Installing ImageMagick beta for PHP on Ubuntu
by James Halsall on May 6, 2012
There seems to be a few issues with Imagick in PECL related to setting your own properties on a class that extends Imagick. A project I’m working on at the moment is making heavy use of image processing and I wanted to stick with Imagick over the GD library. A little bit of investigation told me that this bug was fixed in the latest release candidate of Imagick in PECL, so I began investigating how to install a beta release of the extension but Google gave me no hits.
Recording ‘Last Activity’ for Users in Symfony2 + FOSUserBundle
by James Halsall on January 27, 2012
Whilst working on a personal project based on the Symfony2 framework I wanted to record when a user was last active so that I could emulate a list of currently online users. I had already plugged in the amazing FOSUserBundle extension, so this was just about tweaking what was already there. If you’re in a similar situation and already have the Symfony2 standard distribution installed with FOSUserBundle then this walkthrough should be pretty straightforward. Read the rest of this entry »
robbailey.co.uk is live
by James Halsall on December 2, 2011
I’ve recently finished working on a new website for UK based artist and illustrator Rob Bailey. You should definitely head over and check out his work at robbailey.co.uk.
Doctrine 1.2, SQL Server, FreeTDS and Hanging Queries
by James Halsall on October 19, 2011
It’s been a somewhat turbulent few days in the office this week, working with Doctrine 1.2 and SQL Server is no joke. Seriously, there are several flaws in Doctrine’s MS SQL parsing engine which just make me think that they have never bothered to test.
Custom ExtJS Grid Context Menus
by James Halsall on June 25, 2011
ExtJS provides some powerful grid functionality with their Ext.grid package, and part of this functionality includes custom context menus that provide an intuitive method of interaction with grid rows. I found that there was no documentation on how to create these menus, so I thought I would put together a quick tutorial. I’m assuming that users have a basic understanding of ExtJS, and the version I am using as a demonstration is ExtJS 3.4.
Missing mysql.sock file in ZendServer (Mac OSX)
by James Halsall on June 17, 2011
I have spent the best part of today tearing my hair out, trying to figure out why the mysql.sock socket file was missing from my clean ZendServer CE install. From googling a little on the subject it seems I am not the only one to suffer this fate. Turns out that none of the solutions suggested in these articles applied for me.
Custom Event Rendering with Ext Calendar Pro
by James Halsall on June 13, 2011
ExtJS is a great framework, and whilst its learning curve is quite steep it makes building user interfaces as simple as you could hope for. One of its major let-downs however, is its lack of Calendar component (quite a frequently requested interface layout actually). Brian Moeskau (one of the earlier developers in the ExtJS project) released his own 3rd Party extension called Ext Calendar Pro, which fills this void.
Fixing the Missing Text Issue in DomPDF
by James Halsall on May 30, 2011
I was recently plagued with a problem at work where a previously working document produced by one of our software applications was not including text anymore. Table borders and images were fine, and even some custom page footers we were generating through the use of the $pdf global variable was appearing okay.
jQuery Image Overlays with Mosaic
by James Halsall on March 31, 2011
Recently, whilst working on a client’s website I had to incorporate image overlays into their portfolio page. I had seen Mosaic mentioned before on various websites and blogs, but I had never used it. I was disappointed at the lack of documentation, but nevertheless it proved to be a nice, light (~2kb minified) jQuery plugin that did exactly what it said on the tin. I thought I would document how to get going with a quick mouse-over animated overlay which will hopefully save someone some time.
Moving PHP Sessions to the Database
by James Halsall on March 28, 2011
Sessions play a huge role in allowing us to build functional web applications, and without them we probably couldn’t build true web applications. Whilst PHP takes care of Sessions out-of-the-box, it’s also one of the more customisable aspects of the platform.
