Ipod 6th Generation White Screen of Death – How to Fix it
So, I have an iPod 6th Generation. I had the thing for about 3 months, dropped it and received the ever-popular “White Screen of Death”. When I took it to Apple, they basically gave me the “Well… you probably just need to return it or buy a new one”. Obviously, this is not the answer I wanted to hear. So, it sat on my desk for about 2 years, broken… until now. Tonight, I was bored and said “screw this, I’m fixing this damn thing.”. I’m going to tell you all the things that some “say” work, but the one that worked for me was solution 3 which involved me dismantling my ipod… Realize this may not be true for everyone! Any of these solutions may help. The last resort you have if they don’t, is probably to replace your LCD.. So, let’s see what we can do without having to pay for repairs! Solution #1 Cold boot your iPod. You can do this by the following steps: Flip the “Hold” switch on, and then back off Press and Hold “Select” (the middle Circle) and then Menu for 5-10 seconds until it reboots When it reboots, you should see the Apple Logo. … Continue reading
jQuery IE Error object doesn’t support this property or method – How to fix it
As a developer, most know what a pain in the ass Internet Explorer is: mainly because the debugging is almost non-existant thanks to useless error reports like “Object does not support this property or method” that get used for hundreds of reasons. With that in mind, finding out exactly what the problem is can be tedious and tiresome. Today, I was presented with this exact problem in one of our applications here at work. All versions of Internet Explorer seemed to be complaining this this was the root cause as to why it could not render. To resolve it, here are the steps that were taken: 1) Ensure that all variables have been declared using var before actually assigning a value. 2) Ensure that all objects (ie: myObj : { … }) don’t have a trailing comma (,) 3) Ensure that you are not overriding system variables and/or methods that have been defined with the same variable (ie: renaming out of scope) 4) Make sure that, before attempting to append the jQuery data() method to an element, that it exists in the DOM first. These 4 steps helped resolve my issue. In order to track it down though, you will … Continue reading
Simple MySQL Optimization Tips
Since I’m taking a break from studying for my mid-term exam, why not write a small article on something useful? So, let’s cover a topic that I haven’t touched much on lately : MySQL As stated, this is going to be a real dirty list of simple optimizations one can apply with MySQL. When I have time, I’ll write a formal article explaining these techniques in more detail… Simple MySQL Optimization Tips Apply Normalization Know which engine types to use where.. MyISAM InnoDB Archive Memory etc… Use EXPLAIN on any SELECT statement and ensure your indexes are being used properly Understand that how you write your queries is where the biggest performance gains are seen (performance != scalability) Use the smallest datatypes needed for your fields (tinyint instead of INT, char instead of varchar, varchar instead of TEXT, etc) If you’re storing IP Addresses, store them as an INT instead of a CHAR(15) How can this be done? You store your value using INET_ATON (converting x.x.x.x to an integer value xxxxxxxxx) INSERT INTO `LogTable` (`IpAddress`) VALUES (INET_ATON(’127.0.0.1′) Creates a record with 2130706433 as the value for IP Address) Retrieve your value using INET_NTOA (converting xxxxxxx back to x.x.x.x) $sql = “SELECT … Continue reading
Review: “PHP Development in the Cloud” by Ivo Jansch and Vito Chin
I found “PHP Development in the Cloud” by Ivo Jansch and Vito Chin to be a good introduction to Cloud Computing. This book covers the topics necessary to understand exactly what “Cloud Server” environments are, what architectures can be used, along with some examples of how a PHP developer may write applications with cluster environments in mind. The book also gives a good introduction to Popular Cloud Infrastructures such as Amazon’s S3/CloudFront/ECS, Rackspace and Microsoft’s Azure, along with ways to communicate with each via applications like Gearman and MapReduce. I personally could not relate to the “PictureManager” example, though, and found myself wanting to skip past these sections. While I realize that Vito Chin is the lead maintainer of the Gmagick extension for PHP, this example really made these sections difficult and uninteresting. Instead, I would have related more to a CMS system, Social-related application, or other real-world web developer-oriented examples, rather than an application that searches a cluster of servers looking for images that contain a specific “pixel color” as with the PictureManager example. Sorry, but that’s just me. System administration of a cloud server is also briefly covered in this book. While, I am not a developer who really … Continue reading
PHP Singleton Pattern – OOP
Using the Singleton OOP Pattern with PHP Introduction Commonly when we think of OOP, things like extends, inheritence, visibility and polymorphism are terms that almost always come to mind (or at least should…). We, as developers, are constantly looking for the best approach: what makes my class a reusable object? How can I apply more abstraction? Does my hierarchy make sense? Is this object scalable? etc… Typically, these are very short-minded and simple things developers of all levels think of when their only language for development has been PHP. While “short-minded” may seem a bit harsh, one must realize that there is much more to Object Oriented Programming than what we’ve grown up learning through PHP. PHP, while better at OOP as of the 5.x series, still does not have all the available OOP options needed to allow us to code in a true OOP environment. I truly believe that this is one reason why developers, like myself, never hear about “patterns” or realize just how important they are are until we feel we’ve mastered all there is to know about development with PHP. Why? Well, let’s face it – As we get better, we become a little more … Continue reading