Jackson’s Blog

Data inside a database should always be post-processed and ready-to-use-as-is. If you can rely on the data provided by the database to be usable as is, then you’ll save yourself a lot of string processing work. Think about it this way, if you have a string, let say “orange” and it’s stored in the database, and you had another string called “apple”, along with other fruit based strings stored in the database. When you do a search for these fruits, you can specify a where condition and then the fruit the name. Even with for usage, you can use the fruit name as is. Whereas if these strings had all these weird characters in it, “orange\’s” and “@pples”, then the where statement will no longer be as effective. Not only that, during run-time, you’ll have to have code to handle these weird characters appropriately. So if you’re ever inserting data into the database save yourself some problems in the future by ensuring that the strings are properly processed.

I’ve been playing with both Smarty and MVC. I can’t help but feel that having both Smarty and MVC is a bit redundant. Smarty was developed so that people with little to no programming experience can be involved in the designing process through the use of templates. MVC is known as Model, View, and Controller. The whole point of the system is to separate the components behind a major web application such that people with different backgrounds can come together and build an application. The model contains the business logic; it is the layer that accesses the database and prepares the data. The controller is the component that handles the parameters and figure out what kind of data it needs and where which views to render in order to achieve the result desired. The view is the component that contains the design for the application. It’s designed in such a way that even a person with no programming experience can code and develop.

It seems in that regard, Smarty and MVC are achieving the same thing. I know caching is a big benefit provided by Smarty, but you’ll find that most MVC frameworks have caching solutions as well.

The model I was coding employed the Table Data Gateway pattern, the resulting object was then feed into the Zend Paginator object, which is then supposed to be fed into a view. The object takes care of every aspect of pagination. Smarty also has a means of paginating, but it then in order for it to perform pagination, requires SQL statements thereby bypassing the model layer. Even if you attempt to pass the Zend Paginator object directly into Smarty, the iterator for the Zend Paginator is completely useless due to Smarty’s insistence on using arrays instead of objects. Although it’s possible that more recent versions of Smarty might’ve corrected this error, but this is one programmer who would have rather worked with Zend MVC instead of Smarty plus Zend MVC.

There are many ways in which code is rolled out.  I’ve noticed in the new environment I’m in, code roll outs are performed more in a “hot swap” fashion than an install / overwrite fashion. In an overwrite manner, code has been throughly tested in a dev and staging environment before being rolled out to live. Whereas in a hotswap environment, staging is on live, except in a different directory. When it’s time to implement the changes, the directories are merely moved around. I thought this concept is interesting because sometimes, even the staging environment, might not be a perfect replica of the live environment, and this “hot swap” can be an additional test on the code before it becomes live.

If you searched for my full name in Google for the past 3 weeks or so, you might have noticed that my site completely disappeared from the famous search engine. The reason it disappeared was probably due to my domain expiring and parked, but after 3 weeks of checking and waiting, it appears my site is once again, back on top. There’s a certain about of pride we web-programmers have in regards to our stuff being on top. I shall enjoy it while it lasts.

There really is no particular order in this list:

• Randy Pausch
• Albert Einstein
• Stephen Hawking
• Sun Tzu
• Bruce Lee
• Jet Li
• Stephen Chow

Today, I after watching Stephen Hawking lecture on “The Big Question”, I found a new appreciation for this man. He can only communicate through twitching his cheek, the other parts of his body is rendered completely useless. This man takes roughly 7 minutes to write 20 words. Yet, he finds the ability to give full-blown lectures, books, and to be optimistic about his situation. He states that his conditions actually gives him a lot of freedom to pursue one of his greatest interest in life; Solving the mysteries of the universe. I admire this man not only for his intellect, but his bright-facing outlook, and his ability deal with the countless problems in his day to day life. People like Stephen Hawking make me realize how strong humans can be, how they look adversity in the face and overcome it.

The question is “How does this tie into programming?” If Stephen Hawking can overcome the challenges he faces, the problems we face in the computer world seems trivial in comparison. Men like Stephen Hawking gives me strength tackle monstrous applications and crazy product requirements with great confidence that the problems I face can be overcome.

There already tons and tons of articles on this topic, but I think this knowledge is definitely nifty, so I decided to repeat this information in my blog.

A tracking pixel is a script that is disguised as an image. Each time the image loads, the script does whatever it was coded to do, but at the same time returns an image. This image doesn’t need to be a pixel, but a pixel is the smallest graphical information you can return. The pixel doesn’t need to be transparent either, but I just think it’s annoying to see an out of place pixel sitting on the edge of the page. So for all those who are like me, we like to implement something called a transparent pixel. Without further ado here is the php code for a transparent pixel:

header('Content-Type: image/gif');
header("Last-Modified: " . gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s") . " PST");
header("Pragma: no-cache");
$img = imagecreatetruecolor(1,1);
$color = imagecolorallocate($img, 0, 0, 0);
imagecolortransparent($img, $color);
return imagegif($img);


The header code is telling the browser that the file is a gif and to not cache it. If you want your tracking pixel to work well, it’s best for you to include it.

For those hardcore nerds out there, you can save the generated gif into a file, check if the file is there, and if it exists, use that existing gif instead of creating a new one. Not only does this method prevent regeneration of the gif, it also allows you to pass file size information through the headers.

For those even more hardcore nerds out there, you can simply print the string that represents a transparent pixel, it’ll save you all that image creation code. Although you’ll sacrifice readability, since only a handful of us can look at a string of bytes and is able to tell exactly its supposed to be.

I know flash objects could be listed on MySpace pages for quite some time, but I didn’t really understand what this meant for MySpace pages until I went to a friend’s site. I’ve noticed that my friend’s MySpace on, well, MySpace looked and behaved absolutely different than any other MySpace I’ve seen so far. Being the code monkey I am, I decided to investigate. It turns out, her MySpace page has been pretty much replaced by a massive flash file, and everything else is hidden away. I thought this was very interesting, and opens a lot of possibilities for further development of MySpace pages.

I love tinkering with the technology and creating my own version of it, but for those who don’t want to do that, here’s a link to the page that does it for you: http://www.lovemyflash.com/