Given time I’d like to introduce a similar row by row checksum, which should be easy enough for tables with a primary key. PhpMyDiff is still a long way from complete, but it may slowly get there!

Oh, it should also be possible to compare any database type supported by Zend_Db now, although I haven’t had the chance to test this at all. I’m sure something will break, as a few of my queries are probably MySQL specific!!

Feedback would be great if anyone gets the time… check it out at http://code.google.com/p/phpmydiff/

There seemed to be many ways of comparing the schema of two databases, but nothing to compare the changes in data (unless I was looking in the wrong places). I decided to write something that would help me out and have released it publicly.

You provide the connection details of two databases (server, username, password, name),  select the tables you would like to compare and hit “Compare”. The resulting page is a list of all schema and data changes.

There are plans to style the application (at the moment its simple blocks and tables) and more importantly, allow you to select which differences you would like to apply before creating a .sql diff file.

If its something you’re interested in, trying check out the google code page for the project. Its currently in beta with better performance, stability and functionality to come!

phpMyDiff at Google Code

One change worth mentioning for 2.0.11 is that the tinymce plugin no longer calls wp_head. This should fix a number of compatibility issues with other plugins! Download it now at WP Plugins: RB Internal Links.

The change log:

v2.0.7 (17/11/2009)

• Fixed conflict with WP-Super-Cache
• Fixed encoding issues with preselected text, particularly foreign characters
• Moved js and css for tinymce plugin to seperate files
• Temporary work around for wp_enqueue_script with tiny_mce_popup.js
• Post, page and category names printed using _e on tinymce plugin

I’ve also updated the support forum to bbPress, after wasting an hour trying to delete spam posts from phpBB. Sorry to anyone that has posted on the old forum, hopefully bbPress will do a better job (it seems a little toooo simple). If you need help or just want to say hi, check out the RB Internal Link support forums.

The idea was to scatter faded logos of the different websites around the page and as the user draws their mouse closer to the logo, the opacity increases and the logo gets brighter. I think it looks good, although I guess I could be confused with cheesy? I like it, I’m keeping it. :p

So, if you’d like to do something similar yourself I’d suggest you take the shortcut I discovered after coding up my own class, and just download this jquery plugin: jQuery approach

But if you were interested in the logic behind it, this is the core of the code:

$().mousemove(function(e){
elements.each(function(i, element){
var box = $(element);
var distance = parseInt(Math.sqrt(Math.pow(e.pageX-element.center.x,2) + Math.pow(e.pageY-element.center.y,2)));
var distanceRatio = (settings.distance - distance) / settings.distance;
 
if(distance <= settings.distance)
{
var percentage = distanceRatio + settings.minimum;
box.css('opacity', percentage);
}
 
});
 
});

To save calculating the center on each mouse update, I calculate those on page load and store them on the element object using this code:

elements.each(function(i, element){
var box = $(element);
var offset = box.offset();
var center = { x: (offset.left + (box.width()/2)), y: (offset.top + (box.height()/2)) };
element.center = center;
});

RB Internal Links

Not had a chance to update the plugin with any cool features yet. As far as I know, the only thing people are waiting on is better language/encoding support. I will get round to this soon!

Work

Works been busy but fun, we’ve just launched a new product. It’s a financial content management system (yes, shameless plug) that accepts fund data in a variety of formats and produces graphs and statistics etc. Its also bundled with the usual suite of CMS features, all tailored to the financial sector.

We’re also thinking of moving offices soon, got our eye on a very nice place not too far away. After this summer the lure of air conditioning in every office was just too tempting. It’s also got its own datacenter which will house our development server nicely!

Play

Just got back from a tranquil week away in the south of France. Got to take the new car with me, was a lot of fun! I took a picture on my phone one morning when we went to get breakfast, came out a little blurry.

My C30 in Monfort

When working on the UI of a web application text would often get selected by the browser incorrectly, for example while dragging an element, or clicking on an element with an onclick event.

If you are using jquery already; download it, include it, then use:

$(‘.elementsToDisableSelectFor’).disableTextSelect();

If you need this functionality without including the whole of jquery, take a look at the source code for the plugin. It’s only about 20 lines long. It uses a different method for Firefox and Internet Explorer, with a fallback for everything else but it should be easy to convert in to native JS or another javascript framework.

The point of this post is to gauge any interest, either by comments or (more likely), hits from google. I’ll outline my plan for anyone interested.

An individual signs up to the service through a short two step form. Step 1 asks for their email address and a password to use with the site. On submission an email is sent to the address given to verify that the person has the ‘right’ to email from that account.

Once confirmed there would be two ways to send email at a scheduled time from your own email address.

Method 1

Log in to the site and use a simple email form, similar to any other webmail service. One would be able to specify a list of recipients, the subject, message and any attachments followed by the all important send date.

Method 2

Using your prefered email application, you compose the email and send it to an email address (delay@mail.com for example). In the body of that message are some parameters that tell the service who to send the email to and at what time. I was thinking something like:

(test@mail.com, test2@mail.com : 2pm 1st Decemeber 2007)

followed by the rest of the message. The beauty of this method is you can write the message in thunderbird, outlook, gmail or whatever else you use, and still delay the time the email is sent out to recipients. It’d even work from a blackberry.

Concerns

Put simply, spam and spoofing. There would be the verification step, but I wonder whether this would be possible to bypass? Plus the email would be sent from a server I hosted, not the domains reverse dns IP. Perhaps the mail would be frequently makred as spam?

If this sounds like a service you’d like to use please leave a comment. I don’t want to spend too much time on it if I’m the only person that will use it!

There are a number of options available to do this:

1. Using a flash (swf) file to perform the upload
2. Using a java applet to perform the upload
3. Using an HTML file input box to create a hidden array of file input boxes

My issue with #3 is that you still have to individually select all the files in a folder before clicking upload. If you want to upload 50 files, thats 100 clicks and a case of RSI. So, I ignored #3 entirely.

Ideally,  I wanted solution #1, but I found a lot of answers to solution #3,  followed by #2. In the end I tried out four different solutions, all open source.

SWFUpload

By far my favourite, and the one we ended up using, this is the same tool wordpress use for their image upload plug

in. It is the most difficult to configure, but its got the most flexibility. SWFUpload uses a .swf file for the actual file uploads, which get posted to a script you specify in the setup. There are then a load of javascript callbacks that allow you to track the progress of files and update your page with the results. All in all, very impressed.

Check it out and download it here: http://www.swfupload.org

There are also demos at: http://demo.swfupload.org

UPDATE: I stumbled across a blog post with a tutorial for creating your own flash file, incase you don’t

want to use SWFUpload. It looks pretty simple, so check it out: Multiple File Upload Using Flash

jUpload

jUpload was the first tool I tried, but couldn’t get the Firefox Java plugin working on my desktop (ubuntu) and so gave up. I’m sure the tool would have done the job, but I’d have needed to compile it and more importantly, it looks ugly.

Check it out at: http://jupload.sourceforge.net

jQuery-transmit

Had this worked for me, I think it could have been pretty good. It works on the same principal as SWFUpload, but with seemingly less features. The fact that it used jQuery made me want to use it.

Check it out at: http://code.google.com/p/jquery-transmit/

jQuery multiple file upload plugin

This uses option #3 from the list above, and I couldn’t get it to work. It may have been something silly I was doing but, because it uses method #3, I didn’t spend too long trying to fix it.

If you’re still interested in trying it, check out: http://www.fyneworks.com/jquery/multiple-file-upload/

In conclusion, if you have the knowledge and patience to set up SWFUpload, it really pays off. Once the file manager is done I’ll put up a demo, I’m unashamedly impressed. For now I’ve got a screenshot. Ignore how ugly it is (and the garish colours), I haven’t given it to the designers yet!

SWFUpload concept demo

The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades (keynote)

I’d never heard of Aral before, and as he cheesily ran across the stage at the beginning (to a silent reaction) I was a little worried! It turns out I’d judged him too soon, as the talk turned out to be really interesting. I think his point about remembering the first piece of code you ever wrote, and how excited you were about what it did, really hit home with a lot of the people in the audience. He finished with “make sure you’re always working on things that excite you” (paraphrased, I’ll try to find the actual quote).. which is something I really want to work towards, but sometimes you just need to pay the bills.

Sharding Architectures

I’d already heard Scott talk about the new features of 5.3 so thought I’d checking Sharding. Although I didn’t know what “Sharding” was before the talk, I was familiar with the technique, I just didn’t know what it was called! I thought the topic was delivered well, although some key points were missing from the explanation of consistent hashing.

Of Lambda Functions, Closures and Traits

Sebastien’s opening line: “I’d like to confirm that Marcus and I don’t hate each other”. I’d not heard any rumours but had always wondered what would happen if the SimpleTest and UnitTest creators had met up. Apparently nothing. It was great to see some of the new PHP 5.3 features and examples of how to use them. I’m looking forward to the introduction of Lamba functions and closures but it sounds like there are a few useful (perhaps even key) related features that didn’t make it in to 5.3 in time that will hopefully get in to a future release soon. I couldn’t think of a use case for functors though?

Living with Frameworks

Although Stuart tried to stay impartial, he is clearly a big fan of Symfony. :p I think 80% of the room were already familiar with frameworks, me included, but it was good to hear other people had experienced similar issues to us when implemeting a framework. Towards the end I got a little bored with the reading of the quotes from Will, James and Bob (or whatever their names were). The talk was pretty popular though, and I was the last one to get in.. which was lucky, as the alternative was PHP on Windows. Its not that I have a problem with Windows, I just won’t be switching any time soon.

Flex and AIR for PHP programmers

Not a lot to say about this talk. Flex is something I’m interested in getting in to and so it was good to see Mihai creating an application live on stage. But I’m still not sure I had enough info to get me started. I’m gonna email him for one of those free books.

Security-Centered Design — exploring the impact of human behavior

I’d not heard of Chris before either, but he seems like an interesting guy and was pretty happy to openly share his opinion on pretty much anything. The talk didn’t get in to anything too specific, but shared some ideas on how to subtly let users know that they are on a secure site or, that they’re on the wrong site in the case of phishing. Either way I left the talk feeling I’d learnt something and had a good time.

Otherwise, the rest of the day was great. Lunch was tasty, events ran on time and everything seemed well organised. The only downside? I didn’t win anything.