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That which cannot be rendered in binary is by definition a delusion
 

Drupal

Some articles and tips on Drupal

Getting Flashy

So I have finally made the jump into Flash games. I used flash a long time ago and its really matured since, so I thought I would drop a few notes as I go about things that just aren't really obvious.

Zend Forms: my, how they blow!

Ultimately anyone who comes into the ZF runs into forms and is blown away by how inflexible difficult the forms are to use. While they do have a fair amount of power, the investment you put into learning them doesn't seem to be in proportion to the functionality you get out of them.

Zend Framework 1.8 + Doctrine 2.0

The best tutorial on integrating Zend Framework with Doctrine. Download the demo at the top of the tutorial first and get it running.

Pulling the bullet out of your feet with a bad mysql install

How to back out of a crappy install where you enter a wrong password in mysql and can't figure it out.

  1. read /etc/mysql/debian.cnf. It will have the username and password of a valid mysql user.
  2. Log into mysql with that user/pw.
  3. http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/mysql-change-root-password/ trick:
  4. use mysql;
    update user set password=PASSWORD("NEWPASSWORD") where User='root';
    flush privileges;
    quit;
  5. Test your new password to regain cofidence in your own brain.

Thoughts on Thoughts on Flash

I have to give Steve Jobs' credit. Even when he comes to an exuberantly flawed and just plain wrong conclusion, he does so on a very direct, eloquent and practical manner. Here is where he goes wrong.

Why I still use tables

Tables are extremely robust. They absolutely lock a set of related blocks in a fixed topographic arrangement and you can use a lot of combinations of sizing methods (fixed, percent, ratio) easily.

here is a great example of tableless CSS biting you on the ass. When I zoomed back one level (ONE level! and clicked in my "news feed" box in Facebook the text field jumps all the way to the bottom of the page. On a smalller screen I might have not even figured out what happened -- it would look like a blank(ish) page.

Long Task Monitoring and execution

I've been put to a task that requires digesting the execution of large sets of data over time. To respond to this challenge I have come up with a pattern that seems to be working I thought I'd pass it on, in case it benefits others with a similar chore.

Order of Execution


The steps I've taken can be broken in to a series of steps:

RoBlox

Real fun virtual legos

Day Range Indexer

I wanted to create a way to rapidly compare and get date ranges (in days) between two dates. So I created a class that indexes all dates within a range of years and retuns an integral value for any given date, i.e., in years from year zero. This was done for the purpose of creating a Gantt table with date pagination.

The entire library is pretty short so I'm just pasting it here:

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