Blogs

Headline, 2008: Zend_Form decoration a pain, says lead Zend developer.  Three years later, googling for "Zend_Form decorator help" produces no shortage of questions, complaints, and outright rants against Zend_Form decorators. Seriously, no other part of Zend seems less loved than form decorators.

All the bitchin' and moanin' seems rooted in two problems: the default use of definition lists and the lack of an easy way to override those defaults.

Colorizing maps is big on our plate right now.  Easier said, than done, in a generic way.  But we're laying the foundation for it and looking to the future with 3D.  Michelle Wang produced a bang-up massing map for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill using SketchUp, colored by building type.  Cool stuff.

The situation: I have a database of businesses, each with a name, product, and physical address.  The goal: Using Zend_Search_Lucene, I want to find all businesses selling a certain product within a certain distance from my current location.

In a hurry?  Skip the explanations and go right to the final code.

I need a few things to meet this goal:

Every once and a while, I remove a file (or directory of files) from my local repository that I want back.  No big deal, it's in the repository.  Well, yeah, but finding it and using the right command is not so straightforward.  And since I recently deleted a whole bunch of files and I'm waiting to get them back, I'll show you how.

To recover deleted files from svn, first find the revision in which the file(s) existed:

cd /path/to/local/repository/
svn log --verbose .

I had a lot of files to recover, so I piped the output to a temporary file and cut out the junk I didn't need.

Second step, recover those files:

I love standards, in theory.  In practice, there's never anything standard about them.  COBIE2 is no exception.  While specifying the interchange format (Excel spreadsheet) and the data in the model (features) is great, what's totally "ungreat" is the flexibility of user-defined columns.  Which is really all useful columns, since only the most basic columns are in the COBIE2 standard.  I predict this is going to bite someone, so let's play out a scenario.