I recently found myself creating more and more objects to store data within apps. I’m not going to get into all the ins and outs of why this is good practice, but it lead me to whipping up this simple script. I had seen a few other similar tools on the inter-webs but none of them worked quite like I needed.

If you’e not familiar with the OO approach for storing data within a script (is there a better way to describe this?) here the gist.

Say you are storing user profile information in your favorite RDBMS. You have a user profile page and will pull data for a specific profile to use in that page. Well, instead of just doing a fetch and grabbing data – creating a bunch of variables, etc., you can take the OO approach. Load all those vars into an object, with nice features like getters and setters – which may manipulate the data, etc. Then you have a clean interface to the data.

My IDE doesn’t have any wizards for this stuff (I think Eclipse can – or has plugins that can) and it can be a bit time consuming to do. Also – its very repetitive to get your basic class structure together. SO – why not write a little script to do this! Like I said, I have seen some others out there that were apparently written for PHP4 or just didn’t format the methods like I prefer.

Check it out and let me know what you think.
http://webguru.org/getset

The resulting class allows you to do stuff like this:

<?php

// create an array of basic user data
$data = array();
$data["user_id"] = 3;
$data["name"] = "Brian Bell";
$data["email"] = "brian@example.com";

$user = new UserDataObj( $data );
echo "User {$user->get_name()} has an id of {$user->get_id()} and an email address of {$user->get_email()}. ";

/*
  You can also instantiate the object with no argument,
  and set things manually
*/
$user = new UserDataObj();
$user->set_name("Brian Bell");
$user->set_email("brian@example.com");

// also comes in handy to pass the data object to your CrUD methods
$new = new Users();
/*
  pass in the data object from above so
  the create_user() method has everything it needs.
*/
$new->create_user( $user );

?>

Let me know if you have any comments or suggestions. I don’t have a lot of time to contribute to it – but I can easily see how it could be extended to give the user some options on formatting, etc.

This site has popped up with an easy way to search and drill-down into the entire text of the House Stimulus bill. Just take a few minutes and browse through this pork-packet. Unbelievable!!

http://code.google.com/p/phpmultithreadeddaemon/

Here’s their example of how to implement it. Everything needed to run the daemon is in the single included file “class.MTDaemon.php” – cool!

<?php

error_reporting(E_ALL);

require_once(include/class.MTDaemon.php);

class MTTest extends MTDaemon {

public function getNext($slot)
{
$this->lock();
$num = $this->getVar("num");
if ($num == null) $num = 1;
if ($num > 100) {
$this->unlock();
return null;
}
$this->unlock();

$rand = rand(0, 5);
echo "Next for slot " . $slot . " : " . $rand . "\n";
if ($rand == 0) return null;
else return $rand;
}

public function run($next, $slot)
{
$rand = rand(3, 10);
$this->lock();
$num = $this->getVar("num");
$this->setVar("num", $this->getVar("num") + 1);
$this->unlock();
echo "## Iteration #" . number_format($num) . " in " . $rand . "sec" . "\n";

sleep($rand);
return 0;
}

}

$mttest = new MTTest(2);
$mttest->handle();

?>

Bottom line is that nobody is really using Silverlight – besides MS’s attempts to force it down your throat on their own website and through some strategic marketing moves (ie. with NBC Olympics online coverage).  Plus, the sites that do offer streaming media via Silverlight were thankfully not stupid enough to make that your only option.  I haven’t been to a site yet that doesn’t offer me the same feature with Flash Video for example.

Anyway – there is a newer version of Silverlight out -  so when I visit a page that is trying to stream content via the Silverlight plugin, I get this error:

How awesome is that?  Did MS really think I could click the link and get to the update page? No – maybe I was expected remember that URL or write it down so that I could quickly download the newer version and get to my content.

How classic is that?!?!

And so, last Friday, in stumbled Sens. Lindsey Graham, John Thune, Saxby Chambliss, Bob Corker and Johnny Isakson — alongside five Senate Democrats. This “Gang of 10″ announced a “sweeping” and “bipartisan” energy plan to break Washington’s energy “stalemate.” What they did was throw every vulnerable Democrat, and Mr. Obama, a life preserver.

Here are the dirty details from the WSJ.

Way to go Lindz, you really know what the people want.

An example in a MySQL query would be this.

<?php
// build our sql string.
$sql = "SELECT * FROM table WHERE field=%d";
$sqlf = sprintf( $sql, $somevalue );
$db->query($sqlf);
?>

As you can see, you can designate where the substitution will take place in the $sql string. That’s easy. But what happens if you need to use MySQL’s DATE_FORMAT() function? It requires that you pass in arguments to define its output (ie. Day as a word, day as a date, month as a number, etc).

<?php
// build our sql string.
$sql = "SELECT DATE_FORMAT( %b %M %d %Y, some_date_field ) as myDate FROM table WHERE field=%d";
$sqlf = sprintf( $sql, $somevalue );
$db->query($sqlf);
?>

This will fail. sprintf() will complain because you haven’t passed in enough arguments. It is expecting 5 values as part of the call, instead of just the one that you are trying to replace (in the SQL WHERE clause).

So what’s the solution? You have to “comment-out” the % that aren’t part of your sprintf() substitution. You can do this by putting another % in front of the ‘%’ symbols in the DATE_FORMAT() function. This deems them as a literal percent-sign instead of the start of another sprintf() “variable”.

<?php
// build our sql string.
$sql = "SELECT DATE_FORMAT( %%b %%M %%d %%Y, some_date_field ) as myDate FROM table WHERE field=%d";
$sqlf = sprintf( $sql, $somevalue );
$db->query($sqlf);

Hope that helps!

Oh – and it would be helpful for you to know that affectedRows is a method in a database class.

A method, that’s right.  Unfortunately for me, method is not spelled, v-a-r-i-a-b-l-e.

Amazing what two little ( ) can do to your stress level.
if ($this->dbi->affectedRows()>0) {

There are many places on the ‘net that you can find “comparable” batteries for your APC (and other) backup units.  Knowing that my friend Jason replaces battery backups with some frequency, I asked for his opinion.  He led me to Gruber Power Services.  What a find!

The prices are extremely reasonable (e.g. $15.99 for a “RBC2″ comparable battery which is $40 through APC and other sites). You obviously have to pay for shipping these heavy lead-acid batteries, but that is the case with any site from which you order.  Shipping for the entire order ended up being about $100 bucks (ugh!).

All told, I estimate that I saved about $350 (incl. shipping) by ordering from Gruber.  Assuming the rest of my experience matches those of my friend, I highly recommend them.

UPDATE (7/23/08): Got a personal email this morning from “Dawn” thanking me for my order and providing to me the UPS tracking numbers for my shipment.  Pretty cool.

UPDATE (7/30/08): The batteries were delivered Monday, as projected.  I have installed one of them so far and it fit well, connected easily and seems to be a great product.

I’m very interested in where I-540/NC540 will be built (assuming NC comes up with the money, and by that I mean raises taxes, builds toll booths and/or Gov. Mike Easley stops robbing the Highway Trust Fund).  The Southern Wake Expressway and the Eastern Wake Expressway will be a great boon to the area and will make it so much easier to get around the triangle if you live in the increasingly popular corridor between Cary and Fuquay-Varina.  So, I did some searching and found the projected routes on the NC DOT Projects website.

I’ve transferred what I found there on various maps into Google Maps.  The route should be pretty close to what is shown on the planning maps from DOT.  I used the satellite view from Google Maps and my own common sense to determine where certain road and property crossing would take place.  For example, I made the assumption that they would snake the road in and around established neighborhoods.  I could be wrong, but I think it is a pretty close approximation of the anticipated route.

Google Maps allows you to export a custom map into a KMZ file, suitable for viewing in Google Earth.  I am making that file available here as well.

We had a great time visiting this tiny island near Aegina in the Saronic Gulf, south of Athens, Greece.