Before I begin today's article, I would just like to preface this and say that i am working on a series about how I set up my development environment. It is slightly complicated, but I am proud of it, and will post that series soon.

For today, I recently had to rebuild my development web server and did a mysql dump to backup all of my application databases. I did not know that doing a backup this way does not back up user defined functions (UDFs) and had to rebuild them from scratch. For my own sake, as well as to hopefully help others, I would like to go over the two UDFs I am using.

It's been a while and many things have been going on; though really it's just life getting in the way of me sitting down to write. I lost my job, mainly becuase of a stupid mistake. Things happen, I understand that. I have learned from the mistakes I have made in the past and I am read to move forward. 

A while ago I purchased a set of Z506 Logitech speakers for my living room HTPC on sale. Until today, the rear speakers were just sitting on top of my entertainment center. I finally got off by butt and ran some 18 Guage speaker wire from one wall to the other (I have an open basement which made this quite easy) and now I can plug the rear speakers into the wall in the back of the room.

There was really no trick to extending the speakers, I did some research and seemed to find that 18 guage wire was the most common to extend RCA type speaker plugs. I then ran 2 lines of the wire and finished it off with some RCA keystone wall plugs on both walls. No ugly wires across the room, and surround sound to boot!

I just wanted to do a quick post to notify visitors of changes to the comment system. I have been having issues with spam bots, so I had the option of either making everyone register for the site, or to moderate comments as they are posted. 

I chose the option of moderating the comments, so your comments may not show up on the site immediately, but I feel this is a better alternative than requiring everyone to register before they can post comments on my articles. If the spamming gets worse, I may have to look at other options, but for now - 1 day at a time. :)

Recently I installed Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) on my work PC and set up evolution to work with our Exchange2010 server here. There were a few problems that I hope to chronicle here to aid others who wish to use Exchange and Evolution.

The exact issue I will be explaining shows up as GLib-GIO-ERROR **: Settings schema 'org.gtk.Settings.FileChooser' does not contain a key named 'last-folder-uri' when you run evolution from the terminal.

Recently I was doing some work for a client that uses a host that gives no adminitrative access to mysql - no PHPMyAdmin or shell access! Once I got over how terrible this was, I threw together a quick script to interate through all tables in a database and drop them all, leaving the database intact.

I have been working with the Zend Framework for a while now, and one tedious aspect I have encountered is  creating getters and setters for each property in a model class. According to the Quickstart, their stub for a model looks like this:

class Application_Model_Guestbook
{
    protected $_comment;
    protected $_created;
    protected $_email;
    protected $_id;
 
    public function __set($name, $value);
    public function __get($name);
 
    public function setComment($text);
    public function getComment();
 
    public function setEmail($email);
    public function getEmail();
 
    public function setCreated($ts);
    public function getCreated();
 
    public function setId($id);
    public function getId();
}

For my birthday this year, I decided to take some money and invest in a pair of Gunnar Optiks. If you are not familiar with these glasses, they are marketed for heavy computer users that suffer from eye strain. I researched these heavily for about two weeks before purchasing, and have finally used them for long enough to give my first impressions.

I have recently started using Zend Dojo to build a CRM. I am the type of person that learns best by jumping in the deep end of the pool and trying to figure out how to stay afloat from there, so naturally I found some great semi-advanced tutorials and forums for Zend Dojo and dug in. Very early on, I starting getting this error in my layouts:

Uncaught exception 'Zend Dojo View Exception' with message 'Lock already exists for id "layout"'  

Needless to say, it was a bit cryptic..