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Stuff I did or liked.

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Komodo Edit & Crunchbang Linux Install

I recently had a problem installing Komodo Edit on Crunchbang Linux BPO (Debian). The error I kept getting was "Couldn't load XPCOM" a lot of googling just tells me its related to the Mozilla framework. After some fiddling I figure out it's due to me not grabbing the 64 bit version.

Hope that helps somebody!

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Stop Komodo from removing whitespace after the fold.

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CakePHP Automatic Environment/Database Detection

I came across this today, and modified it to be a little smoother. Heres a list of the changes.

Now it uses gethostname() instead of $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME']. This allows different environments to use the same hostname

Save on memory with reference (=&).

Set other vars like debug level.

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I've been using this automation script for creating virtualhosts in ~/public_html with apache.

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Stupid Easy Cakephp Datepicker (without a massive library)

I didn't like CakePHP's 3/6 textboxes for date and datetime. I needed a simple and easy datepicker widget (a la jQuery) without installing any number of plugins, components, or helpers. This is what I did.

1. Get jQuery and jQuery UI's datepicker widget.

2. Setup your view to use a text input rather than a select. Then start a jQuery datepicker on that field.

<?php echo $this->Form->input('Mymodel.date', array('type'=>'text')); ?> <script type="text/javascript">$("#MymodelDate").datepicker();</script>

3. Change the model to modify the date format on save with a beforeSave method.

function beforeSave($options) { if(isset($this->data['Application']['date'])) $this->data['Application']['date'] = date("Y-m-d", strtotime($this->data['Application']['date'])); return true; }

4. If necessary, build a similar afterFind method so that the edit view shows the currently selected date.

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CakePHP - Automatically Create Tables from Model

Very easy. Create app_error.php in your app folder and paste this code.

<?php class AppError extends ErrorHandler {     function missingTable($params) {         echo "{$params['table']} is missing from database";         $fields = $params['className']::$fields;                  foreach($fields as $key => &$field)               $field = "{$key} {$field}";         $fields = implode(", ", $fields);         $query = "CREATE TABLE {$params['table']} ({$fields})";         $db = &ConnectionManager::getDataSource('default');           $result = $db->query($query);         $path = TMP."cache/models/*";         `rm -rf $path`;         header("Location: {$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']}");     } }

Add this to the models, describing your table columns.

static $fields = array('name' => 'VARCHAR(25)','field_id' => 'INT');

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icanhaz.js one-liner

I've been using icanhaz.js to do templating in the app i'm working on. Today found out that partials cannot be manually rendered. So if my partial name is short_name then this would not work:

ich.short_name({})

Even if this would would from inside the template:

{>short_name}

Well I used the partial at load time, but later on the data changed and I needed to update just the partial. This one-liner makes partials accessible just like regular templates. Call this once on page load using jQuery.ready or onload:

for(index in ich.partials) { ich.addTemplate(index, ich.partials[index]); }

So now partials can be accessed just like templates:

ich.short_name({});

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Really Easy Tumblr Code Blocks

I've been looking for an easy way to get a simple code block with a fixed width font on tumblr. Coloring is cool, but not necessary. Here is what i've done.

<?php echo "This looks like code right?" ?>

Looks okay-ish right? I simply edited my theme and added these lines to modify the blockquote style. Now I use blockquotes for my code.

blockquote { font-family:Courier, Courier New, Monospace, Mono, sans-serif; background-color:#000; color:#FFF; }

It works for now, Maybe I'll figure an easy way to get coloring and tabbing in there to.

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IE and Quirks Mode (or: always use a doc-type)

I've spent the last few days fighting IE to make my app look right. jQuery accordion was doing all sorts of weird things. Not surprisingly what fixed it was one simple line:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

That was all it took. Even a simple HTML5 doc-type <!DOCTYPE html> would fix this problem. I often start a project with just a simple html tag followed by whatever code I need just to get it running. Later on I run into problems because I forgot this important piece of code.

The specific problem I was having was with jQuery accordion with {fillSpace: true}. In internet explorer it would leave space at the bottom and when changing sliders that space would grow until the accordion was tiny.

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MongoDB

Learning Mongo, might have something to show in a bit. I think I'm liking the no-sql thing.

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Learning some Knockout JS

Took the time to learn a little knockout. This tool is useful for calculating exactly how much you pay for every mile in your car. Its called costpermile.

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HTML5 Canvas Collision Detection

This is a project I did ~2010 learning about collision detection using html5. I taught myself vector maths to figure the collisions correctly. You can view the source to see how I did it.

http://mjz.me/html5-collisions/