My work at the 2010 CES in Las Vegas

This is so cool
My work at Great Connection: developing, filing patents, taking meetings, and most of all drinking coffee, has finally been outed is a significant way. Dr. Paul E. Jacobs, the CEO of Qualcomm and Dr. Eric J. Topol, a most prominent medical doctor working to improve IT in medicine, demonstrated Mobile Baby at [...]

Why isset() in PHP can be misleading

I thought this was worth noting even though a comment on php.net explain it very well.

You can not rely on isset() for associative arrays unless you know for a fact you are checking an array.

Why I switched to Wordpress

Last week (november, 2009) I installed Wordpress as the CMS for this website. I wanted to explain the rationale behind this move. I’ll explain why a web-developer would get an “off the rack” CMS and on top of that pick a commercial theme template to go with it.
Why not build my own CMS?
Why indeed. I [...]

Designing a modular application using CakePHP plugins

This article will try to explain how I build a modular application using plugins. I will cover how I implement them and integrate them into the main application.

Javascript variable definitions

The variable scope in javascript can still surprise me. This is a nice one I debugged today:
A variable that is not defined by “var” have a global scope. This can be a real pain since the globalization is implicit and easy to forget.
I forgot the “var” when writing a for loop and could not for [...]

StarSchema (OLAP) setup for reporting in CakePHP

When you need to gather statistics and reporting data from a large number of transactions (easily >1′000′000 rows) you need to transfer that data over to a reporting-friendly format to keep request times down. One popular database design for this is called a Star Schema. This is a simple re-usable StarSchema setup for CakePHP.

One core, one app, multiple domains for CakePHP

Dealing with configurations for multiple domains (environments) is always a topic for discussion. I wanted to share my way of dealing with this common problem. This will not be right for all, which is the point. If this does not suit you, there are a few links at the bottom.

Finding ordered position of a row in MySQL

This is slightly modified from something I found @ http://www.kirupa.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-263260.html
Using high-score lists or similar you often have a large number of rows where you want to know who is in 7th place or how well is id:254 doing.
This eliminates the slow looping in php of big result-sets by making a sub-query in MySQL.

SET @rownum := [...]

HTTP basic authentication in CakePHP with users from database

This is a few lines of code and explanations explaining how to get HTTP Auth to check against your normal users table.
Intended audience:
• You want to provide a protected RSS feed.
• You want to provide a protected API.

Migrating a real-world application from CakePHP 1.1 to 1.2

I thought I’d chronicle my work migrating my fist CakePHP application to CakePHP 1.2 (rc3 at the time of writing). The application was originally written for CakePHP 1.0 (= the good old days). It has been updated to work with the latest versions 1.1 but has not really been rewritten much.