Very Frustrated with mysql on the mac

So I just discovered a little bug with mysql in general, and which I am finding extra frustrating on the install I have set up on my mac. The short version of the problem is that if you have a whole lot of tables in a database the application “mysqldump” no longer works, producing

Got error: 1016: Can’t open file: ‘./<database>/<table>.frm’ (errno: 24) when using LOCK TABLES

So I followed up on this, and it seems like this is a somewhat known bug. In particular the problem is noted here: http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?28,162893,162893 along with a solution. However for some reason the mac version of mysql is not obeying the open-files-limit param, either when I pass it through the command line of mysqldump (which doesn’t recognize it as a viable option, or when it is set in the config file my.cfg and rebooted. I happen to be runing mysql version 5.0.51a

SEO and title tag density

How does keyword density in the title tag affect search engine placement? On Facts about Title Keyword Density, it says that Live.com rewards high keyword density in a title tag, whereas Google.com punishes high keyword density in a title tag.

I don’t really care about search engines other than Google. I’ve heard SEO experts claim that Yahoo! and MSN/Live still contribute a fair number of clicks, but that’s not true according to my server stats. I’d like to find out if Google really does punish keyword density in a title tag.

I created 3 similar pages for a fictional person, whose name currently return zero results in Google. Using the name as the search term, there are 3 different keyword weights.

  1. Test A (100%)
  2. Test B (50%)
  3. Test C (9%)

This may not be the best test methodology, but at least it’s a start. In a few days, I’ll see how Google ranks them. Any opinions on how the pages will rank?

Cake CleanUpFields

Yesterday night I managed to get stuck on my cake project it two separate places, which is sort of amazing since I have only been stuck with cake once other than that on this project. (To Be fair, One of the problems is with Plesk, may it’s name be damn for a thousand years, not cake)

Anyway, I just solved the other problem thanks to the comments on this post, and I thought I would share.

When you cuse cake’s helper to pick a date/time it builds a whole lot of sub-fields. Then when cleanUpFields is called it stitches them all back together into one date time. However, it’s a little too smart for its own good, it only stitches them back together if it knows about the date-time, and it only knows about the date-time if that field is in the primary model for the controller your working with. This means that if you are using a second model , it wont fix the date-times.

The good news is that their is a work-around for that, you can simply call cleanUpFields again, with the second, or third model name as a param. (I.E. $this->cleanUpFields(‘payments’); )

What I haven’t found a work around for however, is if you want to get a date that doesn’t belong to a model at all. hopefully I will stumble on an answer as I continue with this, If I do I’ll post it in the comments.

Tottling around CakePHP

My research into CakePHP has, up to this point has been pretty positive. It seems to address most of the big issues I have had with other frameworks, and the code and tutorials all look good.

Because it was looking so good, I decided that I would go ahead and give it a whirl on an actual live project. I chose one that was small and urgent. (The urgent part may not have been wise, since for me personally cake is still unproven, but it seemed like a good fit) and I have been pounding out code for it since then.

So far I’m pretty happy with it, the code virtually never makes me cry, though I run into a lot of road-bumps almost all of them seem to be learning curve issues, and I haven’t actually gotten stuck on anything yet, just briefly derailed occasionally.

The Bake application that comes with cake, which is a small php script that lets you generate starting PHP code is really great for me, because it does cover a lot of gruntwork in a snap, though sometimes it crashes when I’m trying to generate specific models, but it’s probably good, for learning purposes, that I’m forced to write the occasional one by hand.

At the moment I still strongly prefer the smarty template engine to the way views are handled in cake, but the two are not incompatible, and it also may be just a case of me being set in my ways. Perhaps when I really get to know the helper functions a bit better I will be happier with this aspect of cake.

Oh, and the one thing that has caused me the most trouble so far is singular vs plural names. For some reason bake messes up the pluralizations when it is generating the rules for many to many models, and I don’t seem to have a feel for what should be singular and what should be plural.

Still, even with all the bitching I’m doing, I’m really happy with cake. I would say that development using it is going about on schedule, which is pretty good for the first time with a framework, and I feel like it is going to save me a lot of pain at the end with debugging and maintainability.

The Greater-Than Gator

I lost a lot of time yesterday thanks to tracking down an alligator in an import utility. There was one itsy-bitsy little function that wreaked big havoc, thanks to a confused gator that didn’t know which way to look.
Greater Than Alligator
That’s right, there was a < when there should have been a >. (Or since it was ColdFusion code, there was a LT where there should have been a GT.)

The import utility was developed by a guy with a masters degree in computer science, so it just goes to show you that no amount of expertise can prevent such an error (or, quite possibly in this case, a typo).

It was an easy fix, of course, but fixing all the data that had been incorrectly imported in the past took a bit longer. It cost me a few hours, but that’s better than causing a credit crisis. Either way, it reinforced in my mind the idea that we could use some unit testing around here. Sure, it might take a little extra time to write the tests, but probably less than the amount of time I spent hunting down the pesky little gator and fixing the mess it left in its wake.

strike one against cakePHP

So I’m looking into the cakePHP framework, because, well why not. (for those not in the know cake is to php as rails is to ruby) Install is quite painless, but I’m still in the documentation, and I have already bumped into something that makes me cringe. The naming conventions require some classes to be singular, and some to be plural, and there is automatic translation between the the two. (I.E. you don’t declare where the singular class should look for the plural one, it just appends an s and goes to look for it) I’m sure some of you know that English is just not that regular a language.

This of course means there has to be a way to add exceptions

Cake’s naming conventions can be really nice – you can name your database table big_boxes, your model BigBox, your controller BigBoxesController, and everything just works together automatically. The way CakePHP knows how to tie things together is by inflecting the words between their singular and plural forms.

There are occasions (especially for our non-English speaking friends) where you may run into situations where CakePHP’s inflector (the class that pluralizes, singularizes, camelCases, and under_scores) might not work as you’d like. If CakePHP won’t recognize your Foci or Fish, editing the custom inflections configuration file is where you can tell CakePHP about your special cases. This file is found in /app/config/inflections.php.

In this file, you will find six variables. Each allows you to fine-tune CakePHP inflection behavior.

Ugg!! I can just imagine getting caught by this one as part of a learning curve and walking away from the whole damn framework because of it. But I guess this is one open manhole cover that I managed not to fall into.

Built a Tiny Module for phpShop

So I built a tiny new module for phpShop, for one of my clients. Honestly It would have been easier to just slap the code into an already present module, but I wanted to see what it was like to add one from scratch. It was pretty painless, though the permission structure is a little weird in some ways. (I’ll go into it in more detail if anyone is curious)

Really the only thing that caught me off guard with adding a new module, was that you need to register it, and any new functions that it supports in the database. (shockingly in the module and function table respectively) Other than that you basically just write the damn things. Pretty clean and easy.

So Far phpShop is pretty sweet

Well, I have gotten shin deep into phpShop now, and at this point I’m pretty darned happy with what I have seen. Since I have been so dramatically UNHAPPY with most of the other shopping cart implementations that I have run into in PHP, this is something of a godsend. At the moment my only significant complaint is that it uses PHP directly as its template engine, and at this point I’m a HUGE fan of smarty. However I think that this can be dismissed for the moment as a small bump in the road, and if I end up using this heavily, then perhaps I will end up patching smarty onto it.

Other than that, some of the file names could be slightly more descriptive (what is the diff between p_header.ihtml s_header.ihtml and c_header.ihtml) but that would just make an already fairly gentle learning curve easier, its not really a problem.

So far, I give php shop a big thumbs up

Looking into phpShop

Well, I just grabbed a small contract to tweak some stuff in an online shopping cart called phpShop. I have had quite a few run-ins with a huge variety of carts written in PHP, and by and large they have been horrible. OScart is a train-wreck, zen cart is not pretty, but is survivable. So far though, phpShop looks sharp, clean and well written. It does seem to be a bit lightweight, but most of the time thats a good thing not a bad one. As I keep going on this, I will review phpShop in more detail.