As a Christmas present my wonderful girlfriend bought me the box set of the superb TV show The Shield which includes the full 7 seasons presented in a very delicious box which acts a police case folder with cool separators for each of the seasons.
Other than The Wire if I had to recommend a gritty cop drama that actually left viewers with a worthwhile conclusion The Shield would be it. Each season contains around 12 episodes with a major plot arc through each one along with a huge plot arc throughout the entire show and events that happen in the very first episode come back in the final season with devestating effects.
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Happy New Year! I hope that you had a really good time over the Christmas period and that you celebrated the new year in style. I've been quite lazy with regards to my website but I've intentions of writing more regularly, whether I can stick with it is another question but I'll have to see.
The series on creating a full CakePHP application has been successful so I may do another one of those using the latest version of Cake and include some of things I've learnt along the way. I've also struggled with writing posts so if you have any ideas or you would like anything covered in a tutorial just leave a comment and I'll see what I can do.
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I've been developing a new application with CakePHP 1.2.5 and came across a really frustrating problem, which admittedly is entirely my own fault but took me ages to troubleshoot and find the source of the problem.
I'm using Xampp and Windows 7 and this problem was causing Apache to stop responding and completely crash. Quite strange behaviour for a simple application I've just started, so I started searching online for similar problems. A few were suggesting that Zend optimizer was the problem but I don't have it installed so I started debugging the code and seeing where the problem was.
Cutting a long and hair-pulling story short the problem was this piece of code:
$this->Session->setFlash('You have successfully logged in','flash_good');
Where did I go wrong? Well I hadn't created the "flash_good.ctp" layout file, one missing layout and the app was causing Apache to stop responding and crash. Now CakePHP is usually extremely good in letting you know any missing files, so I'm not sure if this is a problem with my setup or that if this was overlooked. Either way when this happens again this is the first place I'm looking.
Had similar problems? Let me know in the comments!
I've known about FirePHP for a while now and never really
had the inclination to install and use it. Although I've
been using FireBug for quite some time to debug the client-side
and HTML/CSS issues I didn't really think that it could benefit
me that much.
Finally I've managed to install and use FirePHP (it's quick and easy)
and boy am I glad that I did. For any PHP developer out there I totally
recommend spending the short amount of time it takes to get it up and running.
Basically include the FirePHP class file in your Project, use the OOP or procedural
way of doing things and then start logging and displaying information to the FireBug
console. It really couldn't be easier.
One of the main areas in which it really shines is in Ajax development. You can output
variables to the console during an Ajax request and see what exactly is going on without
having to output anything to screen and will really aid development and cut programming time.
I'm not going to go through how to install and use FirePHP because it's been very well
documented by the offical website and there are a few really good tutorials out there (links can be found below).
Main Links
Tutorials
For a recent project I've been working on the index pages required the data to be both sortable and filterable. Luckily CakePHP comes with the Pagination class which covers the directional sorting of data and I went looking online for something that will filter the data.
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