Posts by Daniel Cousineau
Flex Box: Prevent Children From Stretching
So, flex boxes are a glorious addition to CSS3 to make advanced layouts rapidly. No more crazy floats and nested divs and weird percentage values for columns! Just setup your orientation to horizontal and toss a box-flex: 1 in for kicks. However, just a tip: In the course of working with flex boxes, you will [...]
A Lesson In Good Architecture
We recently began working on our biggest event for our biggest client. In the process of getting everything up and running before the event started, we noticed a show-stopper bug appear out of nowhere. Our media processor when finished converting videos and creating thumbnails of images publishes said files to our CDN. Only a few [...]
Doctrine 1.2 MSSQL Alternative LIMIT/Paging
At work I had been having all sorts of issues with Doctrine_Connection_Mssql‘s LIMIT alteration, based on Zend_Db‘s code. The code used the more-compatible-with-SQL-Server-2000 technique of modifying the query to SELECT TOP (offset + limit), reverse the ORDER BY clause and SELECT TOP (limit), then finally reversing the returned dataset. As ugly as this technique is, [...]
Netbeans Code Completion and your Zend_View
Oh, look at me, blogging again! I definitely have a lot to blog about as I get the time, I’m coming off of a really involved project and learned a lot of tips I’d like to share about the Zend Framework. In the mean time I thought I’d share something I had a helluva time [...]
Python PHPSerialize Posted To Googlecode
A while back I posted a Python snippet that I noticed could be used in a few other side projects. I have since posted it to Google Code so more than just myself will know it exists: http://code.google.com/p/phpserialize/.
Doctrine Migrations Proper
I was talking with someone (I will edit this post when I find her card and remember her name) here at ZendCon and discovered that they were having trouble with migrations in Doctrine. Having gone through the same issues of Doctrine seemingly not being able to figure out your changes and generate migration classes, I [...]
Make The Most Of ZendCon
I felt like I should take a break from finishing up my multi-part javascript series to rehash some points being made recently by Keith Casey and Chris Cornutt about making the most of your N-th conference (and in particular, ZendCon). My first ever professional conference (ignoring BarCamps) was last year’s ZendCon. I showed up in [...]
Solve A Sliding Puzzle With JavaScript And Your AI Course: Part 1
In all my years of web development and formal computer science training, you know I never really got around to truly sitting down and learning JavaScript. Sure I knew the syntax (C based, not terribly hard), understood closures (LISP will do that to you), understood the prototype approach to Object Orientation (oddly enough playing with [...]
Development Environment Help! Setting Up PHP mail() On Windows, Or: Where Is My Windows sendmail.exe?
Lately at work I’ve been having the worst of trouble getting PHP on my workstation to send mail. Previously it was a simple trek to a website to download a Windows build of sendmail.exe, but for some reason I cannot get access to it, so I have to go another route. Enter hMailServer, a free, [...]
Good News Everyone!
Naturally it’s been over a month since I’ve updated and rather than posting something techincal I feel I should be a little selfish and announce that: I’M GOING TO BE SPEAKING AT ZENDCON 09! I will be giving my talk on automated deployment techniques with Phing. To say that I’m excited is quite an understatement. [...]