I thank you for making your excellent articles available for free and I get a majority of my news from you. I don’t even mind paying a bit for archived articles. However, in your eagerness to boost pageviews and revenue, you created a bastard child called altClickSearch.js. This little bugger has caused me untold grief as I like to highlight as I read, double-clicking becomes an instinctual action. I can’t deal with the pop-ups that even Firefox 3 won’t block.

As I write this, I would like to put a little more room between us. I feel smothered with your constant attention to what I highlight. My other friend Greasemonkey has shown me a wonderful relationship modifier that is allowing me to proceed with my sanity intact, appropriately called “New York Times (NYT) Sanity”.

Thanks and please keep up the excellent articles.

In my Action file, I add actions to the stack for nav, footer, etc.

class IndexController extends ....
{
function indexAction()
{
$this->_helper->actionStack('main', 'nav', 'default');
$this->_helper->actionStack('footer', 'nav', 'default');
$this->_helper->actionStack('right', 'nav', 'default');
/* other stuff */
}
}


Then I have a NavController that simply calls setResponseSegment or renderScript to set the named variables.


class NavController ..
{
function footerAction()
{
/* Stuff to display */
$this->renderScript('nav/footer.phtml', 'nav');
// Or I could use
// $this->_helper->viewRenderer->setResponseSegment('nav');
}
}


This allows me to finally use the nav variable in my layout file
layout/default.phtml

echo $this->layout()->nav;

Simple eh?

Basically I have a ConfigDB singleton pattern that gets one db connection, then sets the default adapter so when I extend the Zend_DB_Table_Abstract class, the default connection gets carried around.

class ConfigDB {
static private $instance;
private function __construct() {
}
public static function getInstance() {
if (!ConfigDB::$instance) {
$params = array(
/* redacted */
);
ConfigDB::$instance = Zend_Db::factory('Mysqli', $params);
Zend_Db_Table_Abstract::setDefaultAdapter(ConfigDB::$instance);
}
return ConfigDB::$instance;
}
public static function selectDb($db) {
return ConfigDB::$instance->getConnection()->select_db($db);
}
}
ConfigDB::getInstance();

That grabs the connection and sets the default adapter. So in my model class I can do:
class Country extends Zend_Db_Table_Abstract {
protected $_name = 'countries';
protected $_primary = 'country_id';
function __construct($country = 1, $abbr = '')
{
parent::__construct();
}
}

That’s it

Kaylan is getting in a regular schedule now of crying every two hours, being fed, then sleeping until the next cycle. Great things come in small packages, unless of course it comes in a disposable diaper. Once you get used to the lack of sleep and the fatigue, babies are truly wonderful. Every little tot is a gift to be treasured. Their smiles, cries, and every little movement is something to be remembered. They are growing every day and the challenges of parenting change along with them. Mommy and I are both looking forward to helping our little bit of heaven grow into a beautiful little angel.

-Mom and Dad

There are plenty of offerings out there. Most notably MicroStrategies, Oracle, SAP, and more. Of course most of the ones I just listed are simply not cost feasible for a small company to explore. To pay to play, it’s easy to lay out over $100K just to get something basic. Of course my budget was much much smaller than that so my boss pointed me towards an open source project called Pentaho and I have been steeped in it for the past month.

The documentation for Pentaho is pretty comprehensive if you are educated in the technologies involved. But for me, I had to get familiar with quite a few things before getting to do something useful.

Over the next few weeks, I will post up progress and some small tutorials to help someone new get started with the world of Pentaho.

When I first found the game, it was Websudoku.com that provided an easy and addictive introduction to the game. I spent numerous free hours trying to improve my solving skills. However, after writing a javascript sudoku solver in 2006, I’ve found that only very occasionally will I even think about it anymore. Is this common? How many of you are/were addicted to sudoku?

Seems like I can’t even goto the grocery store anymore without having sudoku puzzle books taking up valuable checkout line shelf space. Unlike crossword puzzles, sudoku does not expand your vocabulary. It also doesn’t help with making word associations and re-enforce current events. Is it just the biggest productivity sapper ever created?

Well, for me anyway, it’s helped me polish up some javascript coding. I recently finished revamping my solver to allow actual game play. Still needs some more TLC and some sticky features, but some features are fairly unique to the online sudoku games. For instance, my implementation allows you to take a snapshot of your work so you can go back if it gets hopelessly messy. I should allow you to save the progress and come back, but that’s for a future release. My best Sudoku puzzle game can be found at http://www.numbercrazy.com/.

The Easy Way

If you are not using FireFox, or you are not running the GreaseMonkey plug-in, you can direct navigate to http://www.anagramssolved.com . The tools are all present there in the same form and function. However, you will have to switch between multiple windows if you’re trying to gather points quickly.

The Best Way

For those of you using IE, you should probably install Firefox.
. Once you install that, get GreaseMonkey, then the new script for Microsoft Club Live Helper. The script works by replacing the Live Search with http://www.anagramssolved.com/. The site makes available an Anagram Solver, and searchable solutions for Clink, CrossWire, Dingbats, and Flexicon. For the searchable solutions, you can also use the available Google Search box to search for individual clues if you’d rather solve the puzzles yourself.

Watch this demo clip of how to use it for Flexicon.

They must have just launched this because I played 1 game of Clink and actually made their high score list! Seems like the existing scores are all random inserts.

I wonder how long before this hits the news? You can find more at Microsoft is Desperate

Monkey Do. Having recently downloaded and installed the GreaseMonkey plugin for FireFox, I searched and couldn’t find a suitable userscript to handle the situation. Being the obsessive type, I went ahead and wrote two quick scripts to help me get at the actual image urls. One, ‘Flickr Img Src Exposer‘, exposes the image url on an individual photo. It adds a link ‘IMG LINK’ underneath the image allowing for easy copying. The second script, ‘Flickr Download Links‘, works when you are exploring the last 7 days’ interesting photos. I got tired of clicking on each photo and then saving the image, so I put a ‘LINK’ under each photo in the page. Clicking on the link takes you to a gallery of all the available image sizes. You can click on the download link to get the image downloaded or copy the images source from the image displayed. The largest size may not be available and you’ll find out if so after clicking on it. I chose not to display the largest image size to save Flickr some bandwidth.

Monkey no get spaceball.gif. This has proved somewhat useful for me and I thought I’d share it with others. You can find the scripts on ‘http://userscripts.org‘.

After going past our due date of Sept. 30th and visiting the doc, an induction date of Oct. 5th was set, due to Audrey’s large head circumference. At midnight, Audrey pre-empted our scheduled morning call and sent Yun into labor. After waking me (Huey) up a few times, Yun got up at 1:05 to walk around. Still half asleep and somewhat disbelieving Yun, I vaguely remembered to tell her to grab a towel in case her water broke. At this point, contractions were irregular and about 10 minutes apart. Deciding that perhaps she was in false labor, Yun laid down around 1:25 and almost immediately went into another contraction. Breaking her water on this contraction, I rapidly became alert and started looking for the phone. We had been waiting for this baby for the past 3 weeks (Not counting the whole pregnancy of course) and I was ready to meet her. Calling the doctors office gave me an answering service. After letting them know the situation, I was told the on-call doctor would be paged. After what seemed like an eternity, we got the call from the on-call and we were told to head for the delivery room.

Half expecting a relative quick delivery, with the wife having been at 2-3cm for a few weeks, I was completely unprepared for what lay ahead. After checking in and getting situated, we dug in to wait for the progression of labor. Yun made some progress early but stalled early in the morning. Stalls around 5cm and 7cm took us deep into the afternoon, what started as a hopeful 10 hour delivery had dragged into a marathon 16 hours. Our doctor finished with her clinicals and was able to come check our progress. Knowing beforehand that our baby was atleast 8 pounds, we knew that we might have to prepare for a Caesarean. At this point, Yun was developing a fever and Audrey’s heartrate had escalated from a steady 130bpm to 170bpm. The decision to head for the operation room was quick but not without a few tears.

From decision to delivery, it was only around 40 minutes. Hearing her first cries of complaint sent Yun and I into emotional tatters. Gathering my wits, I somehow made it over to the baby’s crib and was handed a pair of scissors to cut Audrey’s cord. Bringing her to show Yun, I couldn’t help but fall in love with her pursed lips.

The 9 month+ wait was filled with excitment, confusion, anxiety, and some mad scrambling to purchase all sorts of baby furniture. All that melted away the moment we heard her voice.

So what happened after that? While those details are a bit more mundane, I’m sure there will be plenty more exciting news to come, but you’re going to have to wait with the rest of us. I’m going to go see my daughter.

-Huey