These roads have crossing points and if you are a pedestrian you get to press a button to let you cross, but the buttons do nothing - they have no effect on the traffic flow at all. All I can surmise is that the buttons are put in place purely to give pedestrians a something to do purely so they don’t scream in impotent fury at the traffic.

I know (in my heart) this to be the case, but I push the buttons anyway… out of some faint hope…

I am right aren’t I? The buttons really don’t do a thing?

I thought that it was a particularly ‘tight’ film in terms of the design and feel, clearly a lot of thought had gone into this and it hadn’t been wasted. Gotham city is brutal. It is the dark side of the Modernist Project, Post Modernism and wherever we are now haven’t got a look in. Can you imagine a curvey building by Frank Gehry or Richard Rogers (actually not very curvey but full of light and weightlessness)? I can’t. Gotham is a city where the concrete and the grid rule, this is not to say that some of the buildings are not beautiful, because many are.

I’ve noticed a few years ago that as the new model cars appeared they were all more hard edged, straight lined and less curvey than their predecessors, particularly the more expensive vehicles - think Landrovers or BMWs - in short more militaristic, more hard edged designs. I think what makes it more interesting is that for a very long time prior to this, on the whole cars had been gaining curves. Clearly though people right now are in the mood to buy brutal looking cars. Some of the designs are wonderful (at least from a purely aesthetic point of view) - I think some of the smaller BMWs are sublime.

I think these hard edged designs are a direct response to fear and unease in society at large. People want to buy harder looking vehicles because they are fearful and therefore feel the need to project strength, of course good designers produce what thier customers and clients want, and the best the designers do this before their customers know what they want. Of course the biggest, hardest most brutal vehicle of all is the Batmobile.

Back to the film. I remember going to see Starship Troopers at the cinema when it came out, I went along with all my house mates and we illicitly necked a load of beers (or possibly a bottle of vodka (shudder)) and whooped and screamed as we watched the film. I remember the film because it was the first film I consciously saw where you couldn’t tell where the cgi began, of course ten years latter it almost tame. Special effects have just got bigger and better and they have got so big that they don’t really make any impact at all anymore because there is too much to take in.

So does he deserve an Oscar or not?

I realised that instead you could automatically set them in the beforeFilter() of your app_controller instead.

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function beforeFilter(){
 
  if(isset($this->params['prefix'])) {
    //read the admin prefix set in core.php
    $admin = Configure::read('Routing.admin'); 
 
    if($this->params['prefix'] == $admin){
 
      $this->layout = $admin;
 
    }
  }    
}

If you need to over-ride this, you can just do so as normal in individual methods.

Anyway after an epic wait a flurry of CakePHP books have arrived.

details on Amazon

details on Amazon

details on Amazon

I haven’t read any of these books yet, but I from personal experience I would say the Apress books are bound to be good. I have no idea what the books from Packt are like. I have one Manning book which is good but is unfortunately a PDF (and I hate reading PDFs).

The reason I abandoned Apache2triad was PHP versions - I wanted to do some work with Google Base using the Zend Google Data Library which required PHP 5.1.4+.

Looking around at the various bundles I decided to go with XAMPP - a lot of people seem to use it and it seems to get pretty good feedback. I won’t say the process was entirely painless (it took a couple of goes to get everything up and running) but eventually it all seemed OK.

The fun started when I decided to do a bit of baking (generating scaffolding code for my CakePHP app from a command line interface). Nothing worked.

Looking into it I discovered more than I wanted to know about the PHP Command Line Interface (CLI) which I had happily used for years with no idea it actually existed, having assumed it was just there as part of PHP.

After a lot googleing and a lot of trial and error I got it all working again and this is how I did it.

My environment is Windows XP Pro Service Pack 2 with XAMPP installed on E:/

1. Downloaded the latest version of PHP and replaced the entire contents of E:\xampp\php\.
2. Added to the E:\xampp\php to my environment PATH.

At this stage PHP CLI wwas now working but there were nasty errors e.g. I was uanble to connect to MySQL from scripts. I discovered that this is because PHP CLI uses a different php.ini file to regular PHP.

To fix this I copied my php.ini from E:\xampp\apache\bin\php.ini (the default XAMPP ini file) to E:\xampp\php.

I then checked the PHP CLI again using php -v at a command prompt. There were now about 6 errors displayed, concerned with modules that could not be loaded or found. I believe that these concern modules just that aren’t meaningful in CLI mode. So I went through my new php.ini in E:\xampp\php and commented out the directives that were causing the errors until PHP CLI ran without errors.

I’ve been re-writing my users / groups permission system for CakePHP 1.2 and decided to incorporate as much built in functionality as possible so I’m using the Auth Component - which is great - but one thing kept bugging me, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to get the messages from Auth to display in my views - but by debugging I could see they were sitting there right in the Session.

I spent a long time Googling and looking at the API for clues, eventually in desperation I looked at the cookbook (I have no idea why I hadn’t already looked there - as I use it a lot…) and the answer was both very easy and staring me right in the face.

Just pop the following in a view or layout:

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if ($session->check('Message.auth')) {
		$session->flash('auth');
	}

There are a couple of problems that just aren’t really fixable using a pure CSS solution, firstly <select> menus look pretty horrible no matter what you to them and <textarea> fields look fairly bad, but even worse than their aesthetic merits (or lack of rather) is the fact that the overflowing content i.e. the content that you need to scroll to see, will not be printed.

In the end for the application I ended up adding views, but it got me thinking and so I’ve written a quick jQuery plugin to print forms. It works by looking for any <select> menus or <textarea> fields and replacing them with <div> tags styled to look like form elements. When you click on one of the <div>s to edit it, it reverts to the original form element and when it looses the focus (using the jQuery blur() method) the field is swapped back and replaced by the <div>.

When you come to print the form because all of the <select> menus and <textarea> fields have been replaced by <div>s you can style them as you want using a print style sheet and get a nice looking form with no missing content.

Have a look at the working example and view source to see how to use it.

download printform plugin example

You will want to edit / write CSS for both screen and print appropriate to your situation.
Tested on IE6, IE7, Firefox 2.0.

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/*
 * printform 1.0
 * By John Elliott (http://www.flipflops.org)
 * Copyright (c) 2008 John Elliott
 * Licensed under the MIT License: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php
*/
 
/**
 * convert textareas and select tags to divs so that you HTML forms can be printed.
 *
 *
 *
 * @name printform
 * @type jQuery
 * @author John Elliott (http://www.flipflops.org)
 * @desc 
 * 
 * @example $('#tester').printform();
 * @desc call the plugin on #tester - any select or textareas will be replaced
 *
 * @param settings - not used, but included for future proofing! (I'm sure there will be options sometime...)
 *
*/
 
jQuery.fn.printform = function(settings){
	return this.each(function(){
		new jQuery.printform(this, settings);
	});
}
 
 
 
jQuery.printform = function(obj, settings) {
 
  	/*
  	* within a parent object - replace the textareas and select menus
  	*/
 
 
 	init(obj, 'textarea');
	init(obj, 'select');	
 
 
	function init(obj, fieldType) {
 
	/*
	* loop through each instance of an element within the parent 
	*/
 
		obj = jQuery(obj).attr('id');
 
		jQuery('#' + obj + ' ' + fieldType).each( function() {
 
			var id = jQuery(this).attr('id');
 
			field_replacer(id, fieldType);
		});
	}		
 
 
	function field_replacer(id, fieldType) {
 
	/*
	* function to replace the elements with divs
	*/
 
			str = jQuery('#' + id).val();
			str = str.replace(/\n/g, '<br />');
 
			if ( jQuery('#replace-' + id).length > 0 ) {
				// if a replacement div already exists for this element, then just show it.
				// update the content of the replacer with the edited content
				jQuery('#replace-' + id).html(str).show();			
			} else {
				// otherwise create a new replacement div for the element
				jQuery('#' + id).after('<div class="' + fieldType + '-replace" id="replace-' + id + '">' + str + '</div>');			
			}
 
			jQuery('#' + id).hide(); // hide the element that has just been replaced
			field_watcher(id, fieldType); // add event listeners
	}											
 
	function field_watcher(id,  fieldType) {
 
	/*
	* add listeners to the elements
	* onclick - show the original element and hide the replacer
	* onblur - call the field_replacer to update the page
	*/
 
		jQuery('#replace-' + id).click(function() {
 
		jQuery('#' + id).show().focus();
		jQuery('#replace-' + id).hide();
 
		jQuery('#' + id).blur(function() {
 
			field_replacer(id,  fieldType);								
 
		});
	});
	}
};

Thanks to to Mike Alsup for his great (if rather daunting) guide to writing plugins on Learning jQuery.

You have a series of entries in a database with a start (date)time and an end (date)time and before adding a new record you need to check that it doesn’t overlap with another booking.

The solution is fairly simple but I always end up making a quick diagram on a piece of paper to check.

As you can see two time periods can either be sequential (i.e. there is no overlap at all) or they can overlap in one of four ways. Put this into a diagram and the solution becomes pretty obvious.

There is an overlap if end_time_1 > start_time_2 AND start_time_1 < end_time_2

An example SQL query would be something like the one below but make sure your datetime formats are correct - in MySQL the default format is YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss

 
SELECT * FROM bookings WHERE room_id = '" . $room_id . "' AND ((date_end > '" . $start_date . "') AND (date_start < '" . $end_date . "')) ";

The above query will pull back the records where the times overlap.

I’ve been using this as a bit of a test bed for various aspects of Art-Thing but it is also a fun little project in its own right. AND even better it should be ready very soon, it is a directory of UK businesses and services with a pretty flat structure based on tagging and regions. Fast, easy to use and fun (if a business directory can be fun).

The site is almost ready to launch and the whole process from the first ideas until now has been very quick - it is built in CakePHP 1.2 and jQuery which make coding a pleasure again. It’s also fun to do a bit of design for a change instead of just the stuff under the hood.

Here is a sneak preview:

If you own or manage a business in the UK why not sign up for FREE with blinks.org.uk and see how it can help your business.

blinks.org.uk is a brand new directory of businesses and services based in the UK.

Every entry in the directory is approved by a real person and businesses have to provide their actual address so the directory is completely spam free and only contains quality listings.

• Link back to your website (great for SEO)
• Add a description of your business or service
• Add an image or company logo
• Update your entry whenever you want
• Add you business or service to multiple categories
• Add tags (keywords) - that are right just for you
• Automatically show your location on our map