Hot Dorkage

In a previous  post I blathered about defacing toonlet® graphics.  That activity was for the purpose of refining the best toons into a cohesive book.  The first edition (40pp) is now available for download! Here are samples. The ebook has about 60 strips. You decide how much you want to drop in the tip jar. Click my $$ —> tixrus cool button to get your autographed book..  It will prompt you to send me some money. (Yeah, I defaced Paypal’s graphics too.) For the chintzy and the genuinely poor: There IS a hidden FREE download link  in this article. If you can’t spare even the el cheapo price, you need to waste a few minutes poking around. You’ll get an extra laugh if you find the link. Good luck!   

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I have fired off the new Zend Framework tool several times now to automatically create a scaffolding for a new project. It’s pretty handy, though for a lot less work they could have just included a premade scaffolding in the download. The Zend Tool is fairly new and evolving, and will only get stronger as time goes by and as more options become available, I’m sure a generic one-size-fits-all scaffolding will no longer suffice, so having a flexible tool is the way to go in the long run.

I ran into a curious thing when I installed Zend Framework on my new Mac: The Zend Tool failed with a bizarre error thusly:

PHP Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'Zend_Tool_Framework_Manifest_Exception' with message 'A provider provided by the Zend_Tool_Framework_Manifest_ManifestBadProvider does not implement Zend_Tool_Framework_Provider_Interface' in /usr/local/PEAR/ZendFramework-1.8.3/library/Zend/Tool/Framework/Manifest/Repository.php:100
Stack trace:
#0 /usr/local/PEAR/ZendFramework-1.8.3/library/Zend/Tool/Framework/Loader/Abstract.php(104): Zend_Tool_Framework_Manifest_Repository->addManifest(Object(Zend_Tool_Framework_Manifest_M anifestBadProvider))
#1 /usr/local/PEAR/ZendFramework-1.8.3/library/Zend/Tool/Framework/Client/Abstract.php(101): Zend_Tool_Framework_Loader_Abstract->load()
#2 /usr/local/PEAR/ZendFramework-1.8.3/library/Zend/Tool/Framework/Client/Abstract.php(192): Zend_Tool_Framework_Client_Abstract->initialize()
#3 /usr/local/PEAR/ZendFramework-1.8.3/library/Zend/Tool/Framework/Client/Console.php(86): Zend_Tool_Framework_Client_Abstract->dispatch()
#4 /usr/local/PEAR/ZendFramework-1.8.3/bin/zf.php(77): Zend_Tool_Framework_Client_Co in /usr/local/PEAR/ZendFramework-1.8.3/library/Zend/Tool/Framework/Manifest/Repository.php on line 100

Not wishing to crawl the entire code I posted this on the zf forums, where no one apparently knew the answer. However, googling some of the specific error messages dropped me into the Zend Issue tracker. It would be a good idea for everyone who uses Zend Framework to sign up for a membership in this site. Apparently it is not integrated with the Zend overall site or the forums. I would not have looked in the Issue tracker because I was not sure whether it was a bug or just an error on my part on setting it up.

I copied the scripts to /usr/bin as suggested first, but that didn’t work. Then I saw the message from the developer that states that somehow it’s sucking in something it shouldn’t be from the unit tests directory. That should not be happening, as using the Zend Tool is not really supposed to be a testing task. They didn’t really say, and I don’t know, why it manifests with this problem on some setups and not on others. My guess would be someone failed to exclude the tests directory from some global reflection or something. I finally got it to work by just moving the tests directory out of there altogether. I can always move it back if I really want to run the unit tests on Zend Framework. To be honest I am much more interested in the results of the unit tests of my application.

This blog is a thinking person’s blog. Yeah, I know, that really limits the readership, but so be it. Akismet is very good at getting the obvious spam comments. It’s even started flagging comments where the robot just picks a tag out of the blog’s tags and autocomments a slightly more targeted statement generally related to the keyword, but not necessarily dialoging with the subject of the post. I guess the robots don’t check whether it’s a do-follow or not, they just post their crap everywhere that’s not blocked by a captcha in the hopes of hitting the do-follows. Then there are the actual human-submitted ones that are, in some cases, more inane than the robot-submitted ones.

Don’t post inane comments to this blog! I’ve had people contact me and ask why their comment didn’t get posted. It’s because it showed no sign of READING COMPREHENSION of the article. If you didn’t understand the article, ask for clarification on what you didn’t understand. Don’t say “I didn’t understand this article.” Say, “How did you get from A to B?” or I don’t understand why you said “bla bla bla.” Just blasting some tangentially related statement will no longer cut it. I’m looking for added value or dialog. If your comment does neither, it will be deleted, robot or not. I do not want to bore my readers with large amounts of useless and boring comments but PLEASE don’t make me do a CAPTCHA for comments.

I’ve been known to feature a toonlet® web comic in my blog from time to time. “What is a toonlet®?” you ask. toonlet.com® is the brainchild of Craig Schwartz and Seth Ladygo. It is essentially a Mr. Potato head inspired web toon toolkit that also adds 21st century features like resizing, rotation and repositioning. It’s really pretty easy to figure out, but here’s a basic toonlet® tutorial if you feel you need one. Oh by the way, it’s free to join and create cartoons, here is a link to my personal toonlet® collection.
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How many job descriptions have you seen that says “Ability to multitask a must?” Personally I have always thought that “multi-tasking” was bullshit. Oh, sure, you could have several projects open at once but if you flit tirelessly from one to another, you are engaging in what we used to call “thrashing” way back in computer science, that’s spending so much energy moving between tasks that you have very little energy left over to actually do the task.

In a job interview I’m certainly not going to shoot myself by saying, “actually I suck at multitasking.” I usually skirt that question by saying, “I can multitask with the best of them,” which is not a lie, because I truly believe that no one is much good at it. When faced with several problems to solve, I do it the old fashioned way: Which one is going to cause the most pain if it isn’t solved. Then I allocate a specific amount of time to work on it and I don’t take phone calls, IM’s or go facebookin’ until I have got something accomplished.

Ticket Mastery by taterprint

Any black humor about the business of ticket reselling resonates with me. I found this one today (this is not one of mine but I wish it was!) and it’s so true. There are so many sleazy backroom deals and stuff that goes on related to ticket sales that the honest business (like the one I used to own) doesn’t stand a chance. One wonders how all the tickets get “sold out” in one minute and how it is that often “real” people are unable to buy them even if they are poised at their little computers the instant the sale goes live. I have thought about organizing a nationwide boycott with the slogan reminiscent of Nancy Reagan’s “Just say no!” My slogan would be “Just don’t go!” Wouldn’t it be great to bring these sleazebags to their knees?

Ouch! I just solved a puzzling error in Zend Framework. It was telling me that I had an illegal file name. While the trace never did point to the exact line in my code that triggered it, it clearly had something to do with a PDO_SQL database.

I checked the database file and indeed the permissions were OK and the name of the file seemed as legal as anything else I had that worked.

What it turned out to be was that I used the wrong kind of quotes. Double quotes work, and also no quotes work. But don’t try to use single quotes (apostrophes) around a value in the config file. Here is the line in application.ini that caused the error:

DOESN’T WORK

resources.db.adapter         = 'PDO_SQLITE'

Here is the same config from another project that worked fine. To my eyes there was no difference between this one and the one before it. It’s not like I had variable interpolation in it or anything!!

resources.db.adapter         ="PDO_SQLITE"

And I got beyond this error and on to the next one by doing it thusly:

resources.db.adapter         = PDO_SQLITE

Weblebrity by tixrus

Updated this old toonlet now that we can size them! Wheeee!

What is OAuth, and why should you care? Here’s the deal: Just like Skynet of Terminator fame, web apps have lately been doing a lot more talking to each other on the “back-end” instead of all web communication being between a human and a web app. This is a GOOD thing as long as the humans control what talks to what and what data is shared. Instead of copying and pasting a whole bunch of data from Web App A into Web App B, you can now just give Web App B permission to go get it. And if you ever change anything on Web App A, you only need to change it there: Web App B will pick it up. This makes things convenient, but in the past it required giving Web App B your password to Web App A! As a developer, I understand why they really do need this info, but you don’t need to be a paranoid security analyst like me to imagine how easily an evil person could promise an app that does something cool, suck up your credentials, and use them for nefarious purposes. And nowhere is this more true than on Twitter.
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I am publishing this post on the anniversary of my business being summarily dispatched.This is an ugly story about the WORST credit card processor in the universe and what they did to me. I waited to publish this until I got my seized assets back and then even longer just in case I wanted to try to get off the TMF — that’s a blacklist more like a black hole that I assume I have been put on (of course they don’t TELL you; you find out when you apply somewhere else and you have no clear recourse. You have been warned.   I understand if you don’t wish to read on.
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