn on...

...unless you have secret knowledge...

PhpStorm 50% off

Dan — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 02:03:18 GMT

Get the best PHP IDE for $50 until Nov 27:

http://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/buy/?winterOffer

Fixing Ubuntu 11.10

Dan — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 20:40:02 GMT

After 6 months of wanting and trying (on and off) to allow unity to rule my desktop I have realised if Canonical aren't going to fix it then I'll have to do it myself...

I like Gnome 3 - a lot more than Unity, anyway. But it's still unproductive - why the obsession with tiles of huge icons? I even run 2 monitors and still find this painful to navigate. Plus the tendency to combine mouse and keyboard navigation is also highly inefficient - and both Unity and Gnome3 fail here.

So my solution - while some might think its over the top - is to combine the following:

* Unity
* Tint2 (taskbar)
* ClassicMenu indicator
* Cairo Dock

With the last 3 running in Unity I now have my desktop back - and thanks to tint2 I can actually see what programs are running - and where - without having to *do* anything...

ps: I've also disabled the extremely annoying global menus...
sudo apt-get remove indicator-appmenu

Symfony2 over-optimized bug

Dan — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 22:05:37 GMT

I am glad to see that I am not the only one becoming more disappointed by Symfony2 with each release. The latest blog post on the Sf2 dev site made everybody laugh (nervously):

Symfony2 RC5 has been over-optimized. Unfortunately, this leads to pages taking over 30 seconds under certain circumstances in the development environment

In a nutshell it seems the goals of Sf2 are theoretical rather than practical - every design pattern must be fully implemented - resulting in a framework that is a factory for hammer factories when all you need is a hammer

Global Media Empire is now 100% solar powered

Dan — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 22:02:09 GMT

After waiting 2 months for a new meter while our 3.33kW solar array sat dormant on the roof, we are now hooked up to the grid. Our panels are already generating more power than the business uses - and we're in the middle of winter!

The real way to run Symfony tasks from crontab

Dan — Mon, 02 May 2011 10:12:53 GMT

If you follow the instructions on the Symfony site on how to send emails from the spool using crontab you will get an exception:

*/5 * * * * root /var/www/myproject/symfony project:send-emails --application=backend --env=prod

The reason is that Symfony can't locate itself when running from the user's home directory. Even if you use PEAR to install Symfony you will get an error stating that Symfony must be run from a project directory.

The simple answer, which should be on the Symfony site, is to add a cd command to the cronjob first:

*/5 * * * * root cd /var/www/myproject && ./symfony project:send-emails --application=backend --env=prod

And you're done...

PHPstorm & symfony

Dan — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 22:02:24 GMT

Well I must say I am impressed with the framework/command line tools built into JetBrains' PHPstorm.

From your project settings you can 'add framework', select symfony and then PHPstorm will interrogate your project, locate your symfony script and then extract all available command line parameters and options. Then, running a symfony command is simply a matter of selecting it from the list when you type "s" into the "run command" dialog.

For a more detailed description check the JetBrains blog here.

Also you get 50% off until April 30 so it's a bargain as well...

Bug Features update - projects and technologies keeping me quiet

Dan — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 20:53:53 GMT

It's been a long time between posts so I thought I'd write a quick summary of what's been keeping my attention away from this site lately.

I've started on a couple of new web projects - a big one in Symfony2 and a small one in CodeIgniter. Now there's nothing wrong with CodeIgniter, I actually quite like it, but it does constantly remind me why I like Symfony so much...

Also been building some cross-platform phone apps using PhoneGap and the awesome best-kept-secret Jo JavaScript framework. After really wanting to use jQueryMobile (as per my last post) - not only is it a bit slow to come online, but it is also painfully slow on my Google dev phone 2 - which is why I went with Jo, which is fast, lightweight and beautifully written.

Also been doing some work on the front end with jQueryUI and Blueprint CSS. I will be glad to leave ExtJS behind after a few years of use...

Also started work on an iPhone game using iTorque.

And finally, have been flat chat developing and marketing my flagship Android app Business Time.

jQuery mobile alpha released

Dan — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 19:49:29 GMT

And so the wait is (mostly) over. Not a bad turnaround for an alpha in 2 months... off to download and play with it now.

http://jquerymobile.com/2010/10/jquery- ... -released/

jQueryMobile

Dan — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 21:00:23 GMT

It's very rare something comes along and makes me think "I want it NOW!", but jQueryMobile looks great. This could be what jqTouch and iui never quite were...

Web remote control for virtualbox machines

Dan — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 21:32:55 GMT

I am fond of web-based control panels for desktop software. Being a big user of virtualbox (and php), this was a good find...

http://code.google.com/p/phpvirtualbox/

PHP for android

Dan — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 22:14:55 GMT

And now you can PHP scripts on your android phone. I'm gonna think of a reason I might want this, I know I am...

Local variables with xdebug, PHP 5.3 and netbeans

Dan — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 04:57:44 GMT

If you aren't seeing your local variables when debugging PHP 5.3 with xdebug you can upgrade to xdebug 2.1 to set things right...

details here:

http://phphints.wordpress.com/2010/06/2 ... bug-2-0-5/

and here:

http://icephoenix.us/php/xdebug-doesnt- ... lipse-pdt/

MySQL query caching for PHP

Dan — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 04:38:04 GMT

You may already use memcache for storing data in memory to speed up your PHP applications. You may use PHP caching accelerators like APC to speed up your PHP execution. You may even use MySQL's built-in query caching to speed up data access. But now there's a new cache on the block...

The MySQLnd Query Cache Plugin for PHP can store MySQL results on the web server, which means less hits on your database and less network traffic (if you use sepratae servers for PHP and MySQL).

I don't think I'll be deploying this in production anytime soon, but it is definately on my radar.

You can check a video here:

http://blog.ulf-wendel.de/?p=286

Apache 'no space left on device'

Dan — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 07:16:22 GMT

Another headscratcher - apache won't start, claiming to have run out of disk space, despite the disk being far from full. Turns out after 229 days of uptime the mod_rewrite memory leak finally caught up with us... read about it here.

BrowserSeal.BrowserPack - 10 browsers in 1

Dan — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:18:51 GMT

I've been using IETester for years but today I stumbled upon another browser package called BrowserSeal.BrowserPack that not only includes IE5.5/6/7/8, but also IE 1/2/3/4, Opera 8/9/10, Firefox 3/3.5 and Safari 3/4. Not a bad effort! Unlike IETester which executes all the browsers in a single tabbed window, BrowserSeal.BrowserPack is really just a collection of portable browser versions, so you are left running 10 windows instead of one. What I suggest is not installing the IE browsers in BrowserSeal.BrowserPack and continue using IETester instead.

PS: And if you want to run Firebug in your 10 new browsers you can bookmark the Firebug Lite bookmarklet and you get almost the same featureset as the native firefox extension gives you!

Dynarch calendar and IE7

Dan — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 04:53:18 GMT

OK here's one that might save you some time. I have a symfony admin gen site that works fine in all browsers but for some reason the rich calendar inputs failed to appear in IE7.

At first I thought this might have been the reason:

http://forum.symfony-project.org/index.php/m/58074/

But my calendar.js was already patched!

It turns out that you have an object in the DOM with an ID of "content" then you might find that any Dynarch calendars appear off-screen in IE7 only!

Rename your element to something else and it starts working. Don't ask me why, I can't find any reference to 'content' in the calendar script files. It's just one of those quiry things that makes you even more convinced that hating IE7 is completely justifiable!

Symfony 2 hits the streets

Dan — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 20:42:29 GMT

It's still very early days, but Symfony 2 now has it's own site with some introductory material included. You can get the code and read about the framework - although there's no side-by-side comparison with symfony 1.4.

Now that versions 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2 are all officially dead (and 1.3 being a transitional version from 1.2) it looks like 1.4 will be the last stepping stone before 2.0.

And what's so different about sf2? Well for starters it looks like every component of the symfony framework has been decoupled into what they are calling "bundles". Hmm, that sounds a bit like Zend doesn't it? Interestingly, the Zend framework is one of the core symfony 2 bundles! Whoop! I guess that means you could use the Zend MVC in place of the Symfony one, hypothetically...

Additionally, your app is a bundle, too - although I can't think of any real expedient here as I doubt your app will be of much use without the other bundles. Perhaps this allows you to easily unplug it from synfony 2 and move it somewhere else... in a parallel universe perhaps.

Ironically, the sf2 site also publishes some "hello world" benchmarks which, while impressive, are still subject to the criticisms thrown at earlier benchmark results where symfony did not do so well - hello world is not an application where a framework is useful etc. Anyway here are the stats:

For the "Hello World" application, the Symfony 2.0 is about:

* 20% faster than Solar 1.0.0beta3
* 60% faster than Lithium 0.6
* 75% faster than Yii 1.1.1
* 2 times faster than symfony 1.4.2
* 3.5 times faster than Zend 1.10
* 5.5 times faster than CakePHP 1.2.6
* 69 times faster than Flow3 1.0.0alpha7

Anyway, it doesn't look to me like symfony is getting easier, but it is definately getting better. I am particularly looking forward to the new debug toolbar:

Check your water cooling

Dan — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 03:54:31 GMT

Do you use water cooling? Well my advice is put a calendar item to check it monthly. And run a CPU temp app at all times. You see today after 3 years of smooth sailing my reservoir ran dry, cooked my cpu and then (after I quickly refilled it) sprayed water all over the motherboard, video card and power board, killing everything and short-circuiting the entire house.

Woohoo!

Zend Mail mangles email text

Dan — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 00:10:34 GMT

Had this strange problem ever since we upgraded a Symfony site from 1.0 to 1.2 - the emails being logged to the database were being mangled.

The problem turns out to be simply that the symfony 1.2 swToolkit plugin uses Zend Mail instead of phpMailer and Zend Mail spits out encoded text when you ask it for the email text or HTML contents.

So the simple fix is to wrap the data you get out of Zend Mail with the obscure quoted_printable_decode() function as shown here:

$message = quoted_printable_decode($zendEmail->getBodyHtml()->getContent());
$text = quoted_printable_decode($zendEmail->getBodyText()->getContent());

There, that gets rid of all those =0D=0A characters everywhere!

Note that you would think you could avoid this simply by passing the line ending explicitly, but it does not work:

//this does *NOT* work!
$message = $zendEmail->getBodyHtml()->getContent("\r\n");
$text = $zendEmail->getBodyText()->getContent("\r\n");