Category: Random

Random

Two imperative Zend Studio commands

Posted on By : Kevin Schroeder

In a perfect world software works all the time…

So, you can stop laughing now. But if something gets really messed up there are a couple of options that you have to make it work again.

Often, one of the reasons for a hung instance of Zend Studio is a broken workspace. Zend Studio, and Eclipse, cache a LOT of information and the IDE is highly dependent on that information. Sometimes that information gets royally mangled. If the workspace is salvagable, and it usually is, the easiest way to fix the problem is to have Studio clean its cache.

Random

Friday Framework Highlight: Creating tickets with Zend_Barcode and Zend_Pdf

Posted on By : Kevin Schroeder

So you’re now in charge of some kind of event and people are going to need tickets to get in. You could do it the old fashion way and actually have people at the door checking the tickets, but that is so 1980’s and also so easy to forge (for the nefarious). Event organizers are adament that tickets are only used once and so they want to use some kind of barcode reader to ensure that tickets are valid and you are responsible for the web side of this.

Random

Sharing feedback with Twitter using Bit.ly – Part 1

Posted on By : Kevin Schroeder

Over here there is a good article on sharing page feedback on Twitter. I’ll end up doing something similar but in a different manner. A little while I posted an article (Do you queue?) on how you could use the Zend Server Job Queue to run individual tasks. Well you can do the same thing here. I’ve made a few changes since that article, namely that Zend_Application is passed in both to execute() and to run() so I could easily retrieve application settings. Don’t know why I didn’t think of that earlier. Oh well.

Random

Writing music is hard

Posted on By : Kevin Schroeder

Writing music is hard. I love doing it but I have yet to write a piece where I did not have significant writer’s block. What I often do is wakeup early and spend an hour or so working on a piece before starting work. I have been writing and playing music for a few years and it is still hard each time. It really is 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration. Enough so that I stopped and wrote a blog entry about it.

Random

Do you queue? Introduction to the Zend Server PHP Job Queue

Posted on By : Kevin Schroeder

There has been a lot of talk over the past several years about the difference between performance and scalability. Never mind that the difference between the two will probably not really affect most developers. Never mind that the “difference between performance and scalability” argument is often used when someone’s code performs poorly and their best argument is “Yeah, but my code scales”. Yeah, sure it does.

Random

Server Monitoring, Studio Tasks and Gmail?

Posted on By : Kevin Schroeder

I deployed this blog about a week ago. Since then there has been little traffic, mostly because I have not promoted it and I have also been working on a bunch of other content and such. Since I also just needed to just get it out the door and running I have not spent a lot of time testing for performance. This blogging app is based off of Zend_Application and as such there is a bit of overhead. Since I was not expecting traffic to be that heavy I was not (and am not) overly concerned about snappy performance at this point. As long as the page loads and displays in the browser I’m fine with it.

Random

Introduction to Caffeinated PHP – Using Java to extend PHP

Posted on By : Kevin Schroeder

If you are reading that title and thinking “what is that guy smoking?” then you are probably in good company. Developers often make development decisions based off of philosophy. Some developers go the route of “we will decide on the best tool (language) for this individual job” and end up having hundreds of individual tools that they need to end up supporting. Others desire to take a more puritanical approach in saying that “we will only use this one tool (language) for this individual job.” The problem is that the decision is often not as cut and dry as many development philosophies allow.

Random

Why no comments?

Posted on By : Kevin Schroeder

You may be wondering why there are no comments on the site or any kind of interraction. That’s because I haven’t written it yet. I intend to make the web site much more interractive but I’m also writing all of it myself. That means progress will be slow. Not because I’m slow (I might be) but because I’ve got a bunch of stuff to do. But if you have something to say feel free to do it on the Facebook page or my Twitter.

That’s all