Nerdy Dork

After doing maintenance on a few PHP projects, I’ve come to the conclusion that I really need to use frameworks for medium to big projects. After looking at a few frameworks in a few different languages, I’ve run across a pretty cool website at sucks-rocks.com.

I plugged in a number of popular web languages and frameworks just to get an idea of what people are saying about them. The results are pretty interesting. First take a look at some language comparisons. Then, look at some framework comparisons. And finally, I thought I’d check out some Javascript libraries.

Conclusion: With Web 2.0 design, you can’t go wrong by picking a good framework and throwing in some ajax.

I just need to give some props to Liquidweb. I have a cPanel VPS account there. I have been impressed with their “Heroic Support”. Recently though, they went above and beyond.

I’ve been having PHP mid career crisis of sorts and been looking at other languages and frameworks. Django and Python have caught my eye. I started developing an application, but I wanted to first see if I could deploy it to my server before I got too far into it.

I strugged for 3 or 4 days trying. I spent a lot on time on IRC and they guys there were quite helpful, but they couldn’t figure out why my deployment was not working either. Finally, after hitting a brick wall, I submitted a support ticket. Because it was 3 party software I wasn’t expecting much.

I was blown away by the level of service I got. The first person had never heard of Django, but she read the documentation on how to install it and pointed me to the right files to edit. Later she passed me on to someone else who was more familiar with Django. In all I got responses from 4 different people who worked on this issue. They got it up and running and explained what they did. Kudos to Liquidweb.

I find it quite annoying that whenever I read instructions that include adding an environment path variable you are asked to reboot your machine for changes to take effect. I know there has GOT to be a way to do it. Well, I know a way, but it’s someway kludgy.

Here is how I do it (I’m really hoping someone will comment and tell me a better way)

Continue reading “Update Windows Path Without Rebooting”

After writing my fuel trip calculator, I learned there was a bug in IE. I got it to work but I get getting ‘meters’ is null or not an object or even worse, ‘null’ is null or not an object. I tried everything I could think of in the javascript code to get rid of that message in IE.

I realized that the function was being called twice for some reason, and that is where I finally found the culprit. The error wasn’t in the javascript, it was in the html.

When I first wrote the tool, I just called the javascript function using a button and onclick method. Then I changed it to a form so you could just hit enter in any field. But, I forgot to take out the onclick method from the submit button. So therein lied the problem. Once I removed that the error went away.

So I was talking with a friend and we were figuring out the amount of money we spend on a commute to see if it is worth buying a new car for the gas savings. I was using Google Maps to determine the distance between locations. So I got the idea to create this little tool to calculate it for me. I’ve been meaning to learn the Google Maps API anyway.

DIRECTIONS: Enter the current cost of fuel, your car’s gas mileage and a start and end address to get an estimate of how much you will spend on fuel for the trip.

I would consider myself above average, maybe even an expert when in comes to developing in PHP. I can pretty much accomplish whatever my heart imagines as far as web applications with it. The problem comes when I have to maintain these applications. Therefore I have looked into frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and CakePHP. I’ve teetered between the two. I’ve heard many say that Ruby is what makes rails so great. On the other hand CakePHP allows you to use your extensive knowledge of PHP and put in a more maintainable framework.

Well, all things considered led me to make the decision to learn Ruby on Rails. It’s been much more daunting than I imagined it would be. I feel like an old dog trying to learn new tricks.

In the process of learning, I’ve been all over the web. One stop led me to the blog of David Heinemeier Hannson - the creator of Ruby on Rails. One thing that has been quite annoying is reading post from self-righteous Ruby on Rails developers who like to put down PHP. So it was refreshing to see DHH give PHP a little love!
Continue reading “Rails Creator Praises PHP”

I’m currently trying to learn Ruby on Rails. I guess now is somewhat of an odd time to be learning as I seem stuck in archaic examples and tutorials written for 1.2.6 and 2.0 has been released and changed the way many things are done.

Take scaffolding for example. When I first starting learning about ROR and CakePHP, I thought it was pretty cool that I could put in a one-liner to generate a view representing a database table, then I could run a command to generate the code for that scaffolding if I wanted to use it as a base.

Well, it seems they took all that out of ROR in 2.0. Now there is one way to do it, from the command line, the first time. No more one liners and no more building the scaffolding based on the database table

Fortunately someone for ROR talk pointed me to two resources that I have found helpful:

www.elctech.com/blog/refreshing-rails-generated-views

helloimbloggingatyounow.blogspot.com/2008/03/i-am-leet-rails-haxor.html

I’m very mediocre at online marketing. I know all the theory and things I should be doing to make money online, but I haven’t hit the big time by any means. I think a big part of the problem is that I’m not very motivated by making money. For for some weird reason, I’m very motivated to save money!

This is where the knowledge and skills I’ve developed in internet marketing begin to be entertaining and profitable. I have two example to share. One I’ll share now, the other I’ll share after May (you’ll understand why when I share it then)

Example the first:

I love Rocketman! It’s one of my all time favorite movies. It’s just plain clean stupid humor. I wanted a copy of it so bad on DVD. At first it was only available as a region 2. I couldn’t take a chance of it not working. LaterI found that it was released in region 1. I saw a few copies on Amazon, but they were selling for over $50 per copy. I did some searching and found that the only way to order them was by joining the Disney DVD club. I didn’t want to join the club for one movie. I did some calculation, and though I can’t remember the exact numbers (this was two years ago) I figured if I joined the club and bought filled my requirements by buying all Rocketman movies, I could get approx 9 copies for $118.00 ($13.10 each) and then quit. So, if I kept one and sold the rest to break even, I would just need to sell them for $14.75 each. Since they were selling on Amazon for $50 I figured it wouldn’t be a problem.

My wife was quite surprised when she saw 9 copies of Rocketman show up in the mail. Ok, by now she’s probably not surprised by the weird things I do, but rather curious. I kept one copy for my personal collection and sold the other 8 on Amazon for an average of $40 each after shipping. So, to do the math, I got my movie and made $202.00 in the process!

I told a friend about it and he was elated because his wife had joined the Disney DVD club and they still had 3 movies to buy before they could fulfill their commitment. He bought 3 copies of Rocketman and sold them promptly.

So why not wash, rinse, repeat? I told you, I’m lazy. I hated going to the post office and shipping movies. Besides, I’m sure they have some kind of rules about household quitting and rejoining. I did tell everyone what I did and said they could do the same to make a quit buck, but I think they were all too skeptical and no one took me up on it.

Don’t bother now, because you can buy them new on Amazon for under $10.

Look for the follow up to this post in a couple of months.

UPDATE:

I wrote the follow up post, but just before publishing it I changed my mind. As much as I would love to share what I did (I basically got a $1000+ value from $6 worth of advertising and 1-2 hours of time). I thought it would be a once in a lifetime opportunity, but from what I’ve learned, the opportunity may present itself next year! So, I guess I’d be better off keeping this one to myself for now.
Continue reading “Skills for Deals”

I was happy to receive an email this week from the author of MySQL Front. The product is now SQL-Front. So far, I don’t know that much is new other than the name change. The best part is that all license keys still work – better yet, if you once registered and lost your registration information, you can easily request it online. Since getting a new computer and not having MySQL Front available, I’ve been getting use to the subtle differences of SQLyog. When I evaluated the two a few years ago I decided I liked MySQL front better, plus it was $10 cheaper for the registered version that included http tunneling which I needed at the time. Welcome back SQL-Front!

I use DirectAdmin for my hosting control panel. There is a nice plugin to add awstats, but I’ve found they don’t work on sites where I have WordPress set up (such as this site) because I’m using permalinks. No worries though. I found a way to fix it. Just put the bolded line below in your .htaccess:

# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/awstats.*$ [NC] [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress

*Note: Replace “awstats” with the name of your stats location