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PHP Curl not Working on Windows 7 or Windows 8 (PHP 64-bit version only)

Posted on 12/18/2013 at 11:10 am | Viewed 27,449 times | 0 comments

Download the Fixed Curl Version

Short Answer: you need to download and install the corrected version of libCurl for PHP to get it working on 64-bit versions of PHP. 

Download from this link:
http://www.anindya.com/php-5-4-3-and-php-5-3-13-x64-64-bit-for-windows/

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jQuery UI 1.10 Tabs - Getting Index of Current Tab

Posted on 03/18/2013 at 10:00 pm | Viewed 18,443 times | 0 comments

I remember being able to get the index of the current tab very easily from jQuery UI, something like ui.panel.index.  I couldn't find it in my code and figured out the way to do it with jQuery UI 1.10

Determining the Current Tab Index

Most of the documentation and examples for JQuery UI keep using the same basic code that doesn't really work if you have more than one tabbed-interface on any of your web pages.  The jQuery UI documentation tells you to do this:

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jQuery UI 1.10 Tabs - Using Aria-Controls to Set the URL of a Tab

Posted on 03/18/2013 at 01:00 pm | Viewed 80,059 times | 0 comments

I continue to find things that I overlooked on my upgrade to using jQuery UI 1.10.  This time it was the tabs API changes that got me. 

No more show(); Now use activate();

The first change that really did me in ("why aren't any of my tabs executing my show callback function???") was the elimination of the show() callback.  This callback used to be fired-off each time a panel was displayed.  The change is easy, just rename your callback to activate:

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Speeding Up Windows 8 for Web Development (using WAMP)

Posted on 02/25/2013 at 01:33 pm | Viewed 48,705 times | 0 comments

Here is my list of optimizations and changes you can make (and I've had to make) in order to get WAMP (and CakePHP) to run faster on my Windows 8 computer.

Speed Up WAMP Web Development on Windows 8

The short list, in order of importance (stop once you are happy with your localhost web server response time and speed):

• Get the latest version of WAMP.
  Start by downloading the latest wamp.  I used the 64 bit version.  Download WAMP here.
  
  
• Edit your hosts file.
  Make sure it has the proper entries, and most importantly, remove the IPv6 localhost setting.  Your Windows 8 hosts file should look like this:
  
  127.0.0.1          localhost
  #    ::1             localhost
  
  
• Disable IP v6
  A great tutorial can be found here.  My advice is to disable IPv6 BOTH ways- via the network adapter and via the regedit hack.
  
  
• Edit Apahce httpd.conf. 
  These tweaks are supposed to speed up the lstat() system calls when reading files/scanning directories.  They are:
  
  EnableMMAP On
  EnableSendfile On
  
  
• Edit PHP.ini
  Increase the real path cache size.  This helps when you have lots of files involved.
  
  ; Determines the size of the realpath cache to be used by PHP. This value should
  ; be increased on systems where PHP opens many files to reflect the quantity of
  ; the file operations performed.
  ; http://php.net/realpath-cache-size
  realpath_cache_size = 24M
  
  
• CakePHP: make sure debug is off.

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CakePHP Form Security Blackhole on Large Forms

Posted on 06/28/2012 at 11:11 am | Viewed 14,838 times | 0 comments

I kept getting the White Screen of Death (WSOD).  What we at Saco Design have appropriately named the behavior of the default blackhole Security Component setting.  The weird issue was that I was getting the issue only on the live server.  I had recently updated the live server's version of PHP to the latest 5.3.x release.  However, I neglected to update my local PHP version, which was still 5.3.5. 

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Upgrading CakePHP Application to 1.3 (from 1.2)

Posted on 09/27/2010 at 09:33 pm | Viewed 14,320 times | 2 comments

I've been waiting to publish a completed article until after I was done with my upgrade to CakePHP 1.3.  Well, it's taking a while.  I'm not blaming the CakePHP upgrade from 1.2 to 1.3 for taking so long.  I'm actually doing several large-scale changes to my code base, my server and my repository structure.  Until that time, I'm going to publish some notes I've been making for this article.

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Getting All ACL Permissions in One Lookup (CakePHP 1.3)

Posted on 09/19/2010 at 11:36 am | Viewed 21,231 times | 1 comment

The biggest hurdle I've had to overcome migrating my CakePHP application from 1.2 to the much improved 1.3 branch involves Plugins and the ACL component.  A while back I noticed that my backend was kind of sluggish due to all of the ACL lookups (that happen with each request) so I optimized my ACL database tables.  At that same time, I also discovered an incredible mysql query that would lookup all of the ACL permissions for a particular ARO.  This setup worked great... until I started upgrading to CakePHP 1.3. 

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CakePHP 1.3 Improvements Over CakePHP 1.2

Posted on 09/09/2010 at 02:01 pm | Viewed 14,125 times | 0 comments

I've been working on upgrading my CakePHP application to cake version 1.3.  It's a lot of work.  I find myself constantly consulting the CakePHP manual/book for answers.  There are many places to look for all of the improvements that were rolled into CakePHP 1.3 (at least coming from the 1.2 version).  For my own reference, I'm creating a list of all of the manual pages that reference improvements, new features and/or different ways of doing things in CakePHP 1.3.

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CURL on Windows Doesn't Work in PHP 5.2.14 ISAPI

Posted on 09/07/2010 at 08:17 pm | Viewed 13,822 times | 0 comments

Just a quick post to let everyone know what I just found out- the version of CURL (php_curl.dll) that ships with PHP 5.2.14 for Windows ISAPI doesn't work!  That's right- it doesn't work.  I tried the MSI PHP installer package, manual installs, moving dll files into Windows and System32 directories all to no avail.  The culprit: a bad version of php_curl.dll (at least that's my best guess).  The other culprit: using ISAPI, but I don't have time to figure out FastCGI at this point.

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Upgrading Jquery UI Tabs and it Stopped Working

Posted on 12/09/2009 at 08:16 pm | Viewed 12,961 times | 0 comments

I was upgrading the version of Jquery UI that I use with Site Avenger.  The last time I was in a rush, nothing seemed to work and I rolled the changes back.  This time, I took the time and decided to finally make this Jquery UI upgrade happen.  This time everything went swell, except my Jquery UI tabs plugin stopped working.  WTF?

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Best Eclipse Feature: Link With Editor

Posted on 05/21/2009 at 09:43 am | Viewed 16,719 times | 0 comments

I use Eclipse for all of my CakePHP development work.  I love that you can get code completion, class inheritance, and more by following these steps.  I also loved that I could have 20 something files opened, and when I changed the active document in the editor, my PHP Explorer hierarchy would change in response. 

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Keep Old Settings When Upgrading Eclipse

Posted on 05/12/2009 at 01:02 pm | Viewed 12,264 times | 0 comments

I decided to upgrade my version of Eclipse to 3.4 (Ganymede) mainly so I could use the Git plugin.  I wanted to migrate my settings from one install to the other.  I know I had done this before, when I upgraded from 3.2 to 3.3, but forgot how.  So I don't have to scratch my head so much next time, here is how you can move your settings after you upgrade your version of Eclipse.

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A tale of caution: naming CakePHP "view" functions

Posted on 05/06/2009 at 05:13 pm | Viewed 14,338 times | 2 comments

Spoiler: functions that generate a view must be named using lower_case_with_underscores()

I just ran into a very interesting problem.  I was testing out some of my plugins to make sure they were still working with Cake version 1.2.2.8120.  They worked fine except for one function.  I had a form that updates a shopping cart, changing the quantities of products placed in the cart.  When I hit the submit button to change the quantities, I was getting redirected to my site root. 

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Preformatted Text in TinyMCE <pre></pre>

Posted on 04/21/2009 at 10:26 am | Viewed 21,722 times | 1 comment

Now that I've got my blog up and running, I've been playing around with syntax highlighting of source code.  I really appreciate sites that serve up code samples in a nice format, so I've tried to comply with my own version of this best practice.

Getting Geshi working, for syntax highlighting was one battle (I'll try and post what I came up with later). My real trouble came with using <pre></pre> tags for my code samples within TinyMCE.  I absolutely love TinyMCE! I did a lot of research on the best JavaScript-based WYSIWYG editor oh about 5 years ago, and decided on TinyMCE and never looked back.  I use it in all of my applications that require formatted HTML input (especially Site Avenger).  Every now and then I will look at another editor (I know 5 years is ancient by web standards) but I've never found an editor I like more.  Each editor has its quirks and I think the quirks within TinyMCE are the most manageable (as I tell my clients- even MS Word has quirks, you're just used to them).

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