Author Archives: David

About David

A mostly professional code monkey, to contact me translate the following "direct from blog to email" at the website ominian.net. Replace spaces with underscores or dashes, whatever is valid. A script will pick up your email, scrub it against a white list, and if your not a spammer I will get an email.

One battle at a time and eventually win the war

One of my clients has a PHP5.1 environment that was originally configured by a band of rabid monkeys snorting meth. Finally got approval last week to clean slate everything. Unfortunately I’m still stuck with PHP5, but version 5.33 instead. Next hurdle was the other side of the department that is doing something completely unrelated to my side wanted to use Zend Framework. Honestly I was interested in spending some time with ZF but only as a resume bullet and thats not exactly right or fair to my client.

That said, it’s Doctrine 2 and Kohana 3, full speed ahead. In the grand scheme of things, its frustrating as hell to work with PHP5 when there is so many nice things out there like Python, C#, Ruby, and did I mention Python?

Lastly, kudo’s to Flynsarmy for doing the leg work to integrate the two major frameworks into one tidy little package.

Link to blog post ( download links is on there, should read this blog post as it explains how to install it, it’s free, and this guy or girl put in some quality work and deserves your 2-4 seconds of attention ) here

Better Doctrine 2 Module for Kohana 3

A web-console implemented in nodeJS

Reading over this ( http://gonzalo123.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/web-console-with-node-js/ ) , I felt this was a pretty good and relatively real world example of nodeJS’s capabilities. I did find one line near the end very poignant and reflective of my own opinions at the end of the show & tell post

I don’t know if node.js is the future or is just another hype, but it’s easy. And cool. Really cool.

New language to the toolset: NodeJS

I’ve started self-teaching myself NodeJS and not surprisingly there was a recent popular reddit link pointing to a not very short introduction to nodejs here ( http://anders.janmyr.com/2011/05/not-very-short-introduction-to-nodejs.html ) . At this point I haven’t found any good books for reference lookup… but hopefully in a week or so I’ll have gotten spooled up enough to be able to report back.

In the meantime as I use Ubuntu for everything but games, this short article here ( http://www.codediesel.com/linux/installing-node-js-on-ubuntu-10-04/ ) was enough to get a working environment running though I recommend using a pristine virtual machine instance to keep things simple.

Last point, a reliable friend & peer of mine recommended I check out this MVC like framework for NodeJS ( http://expressjs.com/ ). Preliminary it feels like a hybrid between Twistd and CherryPy in Python or Limonade PHP as far as style… aiming more for simplicity over feature/complexity.

PrototypeJS, a fond memory

Four-five years ago there was a crossroad that in reflection I screwed up on. I was so sure that PrototypeJS was the right library to invest in, it made working with multi-browser javascript a breeze & had a plethora of fantastically useful helper functions. Now, present day, its been almost three years of non-stop jQuery and I’m kind of fine with that. Though a mere shadow of the power that is ExtJS, jQuery UI is a semi-decent library for widgets and asthetics, jQuery itself does what I need, and I don’t get looks of WTF when I mention I’m using jQuery over Prototype at the local developer meetups.

Doctrine 2

I’ve been looking at upgrading one of my past clients from Doctrine 1 to Doctrine 2 and so far it’s looking from my end like a done deal.

I started here by paging through this ( http://www.slideshare.net/jwage/doctrine-2-not-the-same-old-php-orm ) slideshare on Doctrine 2 and before I got bored with paging through 94 slides I already had a warm fuzzy feeling.

My initial tests have shown that Doctrine 2 without a doubt needs support from APC or memcached, but with the exception my few and far between dumb/cheap client’s is almost guaranteed to be present. Otherwise I like the decidedly simpler syntax for defining domain models as simple classes without inheriting some super support class.

Last bit, my stackoverflow answers regarding doctrine 2 so far
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5954618/does-doctrine-2-0-pre-generate-model-classes-like-propel-1-5-does/5955400#5955400

Semi-critical OpenSSL memory issue shared with Node.js and Twisted Python

I found this ( http://journal.paul.querna.org/articles/2011/04/05/openssl-memory-use/ ) just a tad disturbing. The TLDR is that OpenSSL automatically sets compression on for SSL connections. That’s great if you’re trying to cut down on bandwidth… but not so great when thinking about both Memory and CPU utilization, definitely more so memory in this case.

Fortunately the post author and company created some partial duct tape solutions for anyone suffering under out of memory issues in their infrastructure.

JQuery dataTable plugin quick notes

Server-side processing

To return the names of the columns you want, you need to use aoColumndefs and provided individual objects with the property sName.

Below is most of the implementation for a jeditable Ajax driven dataTables, this is the Alpha version and still needs a lot of love in places, but the gist of it is here

var semesterTable = $("#semesterViewTable").dataTable({
                "bProcessing"   : true
            ,   "bServerSide"   : true
            ,   "sAjaxSource"   : ""
            ,   "fnRowCallback" : function( nRow, aData, iDisplayIndex, iDisplayIndexFull ) {
                                    //console.log(nRow, aData, iDisplayIndex, iDisplayIndexFull);
                                    var recordId = aData[0];
                                    $("td", nRow).data("recordId", recordId);
                                    return nRow;
                                }
            , "fnDrawCallback"  : function(){
                                    $("td.editableMajor")
                                        .editable("",
                                                    {                                                        
                                                          loadurl: ""
                                                        , type: "select"
                                                        , submit: "OK"
                                                        , method: "post"
                                                        , submitdata: function(){
                                                            console.log(this, arguments);
                                                            var $this = $(this);
                                                            return {
                                                                    recordId: $this.data("recordId")
                                                                    , classes: $this.attr("class")
                                                                }
                                                        }
                                                    });
                                   
                                }
            /* Seriously a meta-generator for this would be nice */
            ,"aoColumnDefs": [
                ,{ sName:"record_id",          aTargets:[00], bSearchable:false, bVisible:false }
                ,{ sName:"roster_date",         aTargets:[01], sClass:"roster_date"}
                ,{ sName:"roster_name_both",    aTargets:[02], sClass:"roster_name_both"}
                ,{ sName:"roster_student_id",   aTargets:[03], sClass:"roster_student_id"}
                ,{ sName:"roster_major1",       aTargets:[04], sClass:"roster_major1 editableMajor"}
                ,{ sName:"roster_major2",       aTargets:[05], sClass:"roster_major2 editableMajor"}
                ,{ sName:"roster_major3",       aTargets:[06], sClass:"roster_major3 editableMajor"}
                ,{ sName:"roster_major4",       aTargets:[07], sClass:"roster_major4 editableMajor"}
                ,{ sName:"roster_minor1",       aTargets:[08], sClass:"roster_minor1 editableMajor"}
                ,{ sName:"roster_minor2",       aTargets:[09], sClass:"roster_minor2 editableMajor"}
            ]
    });

For the tbody, just put something like 

        <tbody><tr><td>Chill the fuck out, it's loading</td></tr></tbody>

Server side data contract

dataTables expects a JSON’ified construct like this 

$responseBody = array(
		"sEcho" => intval($input['sEcho']),
		"iTotalRecords" => (int) $count,
		"iTotalDisplayRecords" => count($data),
		"aaData" => $data
            );
  • sEcho is a security variable used by dataTables, basically just send it back and don’t worry about it
  • iTotalRecords – is the MAXIMUM # of records in the data set without any filtering
  • iTotalDisplayRecords – is the MAXIMUM # of records in the data set WITH filtering
  • An array of numerically indexed arrays, dataTables doesn’t like associative arrays

Total and Display total records

If the blink tag still worked reliably, I’d put a neon sign here. Basically you need to do 3 queries per Ajax call… call 1 is to get a

 
   SELECT count(1) FROM sourceTABLE

call 2 is

 SELECT count(1) FROM sourceTable WHERE someCriteria

and finally call 3 is

 SELECT yourColumnList FROM sourceTable WHERE someCriteria

With memcache or such, I’d advise caching the total count but no matter what you unfortunately need to make these three SQL calls :(.

Advanced collision detection

Unfortunately I haven’t gotten the chance to completely read this ( http://www.wildbunny.co.uk/blog/2011/03/25/speculative-contacts-an-continuous-collision-engine-approach-part-1/ ) but what I’ve read has been very educational and potentially useful for future game development.

A quick synopsis is that the linked article provides a very well documented approach for dealing with collisions in time. Say you have an object that should have collided with another, but it’s velocity or translation across the drawing surface is so high that in the time between frames it completely skips over another entity without colliding. In physical reality there would be a collision, but in computer terms there isn’t easy logic to detect and resolve these false-negative near misses.

Python helping PHP development

Just a quick little utility script I wrote to make watching PHP error logs a tad easier:

Usage is

#tail -F /var/log/php/php_error.log | ~/bin/parsePHPErrors.py

Thanks to this Stackoverflow question, it even colorizes!

#!/usr/bin/python
import sys
import os
import re

input = os.fdopen(sys.stdin.fileno(),'r',100)
regex = re.compile("(.*?PHP (Warning|Error|Notice|):.*)")
line = input.readline()

class bcolors:
    HEADER = '\033[95m'
    OKBLUE = '\033[94m'
    OKGREEN = '\033[92m'    
    WARNING = '\033[93m'
    FAIL = '\033[91m'
    ENDC = '\033[0m'


myColor = bcolors.OKGREEN

while line:
    
    if regex.match(line) or line.find("TODO") > -1:
        
        isCorrect = True
        
        if line.find("Fatal error") > -1:
            myColor = bcolors.FAIL
            pass
        elif line.find("Error")  > -1:
            myColor = bcolors.FAIL
            #todo get console color code
            pass
        elif line.find("Warning")  > -1:
            myColor = bcolors.WARNING
            pass
        elif line.find("Notice")  > -1:
            myColor = bcolors.OKBLUE
            pass
        elif line.find("TODO") > -1:
            myColor = bcolors.OKBLUE
            pass
        
        if isCorrect:            
            print "#"*25, "@"*25, "#"*25
            print
    else:
        pass
        #myColor = bcolors.OKGREEN
        
        
    print myColor, line.strip(), bcolors.ENDC
    line = input.readline()

Output looks like:

######################### @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ #########################

[28-Mar-2011 11:14:10] PHP Notice:  Undefined variable: sql in

basically breaking up individual error messages into visually easy to spot blocks