Null-Logic http://null-logic.net/blog Wed, 31 Mar 2010 19:57:26 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Holy Crap, I Have A Blog? http://null-logic.net/blog/2010/03/31/holy-crap-i-have-a-blog/ http://null-logic.net/blog/2010/03/31/holy-crap-i-have-a-blog/#comments Wed, 31 Mar 2010 19:57:26 +0000 dprevite http://null-logic.net/blog/?p=184 Remember a few years back before we knew what Twitter was? People had things called "Blogs" where they wrote "articles" about their field, their friends, and more importantly, their cats.

Well. It turns out that I have one of these things. I should use it more.

I have some fun stuff coming up that I'll blog about soon since it won't quite fit into 140 characters. However, in the meantime follow me on Twitter so you know how funny I am.

Don't worry, I promise there will still be pictures of cats.



]]> http://null-logic.net/blog/2010/03/31/holy-crap-i-have-a-blog/feed/ 0 Important Step When Backing Up Tables http://null-logic.net/blog/2008/04/16/important-step-when-backing-up-tables/ http://null-logic.net/blog/2008/04/16/important-step-when-backing-up-tables/#comments Wed, 16 Apr 2008 23:48:58 +0000 dprevite http://null-logic.net/blog/?p=123

See that lil' radio button that says "Structure and data"? Well. If you're backing up a database table using SQLyog, make sure you check that if you plan on dropping the original table.

Oops. Sorry JC :-(

]]> http://null-logic.net/blog/2008/04/16/important-step-when-backing-up-tables/feed/ 2 My Cat Likes Digg and is Stupid http://null-logic.net/blog/2008/03/08/my-cat-likes-digg-and-is-stupid/ http://null-logic.net/blog/2008/03/08/my-cat-likes-digg-and-is-stupid/#comments Sat, 08 Mar 2008 17:20:11 +0000 dprevite http://null-logic.net/blog/2008/03/08/my-cat-likes-digg-and-is-stupid/ Oliver is adorable though

He insists on standing in my way whenever I'm using the computer. Jerk.

]]> http://null-logic.net/blog/2008/03/08/my-cat-likes-digg-and-is-stupid/feed/ 2 Using Subversion for Web Development http://null-logic.net/blog/2008/02/14/using-subversion-for-web-development/ http://null-logic.net/blog/2008/02/14/using-subversion-for-web-development/#comments Thu, 14 Feb 2008 18:10:18 +0000 dprevite http://null-logic.net/blog/2008/02/14/using-subversion-for-web-development/ Hopefully by now you know what Subversion, aka SVN is. It's a version control system that keeps track of changes made to files like source code and documentation. It's similar to CVS, but with some major advantages. We've been using it at work for awhile, and I really like it. Changes don't get lost, we can easily keep track of released versions, and once we get around to implementing it SVN will tie into our bug tracking system.

We usually have two servers for a project, one as the development server, and the other a production server. We all have a working copy checked out on the development server. Using virtual hosts with Apache we all have our own sub domain. So for example on our dev server we'd have:

  • dan.ourproject.com
  • mike.ourproject.com
  • jc.ourproject.com

With each pointing to that developers working copy. We make our changes on the dev server as we're making the site, when we finish a task we check it in, and everyone does an update often to avoid conflicts.

When we are getting ready to push a release out to the production server we have to be careful since a lot of the time there are people using the site. We don't want to have errors pop up on the production server. To make sure it runs on that server as well as it did in our working copies, we have a staging area. It's on the same server as the production copy, but only we have access to it.

So we do an export to the staging area, click through the site and run through a checklist of things to check for and once we're sure it's running ok we copy that to the production area and it's live.

Since we want to keep track of the versions we push out to the production server, we give that release a version number, tag it in our Subversion repo, and update our project wiki.

This workflow has worked well for us and if we have a problem we can always roll back to a previous release. We can also use the Change Report feature of SmartSVN to do a kind of code review when others commit code. If we see something a little strange we can fix it, or if's completely crazy we can roll back quickly.

This is just how we do it, if you do it differently I'd love to hear about it so just leave a comment. In the future I'd also like to look into using Git in a similar way.

]]> http://null-logic.net/blog/2008/02/14/using-subversion-for-web-development/feed/ 12 Sample CodeIgniter Blog Controller http://null-logic.net/blog/2008/02/13/blog-controller/ http://null-logic.net/blog/2008/02/13/blog-controller/#comments Thu, 14 Feb 2008 05:22:05 +0000 dprevite http://null-logic.net/blog/2008/02/13/blog-controller/ I never get comments, or requests, so this is for Peter.

Here's a sample controller for CodeIgniter. This is pretty much the structure and it doesn't do much. When you go to yoursite.com/blog, anything in the index function will run.

If you added a function called edit, and went to yoursite.com/blog/edit, then that would run.

All this controller does is load the links from the links table, get the page content for the current page ID, and then passes that to the views. In your views folder you would have 2 files, sidebar.php and content.php. Those would be your template files.

$links would be a variable available in the sidebar view that just contains the result of the database query from _load_links().

<?php
  /**
   * Blog Class Controller
   *
   * @package Null-Logic
   **/
  class Blog extends Controller {

    /**
     * Default Blog Class Function
     *
     * @return void
     **/
    function index() {
      $this->display();
    }

    function display($page_ID = 0) {
      $this->load->view('content', array(
        'sidebar' => $this->load->view('sidebar', array(
          'links' => $this->_load_links()
        ), true),
        'content' => $this->_load_content($page)
      ));
    }

    /**
     * Get the links for the sidebar
     **/
    function _load_links() {
      $query = $this->db->get('links');
      return $query->result();
    }

    /**
     * Get the content for this page
     **/
    function _load_content($page) {
      $query = $this->db->get_where('pages', array(
        'ID' = $page
      ));
      return $query->row();
    }

  }
?>

And then the view for the sidebar can be anything, like:


<div id="sidebar">
<ul class="links">
  <?php
    foreach($links as $link) {
      echo '
<li><a href="' . $link->href . '">' . $link->text . '</a>';
    }
  ?> <!-- Fixed missing closing PHP tag. Thanks Jay! -->
</ul>
 
]]> http://null-logic.net/blog/2008/02/13/blog-controller/feed/ 3 Multiple Views with CodeIgniter 1.6 http://null-logic.net/blog/2008/02/07/multiple-views-with-codeigniter-16/ http://null-logic.net/blog/2008/02/07/multiple-views-with-codeigniter-16/#comments Thu, 07 Feb 2008 20:19:10 +0000 dprevite http://null-logic.net/blog/2008/02/07/multiple-views-with-codeigniter-16/ EllisLab released the latest version of CodeIgniter on January 30th. They've made plenty of improvements and bug fixes, and you can check out the changelog on their site. I've been using CodeIgniter for projects at work for about six months and I love it. It's made my code much more organized and easy to modify. If you aren't using CodeIgniter, or some other kind of PHP framework, I suggest you try it out. It's lightweight, easy to learn, and the documentation is fantastic.

One feature that I've always wanted is multiple views. Most web sites are split up into chunks like the header, sidebar, main content and footer areas. With regular PHP, you'd just do a require() to load the part you want, but with CodeIgniter it always felt a bit messy doing that.

Now if you want to load multiple views, you can do the following:

one

That's a great improvement, but today I was working on something where I want to have the loader return the view instead of render it right away. I loaded up the code for the loader and found out that it's already there. I didn't see it mentioned in the wonderful user guide, but I tried it out and it works great. So if you want to load a view but have it return the view as a string instead of rendering it, all you have to do is:

two

I'll be using this all of the time now. It's a great feature that just makes sense a lot of the time.

]]> http://null-logic.net/blog/2008/02/07/multiple-views-with-codeigniter-16/feed/ 7 Why Chicago Sucks Sometimes http://null-logic.net/blog/2007/12/10/why-chicago-sucks-sometimes/ http://null-logic.net/blog/2007/12/10/why-chicago-sucks-sometimes/#comments Mon, 10 Dec 2007 23:24:06 +0000 dprevite http://null-logic.net/blog/2007/12/10/why-chicago-sucks-sometimes/ die.jpg

$100 fucking dollars because I was parked in front of a fire hydrant (the only place to park for a few minutes) in front of my building. I was on my way home from work and had to pee so badly I was bouncing in the car. I was there for less than 10 minutes with my hazards flashing.
The most expensive piss I've ever taken.

Tickets, traffic, lack of parking, and the homeless are the only things to not love about Chicago.

]]> http://null-logic.net/blog/2007/12/10/why-chicago-sucks-sometimes/feed/ 1 www is for queers. http://null-logic.net/blog/2007/11/26/www-is-for-queers/ http://null-logic.net/blog/2007/11/26/www-is-for-queers/#comments Mon, 26 Nov 2007 18:15:00 +0000 dprevite http://null-logic.net/blog/2007/11/26/www-is-for-queers/ You may have noticed that if you go to www.null-logic.net, the www is stripped off and it takes you to null-logic.net. That's because the www is for queers.

It's a waste of time, it takes too long to say, and its no fun to type. The www isn't required, and I can't think of why it was ever there to begin with.

If you have a website, just redirect traffic from www.domain.com to domain.com. Oh, and if you're giving me a link, and you start with "go to double you double you double you" expect to be slapped across the face.

More about it here.

]]> http://null-logic.net/blog/2007/11/26/www-is-for-queers/feed/ 2 Things that make my life better than yours http://null-logic.net/blog/2007/11/09/things-that-make-my-life-better-than-yours/ http://null-logic.net/blog/2007/11/09/things-that-make-my-life-better-than-yours/#comments Fri, 09 Nov 2007 17:00:30 +0000 dprevite http://null-logic.net/blog/2007/11/09/things-that-make-my-life-better-than-yours/ “Compare your life to mine, and then kill yourselves.” – Bender/Dan

Updated 04/06/2008

This started as an email to everyone at work, but I thought I'd post it here to share with you losers.

Launchy http://www.launchy.net

launchy.png

Forget the Start menu. It sucks hard. Instead, hit ALT+Space and type the first few letters of the program you want to launch and hit enter. You won’t have to search through your Start menu folders trying to find the program you want. As you go it learns, and even forgives typos.

SFTPDrive http://www.sftpdrive.com
WebDrive http://www.webdrive.com

webdrive.png

Editing files locally and then uploading via FTP every time you want to see your changes sucks. A lot. Dreamweaver’s FTP sucks too. Use SFTPDrive or WebDrive and you can mount a server as a drive on your computer. Just open O:\httpdocs\index.html and save/edit it like it’s a regular file on your computer. No more changing a few characters, hitting upload, and uploading. Just click save in your app. WebDrive is almost the same thing as SFTPDrive, but like 4x as expensive. I've used both a lot and found that WebDrive is way better, but more difficult to learn.

E-Text Editor http://www.e-texteditor.com

e-texteditor.png

I’ve always basically used Dreamweaver as just a program with tabs and syntax highlighting. Now I just use E since it’s smaller/faster and even a little cooler for coding. “E is a new text editor for Windows, with powerful editing features and quite a few unique abilities. It makes manipulating text fast and easy, and lets you focus on your writing by automating all the manual work. You can extend it in any language, and by supporting TextMate bundles, it allows you to tap into a huge and active community.” You can write your own plugins, and I’ve even written a few for CodeIgniter.

CodeIgniter http://www.codeigniter.com

codeigniter.png

Ok so this only helps you if you're a PHP developer, but if you're reading my blog and you made it this far, you probably are.

CodeIgniter has made my life a million times better. I used to try really hard to keep the code for my websites organized, but it somehow always turned into a disaster. I've made about 5 sites with CodeIgniter at this point and I love it. The client can request rediculous changes, and because of how it's organized things still go smoothly. Or at least as good as it can get.

There are other PHP frameworks, a few too many if you ask me, but CodeIgniter scratched the right itch for me. CakePHP was a little too large and imposed it's own coding style on me. Symfony requires too much command line work, some people I'll be working with have never even touched the command line. Not really Symfony's fault as much as them being retards, but oh well. And then Zend just seemed like way too much overkill for me.

CodeIgniter is simple and flexible. Yay.

SQLyog http://www.webyog.com

main_multi.png

phpMyAdmin pretty much sucks so I had to look for an alternative. SQLyog is a great way to connect to a MySQL database and make changes. It lets you tunnel over SSH, has a graphical Query builder that helps with complicated JOINs, and a million other lil toys. Best of all it's not web based so it's fast, especially when entering data.

]]> http://null-logic.net/blog/2007/11/09/things-that-make-my-life-better-than-yours/feed/ 6 Vista Line-In Annoyance http://null-logic.net/blog/2007/11/04/vista-line-in-annoyance/ http://null-logic.net/blog/2007/11/04/vista-line-in-annoyance/#comments Sun, 04 Nov 2007 22:53:46 +0000 dprevite http://null-logic.net/blog/2007/11/04/vista-line-in-annoyance/ This is more of a note to myself than anything, but this took me about half an hour to figure out. For the most part I haven't had any issues with Vista since I've installed it, but today I wanted to connect my iPhone to the line in on my sound card and listen through my computer speakers.

After stripping a cable so it could plug into the iPhone (a whole different story), I plugged it into the line in port on my sound card and didn't hear a thing.

What you have to do is right click on the speaker icon in the tray, click "Recording Devices"

sound_menu.gif

Then click the "Playback" tab, and then double click "Speakers"

speakers_entry.gif

Then adjust the levels for Line-In. This should also work for the microphone.

levels.gif

It seems pretty buried, no idea why it's so much harder than it was in XP. I'm looking forward to buying my first MacBook Pro as soon as I can.

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