mysiteonline™ - Programming

Be carefuly when using an unfamiliar coding language

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 16:30:16 -0500

So, I was learning a scripting language awhile back to help automate and secure some things with our public computers. The scripting language is for use with an application called "AutoIT", which is, well, both a compiler and run-time for the scripts themselves.

I needed to detect if an application window was present on the screen, and if it was, take appropriate action. So, looking at the following code documentation:

WinExists
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Checks to see if a specified window exists.
WinExists ( "title" [, "text"] )

I wanted to make sure that things were working as they should, so my test for this was as follows:

The problem, which I was unaware of, is that I apparently can't make the test (value) comparison in the manner that I did. The proper way to use this method was as follows:

What a bummer.

VBA (Excel 2007) Hide empty columns

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 12:42:16 -0400

An online friend asked me for some help in hiding all empty columns for every sheet within an Excel workbook. I figured I'd share the code:

(also on pastebin)

Perhaps someone else will find it useful for some odd reason.

I18n and L10n in PHP

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 13:29:06 -0400

There was recently a nice posting from PHPDeveloper.org linking to an article by Florian Eibeck, where on his blog he discusses some solutions to these extremely fun situations.

http://blog.thinkphp.de/archives/342-Multilingual-Websites-with-PHP.html

CakePHP Auth Component

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Fri, 09 May 2008 11:21:02 -0400

Disclaimer: These are primarily notes for myself as I get accustomed to CakePHP's (v1.2) authentication and ACL. I've been building a website and wanted to finally make use of CakePHP before I start using it for the library's CMS. A CMS is a large undertaking and I don't want to go into it "cold-turkey", so I came up with some side-project to help me understand the framework a bit better. All in all, it truly is an extremely rapid development tool.

I decided not to go with ExpressionEngine or Drupal simply because I'd still have to take time to learn those systems and make modules or extensions within those languages - and there's no guarantee I'd be able to do what I'd need to do with them. If I build it myself, it would take just about the same amount of time with Cake. Anyway, to continue...
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Adobe AIR

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 20:03:18 -0400

Those of you looking towards "widgets" and cross-platform application development, but are primarily web developers with some background (or none) of programming with a desktop application, perhaps you should take a look at Adobe AIR (formerly known as Apollo). It allows you to create rich, cross-platform applications using just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript! ...and, technically, I suppose you could leave out the CSS and JS part of that and it would still run...but what's the fun in that? It can be integrated into a Flash application, or a Flex application - but it does not have to be.

If you're seemingly interested in the technology, I went through and found some interesting links on the subject (read: tutorials) that will hopefully help to get you (me) started. Okay...so I did it because I'm interested and this blog can serve as an access point for me rather than using my Bookmarks as a temporary storage medium. Whatever. I was looking for simple tutorials, so I ignored anything with an "adobe.com" or "ibm.com" (developer works) domain, so if you'd like more when you dive head first, you might want to look to those resources instead of the ones I've provided below.

Pete Freitag - newest one (by published date) that I could find
NOT A TUTORIAL - Get the AIR SDK here
Jonothan Snook on 2007's 24 Ways: Christmas is in the AIR - a simple to-do list tutorial
AOL Developer Network - Part 1 of a Series - Simple "Hello World" type page with a self-signed certificate
Jonathan Snook (again) releases Snoto Foto source code to help you learn! - No tutorial, but I'd imagine it's commented well

Enjoy! I hope I will!

Update: Make sure you've updated to the latest Sun Java JRE package or you might get some really, really odd and weird undocumented errors when trying to compile!

SimpleXML and Reading CDATA Tags

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 21:41:38 -0500

While using PHP5, almost everyone knows that SimpleXML is the easiest class to utilize when absorbing data from an XML source (be it XML, Atom, RSS, etc...). But, there are instances where things aren't as smooth as one would hope. I was reading in some RSS feeds from WeatherBug the other day, and was all fine and dandy, until I came to an annoying little snippet of code within the feed.

When I got to that data, SimpleXML couldn't retrieve it. When I did a dump of the entire feed, SimpleXML expressed the description tags as being empty. Ok...so how the heck can we get at it?

It's much simpler than one would expect. You forcibly convert the value of that field to a string. That's it.

The annoyingly difficult thing about this, is that I knew I wouldn't be able to figure it out on my own, and the PHP docs didn't help with that one. I went to Google, and that took a few tricky searches to find what I needed too!

Source: Using SimpleXML to Parse RSS Feeds

Tip: That link also shows how to traverse different namespaces, just in case your RSS or XML sources use namespaces, which the last time that happened I used a DOMDocument object, which was a little more work than necessary. I wish I knew this back then!

Google's New API: Google Chart

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 15:28:48 -0500

Google Labs has not given up on their little endeavors, and one of the recent additions to the host of services is the Chart API. By using a series of GET variables in a web request, one can have a dynamically generated chart returned for them. The following chart is the "Hello World" example they give using the following code:

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Extending the Wordpress Visual Editor

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 17:06:49 -0400

Although I personally detest Wordpress, it does have its uses and the user-interface is well-constructed, making it much easier for non-technical users to use it. Regardless, when it doesn't do quite what you want it to do, extending it can sometimes be really easy (due to the massive number of plugins), or extremely difficult. Most of the time, in my case (recently), it's the latter and not the former.

I was recently given the task to import an unmodified XML dataset into a web-based tool as tabular data, HTML'ified, and allow for visual editing of the information, and they wanted to use Wordpress. I thought, "Okay, that should be easy enough." Well, okay, do I create a plugin to handle the import? I don't really want to learn Wordpress hooks and programming functionality considering I hate the thing...no, I'll just import it directly into the database. I used a diff tool to discover that creating a new draft entry only modifies three database tables anyway, that's easy enough. Got that working, 1-2-3, lickity-split!

But now, we need to let staff have access to modify the tabular data.
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The Next Best Language: LOLCODE!!1

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 20:15:37 -0400

I'm amazed, stunned, and laughingly surprised that programmers have taken it amongst themselves to come up with a new language based on what we like to refer to as "1334" speak. Granted, this isn't quite "leet" speak, but more like an amalgamation of statements poking fun at current illiterate IM conversationalists. You have to check this out to believe it.

LOLCODE.com

If nothing else, the CafePress store should be cool.

Serendipity dp.SyntaxHighlighter Plugin Available

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Mon, 28 May 2007 16:08:20 -0400

For information on exactly what dp.SyntaxHighlighter is, please see it's code-site on Google Code. Due to theme compatibility I've had to make some moderate changes to the original CSS of the SyntaxHighlighter package (for better, not for worse), there are no actual visual differences from the examples given in the original package (well, there shouldn't be anyhow, that's what my modifications were for, but this is a first release / test version).

I've always preferred the markup that the SyntaxHighlighter script from Dream Projections (now hosted on Google Code) created over GeSHi's output. Although when using GeSHi the code itself is made "pretty", it's not a necessity, so I feel that the use of JavaScript and CSS would be better served for this purpose than using server-side techniques as GeSHi does. This is where dp.SyntaxHighlighter comes to the rescue, and it handles it wonderfully!

What would the output look like using this script/plugin?
Example without JavaScript enabled:
Using a PRE tag:

<?php
    //the infamous Hello World
    echo "Hello World!";
?>

Using a TEXTAREA tag:

With JavaScript/plugin enabled (either PRE or TEXTAREA):

You'll have to read on to see supported languages and usage information.
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php|tek

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Fri, 18 May 2007 20:28:25 -0400

I sent in a support ticket to php|arch a short while ago inquiring about something related to my purchases, and was expecting someone from sales to get back to me, instead it seems that anything regarding the specific question I had is sent to the person in charge of the training, unnecessarily so in my opinion, but still... Regardless, I got an email back from the trainer, Paul Reinheimer (aka, the really cool PHP guy), telling me how he's currently at php|tek, apologized for the slow response (due to the php|tek conference, sponsored by php|architect, and php|arch being pretty low on in-office staffers)...he also said I should be there.

I somewhat agree, even if I did have presentations and meetings of my own to attend which were pretty important. Alas, I'm now jealous. There are always blogs buzzing over how great the conference was by other PHP developers once it's over. Dancing, eating, prizes, drinking, socializing, networking, brainstorming, and all around geekiness (save the best for last). The trials and tribulations of being "broke" and just starting out in a professional career. Oh well, I do what I love, and love what I do, so I'm still rich. I can at least read about all the cool stuff going on!

I had 5 minutes, and CakePHP.

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 20:40:46 -0400

I had five minutes to do something before I decided that I wanted to watch a movie...I'm now putting that off simply to report back on what I got out of my time.

For the background information...I just discovered that the person traditionally in charge of handling my high school's class reunions, is out of the country and could probably care less over handling everything...so we need something up quick and dirty.
Continue reading "I had 5 minutes, and CakePHP."

Reflections with GD in PHP

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 10:17:14 -0400

There are a ton of image libraries out there that do similar things, but if you simply need something to only do image reflections with a small amount of extra features, Richard Davey's Easy Reflections fits the bill! If you think you might need it, or simply want to read over other portions of his blog, take a gander! He may not post often, but when he does, the content is usually an interesting read.

Update: I had the wrong URL to Richard's tool. I've just fixed that. (Thanks for pointing that out, Richard!)

Unidentified PHP Bug

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 21:56:11 -0500

Bug is known to be small, hides in corners and although is present everywhere, only makes itself known in odd circumstances. It flitters about in the air just above you where you don't expect it during those circumstances. At other times, it snuggles up in a corner, but is always present, waiting for the right opportunity. Considered to be armed and dangerous, as well as mischievous.

For the past year or so, I've been either trying to figure out what's wrong with a script I wrote, or whether or not I should rewrite it from scratch, or if possible, how to save the thing with odd workarounds. I thought, "there's got to be something wrong with my code". Every day after looking at it for hour after hour, not able to figure out what the cause of the problem was, I would think, "There's got to be some sort of bug in PHP!!!"...but when I'd think that, I'd try to do a search to find any other people who've had similar circumstances.

Well, poor coding practice (non-cached dynamic image) alongside some tricky $_SESSION management (and requirements) caused for some odd behavior. Session data was getting dropped on certain pages for no good reason. It worked fine up until a certain page and/or point. I'm not entirely sure what the error is caused by, but I do know that removing the dynamically created image stops the error and the session information continues to behave as would and should be expected. If anyone's interested in tackling the identification of this bug, I'd absolutely love some help, expert or otherwise. Unfortunately, as of right now, I'd have to share full code disclosure as I can't identify any smaller problem code than the full application with those certain settings turned on or off (as I just found the error); so I've really no idea what combination of code is required to recreate this error. I also do not have any debugging software strong enough to show what the stack trace/dump would look like during execution of the problem page.

...but man... 1+ year of being annoyed by this thing. For a long time, I thought it was the server configuration. I was damned sure of it. My test-bed development machine never rendered the dynamic image.

CakePHP Manual

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 14:08:22 -0500

So I started reading the CakePHP manual (after cheating and going through the example blog creation code, which is part of the manual). I'm learning it's much more powerful than I had originally thought. Like I said, I started reading the manual...then I realized just how long it was.

I'm now printing it out. It's used up about 1/3 of a ream of paper...and this printer has a duplexer, so it's printing on the front and back of the pages. The only complaint I have is that originally, the manual had chapter numbers, now the chapter sections use names only...unfortunately, the manual references chapters and chapter sections by the numerical association in some places. I'd also like a single PDF version of the whole thing (and that's saying a lot considering my hatred for PDFs). Otherwise, the manual's written very well, and in an informal writing style. Very easy to read. Even though it says you won't need a knowledge of MVC - not having a short background education in it might get you pretty confused.

Either way, it's my suggested reading for those of you looking for a framework. If you don't decide on CakePHP, it might help you understand how the other frameworks (could possibly) work.