Christopher Shennan’s Blog

Over the last few months I have been working with Symfony and have got used to passing values to methods via an options array but I have recently had to pick up an older project in which the values are passed to the methods by individual parameters.

This has given me a good opportunity to evaluate both techniques and determine my personal preference for working.

The more traditional technique is to pass values to methods using individual parameters as in the example below:-

public function someMethod($name, $age = null)
{
  // do something
}

The benefit I have found with this method is that you can clearly identify what needs to be passed to the method, however, if you need to change the method to include an additional parameter it means that you have to update every call to this method so that every parameter is specified.
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For the last few months I have been connecting to the VPN at work via my O2 Wireless Box II quite happily until it suddently stopped working about 2 weeks ago which has caused me no end of headaches (tight deadlines looming etc). Each time I tried to connect I got presented with a “Error 619 – Disconnected”

I have had my laptop checked out by the IT guy and everything connected fine when it was in at the office and even my iPhone could connect to the VPN when using 3G but this Error 619 kept appearing each time I tried to connect to the work VPN via my O2 Wireless Box II using either the laptop or iPhone.
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My Sony VGN-FE21B laptop has been having problems with performance over the last few months, applications were taking a long time to load and the hard drive was getting cluttered with obsolete files, so at the weekend I decided to re-install Windows XP Pro onto my Sony VGN-FE21B laptop.

The original operating system was Windows XP Home but since the laptop has been bought primarily for work purposes, I had also bought a copy of Windows XP Pro but each time I install Windows XP Pro on my Sony VGN-FE21B laptop it always has a missing icon for the memory stick in My Computer. I imagine this is because the hardware is specific to Sony and not a generic Windows XP driver.
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I recently had to back up a MySQL database on a windows server so I could restore it to my local MySQL server for analysing the structure of an existing site which we are going to be rebuilding. I have done this hundreds of times on linux server but the usual command did not appear to work on this windows server. I was using:-

mysqldump -uroot -pPASSWORD database > c:\database.sql

but when I ran this I was presented with an “Access Denied” message.
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Over the last few weeks I have been working on my first wordpress plugin and I am quickly getting to grips with how it all pieces together but I ran into a problem with a rather basic piece of functionality that pretty much rendered the plugin useless until I figured out the issue.

The section I was working on was a form submission (within the wordpress administation) which saved the form values into the database and then redirected the user upon success to another page (using wp_redirect) but this resulted in a blank content pane.

This seems very strange to me as it showed some of the page contents i.e. the header and left navigation but the content pane was completely blank.
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I just wanted to wish everyone a Happy New Year and all the best for 2010.  I hope that it proves to be a productive and successful year for you all.

I hope to get myself more motivated in 2010 and make 2010 a good year and work for me.  In this aim I hope to post a good few new blog entries on here over the next year and I’ve got a few in the pipeline already including a wordpress plugin I’m developing and moving Manage My Alerts over to Symfony 1.3/1.4 and I hope the entries I post are of use to you.

Once again I would like to wish you a Happy New Year and all the best for 2010.

References

Manage My Alerts – An online reminder service

This Christmas was the quietest Christmas I have had in years in terms of the obligatory “if you have got the time” IT jobs as I only had 1 request for fixing a computer this year (instead of the 4 computers and a DVD player I had a few years back… all requested within 2 hours of arriving home).

Luckily this one turned out to be relatively simple and only took 5 minutes to fix although when I first heard about it I thought it was going to take a few hours. My aunt and uncle reported a problem with logging into their laptop (running Windows Vista Home Premium) on my uncle’s profile where it would give an error message “The User Profile Service failed the logon”, after which it would simply return them to the profile selection screen.
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Over the weekend I launched our newest site, The Weekly Whinge, which was set up as a place for me to vent my frustration and generally just rant and complain about life. As it has only just been launched my whinge list is relatively small so far but I’m finding ideas all over the place, on the way to work, out doing the Christmas shopping (it is probably best that I do not start on that one or I will never end), even with just updating this blog so I am sure there will be many more additions to The Weekly Whinge before long.
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A few months ago I posted an article taking about how to get the raw SQL from a Doctrine Query Object but with the release of Symfony 1.3 and Symfony 1.4 it would appear that the code no longer works.  As a result I’ve updated the code to work with Symfony 1.2 – 1.4 and you can find the updated source below:-
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It’s taken me a while but I’ve finally managed to create the “My Projects” section started although in all likelyhood I’ll not have much time to devote to my projects.

I’ve started off by resurrection an old project that I worked on while I was self employed as Design2Host Ltd.  csNews Pro (formerly V-Desk Newsletter System Pro) has had a few cosmetic details changed (changed the name, removed the licence key limitions) but it’s exactly the same project and it is compatible with the paid version that was original available so you can easily convert from the previous paid version across to the free version when any updates become available.

Feel free to download and play with csNews Pro and feel free to give my any feedback on it.