Full frontal JavaScript conference in Brighton

Posted on November 27th, 2011 by thiswayup.
Categories: Development.

Full Frontal is a JavaScript conference focused predominately on the front end, this is a jumble notes and reflection on it. After missing it last year, I made it a point to get a Full Front conference as early as possible and join in the early bird tickets, an absolute bargain at £120. 

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Titanium.UI.currentTab is null?

Posted on November 18th, 2011 by thiswayup.
Categories: Mobile Dev.

For some reason Titanium.UI.currentTab sometimes returns null and you need a work around by defining it on a focus event on the tabGroup as a work around.

http://developer.appcelerator.com/question/98501/titaniumuicurrenttab-is-null

One of the pains with Titanium is the rather random situations when the built in properties for certain objects aren't set. Spent another hour looking at this same bug again and as soon I figure it out the saying ""Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me" rang loudly in my poor head.

This time I thought it best to write this down, to remind myself (and anyway one else). 

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Titanium Mobile App development and london web cruise

Posted on September 22nd, 2011 by thiswayup.
Categories: Mobile Dev.

I had an absolute ball at the London Web Meetup annual cruise where we set sail from Westminster, going back and forth between Putney and Greenwich on a nice river cruise. Always a blast having a bunch of geeks, booze and pizza whilst chatting over a range of subjects.

On the subject of talks, there was a chance of some lightning talk spots and I decided to give it a go with a very rushed presentation of my current fave platform, Titanium from Appcelerator. Titanium is a platform that allows you to build Iphone, Android and Blackberry mobile apps using javascript. Unlike Phonegap, it translates the UI elements into native controls which gives it a more native feel and generally faster response. I also feel that the offering though has a few annoying bits, will have a great future for knocking up apps in record time.

My talk can be found here on Slideshare here (be warned, may contain lots of mistakes).

Doing my talk as I'm passing by London Bridge
Courtesy of @gelle

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Symfony 1.4 – Creating old sql tables when running build command

Posted on July 31st, 2011 by thiswayup.
Categories: Development.

Dear future self (and whoever it may concern).

You may recall that Symfony has a rather nifty feature to build your models and db from the YML file. If you rename any of the tables through YML, the old model classes are not deleted (see "flushed") from the "lib\model\doctrine" directory. Symfony's process seems to be create sql from the base classes existing in the above directory.

To solve this run the "symfony doctrine:delete-model-files" or just delete the files in "lib\model\doctrine". They really should have added the deleting of model files in "symfony doctrine:build --all"

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mysql stupid errors – ERROR 1005: Can’t create table {table name} (errno: 121)

Posted on July 21st, 2011 by thiswayup.
Categories: Development.

So I've spent at least half a day trying to figure out a stupid error when synching (creating) between my mysql workbench schema to a mysql database. I was receiving an error :

ERROR 1005: Can't create table {table name} (errno: 121)

I worked out that the issue was the foreign keys but had no idea why it was tripping out! Turns out that you need to name the actual foreign keys uniquely themselves. Therefore Ive taken to adding the table name in front of the foreign key name ie

BAD = "FK_title" if there is another table with the same foreign name, you'll get the above unhelpful message!

GOOD = "actor_FK_title" as you cant have two tables with the same name, you;re safe in the knowledge that you wont have a dupe FK.

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Writing PDO prepared statements in Modx to import CSV files

Posted on June 12th, 2011 by thiswayup.
Categories: Development.

Here's a small note for myself (and anyone who just wants to knock up a quick query using XPdo and Modx Revolution). Xpdo is the ORB (Object-relational bridge) or ORM that Modx Revolution has adopted as its standard way to abstract all the data access. It also provides a thin wrapper around the standard php PDO class.

I myself like writing SQL, especially when you have to write slightly more complicated sql which an ORM just becomes a hindrance in certain situations. Recently I've had to deal with uploads of CSV files directly into Modx, here is my code for the csv file read and using the handy PDO prepared statements bit.

Some points to note when using PDO :

• Outputting the actual query used is not possible by normal methods (ie you cant dump the string value) , you have to log the queries used on mysql. This is because the actual query is prepared in mysql with values being passed to mysql after.
• I recommend using the colon place holders eg ":dataValue" as this aids in readability.
• You do not need to escape the query as prepared statements doe this for you.
• Remember in the bindValue call to add the third and possible forth parameter. This defines the data_type and length of the datatype, otherwise mysql will not know how to type the value during the query being run. I always forget this after an extended period of not writing prepared statements and its a pain in the ass to debug, ref : "what the hell is wrong with this insert statement !?!?!?"

Here is some sample code for :

$file ="var/someplace/file.txt";
$handle = fopen($file, "r");
    while (($data = fgetcsv($handle, 1000, ",")) !== FALSE) {
        $stmt = $modx->prepare(
                "INSERT INTO modx_pews_buffer (event_group, month,event_date,event_descrption,event_start_time)
                VALUES (:grp, :month,:date,:des,:time)");
        $stmt->bindParam(':grp', $data[0],PDO::PARAM_STR,200 );
        $stmt->bindParam(':month', $data[1],PDO::PARAM_STR,50);
        $stmt->bindParam(':date', $data[2],PDO::PARAM_STR,200);
        $stmt->bindParam(':des', $data[3],PDO::PARAM_STR,30);
        $stmt->bindParam(':time', $data[4],PDO::PARAM_STR,11);
        $stmt->execute();
    }

Also read up :

• Php manual page on PDO
• Modx Revolution manual on Xpdo
  

Was listening to this whilst writing this post.

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reading about eval in js – why not to use

Posted on November 21st, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: Development.

I've been reading through and slowly digesting some of the points on tutsplus.com post on "The Essentials of Writing High Quality JavaScript". One of the many interesting parts is the point about Eval and some common anti-patterns. This can be sumarised as :

• Potentially unsafe security wise - can you trust the string you are eval() on, especially if it comes from an outside source
• passing to setInterval(), setTimeout() and new Function() is essentially an eval
• You limit the potentially var declaration scope using new Function() and putting the eval into an enclosure

I encourage people to read it!

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Quick speed up on javascript loops

Posted on November 16th, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: Development.

I have heard that one of the ways to speed up js is how you define your criteria on the number of iterations in a loop. Reading an article on Javascript best practices, you should cache the look up of an array length into a separate variable then use that rather then consistently look up the length. So rather then do :

for (var i = 0, i < myarray.length; i++) {
   // do something with myarray[i]
}

The above example  of i < myarray.length does a look up on every iteration. Instead you should do something like :

var max = myarray.length;
for (var i = 0, i < max; i++) {
   // do something with myarray[i]
}

Do the above apparently increases the speed by twice in Safari 3 and 190 times in IE7! Definitely worth knowing!

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Learn Visual basic instead of Objective-C

Posted on November 13th, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: Mobile Dev.

I thought this was both hilarious and interesting, I just discovered Objective-basic! I've been playing around with Objective-C on and off for the past year ("I have that great app idea!") but I've also been thinking about whether its a bit pointless and we should just learn to use Phone Gap, Titanium or Grapple Mobile if you want to build Iphone apps (and not games). Objective-basic seems to be quite a good alternative, if you just want to build an Iphone App. Visual Basic is so straight forward, I think anyone can learn it. Plus I use to do a bit of visual basic "back in the day", this would be a great way to knock up an app quickly for most people!

PS A great post on the comparison on some of the ways to build mobile apps on stackoverflow

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weekend of coding at secret london

Posted on April 25th, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: Development, London gems.

I've had this post sitting in my draft posting for the past couple of months and had completely forgotten about it until recently, so I thought it best to commit some thoughts down for future prosperity..or something.

It was back in February when I noticed a call from secret london for developers to help build a website and so looking for a small project at the time to sink my teeth into, I thought I'll come down. I head to where they had a small cozy office off oxford circus to meet the small gang of 4. After chatting a bit with a slightly shy girl who I thought was called Georgia (for some bizare reason) go through the website concept. This girl turned out to be Tiffany, the creator of the facebook group! At the time with my tired mind I was unawares of this! (sorry Tiffany if you are reading this)

Anyways...walking through the site idea, I had commented how I could possibly offer a few hours of my time a week over the next few months. Obviously Tim (the main dev guy) had thought about scalability and having a fast backend from the start. It was a shame he had decided to do it in Django and some weird data engine called Solr but I was enthusiastic working with people who knew what were doing. The real kicker or as Greg (who I considered the energetic and charismatic "ideas man") came out with the punch line... they were planning to create the whole thing in a weeks time! I was a bit stunned but said I will try get back to them (but still enthusiastic to try help out). I left thinking decisively "These people were slightly mad.", my favorite type of people

Moving onto the following weekend with some great planning and scheduling done through gdocs, the "guerrilla style" site build was underway starting on the Friday near Farringdon. Unfortunately I could not attend from the start and joined them on the Saturday. My php skills would be slightly rubbish for this project but decided to help out as best can with the javascript side of things.

I met some fantastic peeps on the day, chatting mainly to Ruth and Andy The setup was was very fun with a large area to accommodate the gang of designers, developers, editors and content people with booze and food around. I found it amazing to see so many people spending their weekend pushing forward something they believed in and credit is due to Demetrios for keeping the atmosphere positive, making sure everyone was happy! The content people had a very arduous task of transferring as much of the information from the facebook website to the site database. There was then the 4-5 developers  nd roughly same amount of designers do the front end work.

It was a bit of a shame on my part as I had a couple of bday do's to attend on that particular weekend, I wanted to hang around a bit longer to polish off my section! After spending a few hours here and there, trying to play around with the google maps local search api, I managed to offer a small contribution in the form of a google map showing the secrets for the first version of the website. I finally left late on the sunday after the design team had did the initial load of the site on a beta domain, at that point it truly struck me how an amazing feat they had achieved with the number on the posters indicating how much data they had loaded and the functionality they managed to squeeze in!

The experience was definitely a positive one and it made me realise how doing coding for projects like this is really good fun. I should do more of these! I had a chance to learn some new stuff that I wouldn't otherwise expose myself to and got a tasty curry and beer for my troubles! Would I do this again? Definitely.

Further links

• Secret london blog
  
• The secret london site idea on tech crunch
  
• Secret London guest posting on Tech Crunch - I'm famous! Though my head looks like it's growing out of Tim's

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