Welcome to my blog on PHP, ASP.NET, MVC Frameworks, Shopping Carts, IDEs and IT in General. Recently I have spent quite a lot of time research many IT related topics and often couldn't find all the info I was looking for in one place, so I decided to finally create a blog to aggregate and share the info to make other people's research a little bit easier (and add my 2c worth of course).
I’ve done a lot of research into email marketing providers as I needed to find a new one for our business. I searched far and wide and basically these are my findings…
We’ve got quite a few projects on the go at work and it’s become quite difficult to remember all the projects, the tasks needed in each project and more important making sure that the team is working on what they should be working, so I set out to find a better solution than just using Excel. The result was Web2Project. This is how I came to that choice…
So, you might have received a Don’t Count on It Wooden Puzzle Money Box from Crestcom or from someone else and wondering how to open it. The box of course most likely has money in it or something else of value that you probably want to get out. The easiest way to open the box is just to break it. Well if you’re a practical person that’s the best way to do it. That’s the way that I did it, not so much to get the $5, but as I was interested in how it works rather than getting the money out or keeping the box in one piece.
Well, the way it works is as follows:
There are two end pieces that have magnets glued into them. Then, the main frame has holes which are about one inch long and inside those holes are little metal rods about half an inch long. The way the box locks is by putting the metal rods into the holes then sliding the cover on and turning the box so that the metal rods slide inside the holes and make contact with the magnets at which stage they attach to the magnets. Once you know the actual construction it’s quite easy to work out ways of how to open the Don’t Count On It Wooden Puzzle Money Box.
I came up with the following ways:
1. The way I broke the box was to twist the end bit sideways (i.e. No in the direction of the slide). The end bit just popped out. This is the easy way but it kinda breaks the box slightly as it usually creates a crack along the joint between the 3 main bits that make up the main part of the box.
2. The best and proper way is to grab the box and tap it with a hard sharp blow on the floor (with one of the ends at the bottom) and then just slide the top end off. The basic idea here is that the intertia and the sudden stopping of the frame will make the rods separate from the magnets and fall into the holes. You might not get it the first time, but I believe that’s the PROPER way to open the box.
3. Use strong magnets to separate the metal rods from the little magnets inside the end. As nice as this sounds not everyone has a magnet lying around… In fact thats’ the way that I tried to open it initially, but didn’t have a strong enough magnet laying around, and doubt you would too.
4. Try to use some really sharp instrument to slide the rod away from the magnet via the tiny gap between the end and the main bit… This is a real pain in the ass and I tried this way also before opening the box using method 1.
I’ll also try to create some photos and videos and post them on YouTube for anyone interested.
WOW… I just did some comparisons between what Google Analytics reports in terms of traffic as well as e-commerce sales numbers and Google Analytics is just terrible. One would think it’s the best thing since sliced bread as it gives you all these ways to look at data, but when both the traffic and sales are out by HUGE numbers, you really change your mind. I really don’t know how on earth I would ever trust Google Analytics again when the difference is like 25% (and I’m talking sales here). That’s an absolutely massive difference and throws out your ratios completely. My recommendation for anyone considering using Google Analytics is DONT, unless you’re ok with completely wrong data being presented and you making decisions based on this data. If you want proper analysis you should use some tool that analyses your server logs, not a javascript based tool.
I’ve tried finding a comparison of Gigabit Ethernet vs USB 2.0 transfer speed performance on the internet but couldn’t find anything useful as everyone compared theoretical speeds rather than actual speeds saying that Gigabit is faster. I didn’t believe that as actual and theoretical transfer speeds are two different things. I did the testing myself on an SBS 2008 server with a powered external Seagate USB 2.0 3.5″ 1.5TB drive plugged into the server and compared that with a Gigabit ethernet Thecus NAS and copied 5GB files from both USB and the gigabit ethernet NAS onto the server. It’s also worth noting that the NAS is connected to the server via Cat6e cable via a quality Netgear Gigabit Ethernet Switch (with separate buffers on each channel, etc), and Both the NAS and the server have dual gigabit cards configured to run in a loadbalanced arrangement. The result I got was 2:45 for USB 2.0 external hard drive and 3:45 for the Gigabit Ethernet NAS. This was done on the weekend too, so there was no other load on the network. So even though in theory Gigabit Ethernet should be faster, in practice USB 2.0 is actually faster. So if you’re trying to work out whether to do backups to a NAS connected via gigabit lan or an external USB 2.0 drive then if performance is your main consideration the USB 2.0 drive should actually be faster. It’s also worth noting that 2.5″ USB 2.0 drive that draw their power from USB 2.0 actually seem to run a fair bit slower than the powered USB drive.
It’s pretty common to connect SAMBA based NASes and other devices to an SBS 2008 network. For example in our case we’ve got a Thecus NAS, but I’ve heard of other people trying to connect Netgear ReadyNAS, QNAP NAS and other NAS servers. It’s also pretty common to need to join these devices to the SBS 2008 Domain, which results in these items getting created in Active Directory. The problem however that this generates is that the Event Log / Event Viewer gets flooded with EventID 10009 DCOM Errors saying DCOM was unable to communicate with the computer <computer> using any of the configured protocols.
I’ve searched far and wide for the solution and still havn’t been able to find anything official. The best I came across was DCOM 10009 errors on SBS2008 with NAS. I tried doing that by deleting the computer record in AD and then creating a new record as pre Windows 2000 computer. I should also mention that I have these records in a separate OU under MyBusiness/Computers. After deleting and re-creating these records I had to re-join the devices to the domain. It looked like the issue was fixed, but then I checked the log again and it seems I’m still getting the DCOM 10009 errors, so not really sure what else to do. Either way, this is the only reasonable solution that might actually fix it for you, and if you don’t re-join the device to the domain after deleting and re-creating the device in AD, then you might not be able to authenticate with the device at all. Hope this helps.
I’m writing a new app using Yii Framework, but one of my concerns with Yii has been the impact of using ActiveRecord and ORM on the application performance, so I decided to actually compare how the two perform and the results are quite interesting…
All I have to say is WOW… I decided to give CodeIgniter a try as it’s a pretty light weight library and doesn’t try to force you into using ActiveRecord, but guess what? There isn’t a built-in template layout concept so you can add a consistent header and footer and that’s like the most common thing anyone will do with a website.
I’ve been working with database driven applications and object oriented programming for a while now and every time I try to marry up the two patterns I cringe. Many people seem to love ActiveRecord pattern but it has many shortcomings in that it can only deal with very simple applications and everything is in one place. Likewise DataMapper at the other extreme is quite complex and you end up doing a lot of shuffling of data in the application. However what’s even worse is that in complex database driven applications you often want to do things like retrieve results which can span multiple tables and you only need to take a little bit of data from each table. A good example of this is an Order that was placed by a Customer who belongs to an Account. With a full object oriented domain model you’d have the following options none of which are great…
Well, after tossing and turning and considering using Yii and CodeIgniter, I’ve decided to bite the bullet and write my own fast PHP MVC Framework, that’s not bloated with features or compatibility layers I don’t want and takes advantage of PHP5. Why re-invent the wheel you ask? Because in my view what’s current out there is bloated and not quite what I want and most importantly ultimately impacts performance, which I very much about. This framework that I’m writing is going to focus on speed and keeping ways to do something to an absolute minimum and do only what’s required. For example, Yii is hell-bent on using ActiveRecord for everything and if you look at the code for active record with it’s built in ORM it’s like 2000 lines of code to generate SQL that you can write yourself just as easily. With or without opcode caching lots and lots of code, lots and lots of files and all the un-necessary logic is still going to slow things down. In CI’s care it’s nice and all, but it doesn’t play nicely with PHP IDEs atm so you better know the classes and methods pretty well. Also, I can’t say I see the reason for doing things like defining file extentions (i.e. .php) as a constant, implementing fancy stuff like :any in the router and so on… just un-necessary logic… but as I said the biggest issue is not playing nice with PHP IDEs like NetBeans and Eclipse PDT. The closest thing I’ve found to what I like has been what Daniel’s implemented in OpenCart which is somewhat based on PHP Pro MVC tutorial. So to get started…