The Forgetful Sheep
Thoughts of just about anything
Wirting your own ORM data layer in PHP
Jun 30th
When you begin to move from static pages to more dynamic data driven web pages you realize that storing and retrieving data is one of the most essential parts of web development. If you are anything like me you started working with databases using inline SQL statements and eventually found out that is is not very scalable. In this post I’d like to show how my data layer has evolved over time.
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10 Most Common PHP Coding Mistakes
Jun 16th
When starting to do serious PHP programming most developer run into the same situations. I wanted to take a moment to point some of the most common ones I’ve seen to help those starting out avoid such problems.
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Write OpenSSL files in PHP
Mar 16th
A while back I wrote a post on how to Read OpenSSL files in PHP, and a reader asked how would you write a file.
Well I thought that’s easy you just do the same thing but use the encrypt function. Well I should have known better. Two hours later and a whole lot of research yield that PHP doesn’t do PKCS#5 padding when using PHP’s mcrypt API. But luckly duerra had a simple solution. So after padding my input everything worked fine. More >
Installing Gnome Do without Evolution
Aug 8th
I’ve been using fluxbox for quite some time now and I really like it. It is very light and since I run it on my server I want to keep the footprint as small as possible.
Problem is I fell in love with Gnome Do and rightfully so, as it has quite a bit of functionality. So I installed it just fine. I had some Mono dependency which is quite some files but I can live with that. Then I tired installing the gnome-do-plugins package and to my surprise there is quite a bit of stuff. More >
Moving from backup2l to rsnapshot for a better backup
Jun 21st
For a while now I’ve been using backup2l for my automated backups, but there where a few things I didn’t like about it. First the fact that all the backups where compressed, which is fine when you are trying to save space but trying to restore something can be a pain. in backup2l’s defense it does have a locate/restore option to quickly search and restore files, but I find that it takes time to search and if your file is a common name you’ll get multiple hits unless you narrow down your search. Another thing that bugged me was that I really never did get the configuration of levels and max per levels. I did play around with it and got something that worked for me but didn’t really understand it. So I started looking for an alternative. More >
Burning Movies to DVD
Jun 15th
I just recently found a bunch of little video clips that I took with my little point and shoot Canon PowerShot camera. Most of them are really short, less than 5 minutes, and I wanted a quick and easy way to put these on DVD so I can send them to friends and family. So here it is a quick and easy way (relatively speaking) to encode movies in linux to DVD. More >
New Task List Script for VIM
Apr 10th
I got a request from a developer that he used the CompView script all the time, but wanted something that resembled the eclipse task list. So here it is TaskList, this script will search the file for FIXME, TODO, and XXX (or a custom list) and put them in a handy list for you to browse which at the same time will update the location in the document so you can see exactly where the tag is located. Something like an interactive ‘cw’
New Symfony Color Scheme for Vim
Apr 4th
Recently I’ve been doing a lot of PHP programing using symfony application framework. I think it is one of the best PHP frameworks out there. Not to mention that the community is always willing to help, and they have really good documentation. Something lacking in other frameworks I’ve used in the past. More >
Back to Using Flash Cards with JMemorie
Mar 29th
In my quest to cotinue to learn the piano I’ve noticed that I’ve gotten really rusty on reading musical notes. So to brush up on my skill I created a nice little JMemorize lesson which includes all the notes in the treble clef and base clef. Feel free to download it and distribute it as you please. musical-notes.jml