This has given me a good opportunity to evaluate both techniques and determine my personal preference for working.

The more traditional technique is to pass values to methods using individual parameters as in the example below:-

public function someMethod($name, $age = null)
{
  // do something
}

The benefit I have found with this method is that you can clearly identify what needs to be passed to the method, however, if you need to change the method to include an additional parameter it means that you have to update every call to this method so that every parameter is specified.

An alternative (and my personal preference) is to used an option array like in the following example

public function someMethod($options = array())
{
  $name = $options['name'];
  // do something
}

In this case, if you need to add an extra parameter to the method you can simply add the value to the options array and update the functionality within the method.  You do not necessarily need to update the calls to this method that are already in place  because they should still work fine provided the updated functionality is defined in such a way that it allows for the new parameter to be optional.

In addition, I feel that if you provide decent documentation regarding the options array (which should include a list of all the options values allowed), especially if it can be picked up via auto-completion in IDEs such as Netbeans, then this is just as easy to use as methods which are defined to accept individual parameters.

References

http://weblogtoolscollection.com/archives/2010/02/25/passing-parameters-as-variables-vs-passing-parameters-as-an-array/

I have had my laptop checked out by the IT guy and everything connected fine when it was in at the office and even my iPhone could connect to the VPN when using 3G but this Error 619 kept appearing each time I tried to connect to the work VPN via my O2 Wireless Box II using either the laptop or iPhone.

I had a sneaky suspicion that O2 had been in and done one of their remote updates so I logged into the router administration pages, noted the firmware number (8.2.23.0) currently running on my O2 Wireless II box and had a quick look around in Google for VPN issues with this firmware version. There were a number of people with a similar issue to mine but it seems that the VPN issues are only related to PPTP VPN connections, which is the type of VPN connection I was using.

I have managed to resolve this and get everything back up and reverting back to the older firmware version (7.4.20.4) and now I can connect to the work VPN again through my O2 Wireless II box.

The steps I took to sort this VPN connection issues are as follows:-

• Take a note of any static IP details (I did not actually do this step so I had about 30 minutes of paper rummaging as O2 Customer Services has closed by 2.30am)
• Follow the steps outlined in http://www.o2help.co.uk/router-upgrade-firmware/
• At step 4 run RT-585v7_74K4EJ.exe to revert to the 7.4.20.4 firmware version.  Note this will result in a factory reset of your router and all configuration settings will be lost.
• Run router setup and get connected to internet again.
• Check VPN works
• Configure and secure LAN / WLAN

In addition to this I thought it would be a wise idea to stop O2 from coming back in and updating the firmware automatically again which would give me the same problems so I opted to disabled the port O2 use to do their automatic updates.

References

O2 Help – Lots of useful help regarding O2 broadband

O2 Help – How to upgrade the firmware on the O2 Wireless Box II/III

O2 Help – How to close port 7547 on the O2 Wireless Box II/III

The original operating system was Windows XP Home but since the laptop has been bought primarily for work purposes, I had also bought a copy of Windows XP Pro but each time I install Windows XP Pro on my Sony VGN-FE21B laptop it always has a missing icon for the memory stick in My Computer. I imagine this is because the hardware is specific to Sony and not a generic Windows XP driver.

Fortunately this is really easy to solve (although I have to look it up online every time I re-install Windows XP Pro) as you can download the memory stick hotfix from Sony (When the page loads scroll down to “14. To install Memory Stick Hotfix”). Run this file and voila!

This article is mainly to help me (although I like to think it will help others) when I come to re-install Window XP Pro onto my Sony VGN-FE21B laptop in the future and will hopefully help me answer my own question.

mysqldump -uroot -pPASSWORD database > c:\database.sql

but when I ran this I was presented with an “Access Denied” message.

My first thought was that the MySQL database username and password that I was using was incorrect, however this message refers to not having permissions to create the file c:\database.sql.

Once I realised this was a file permissions problem and not a database permissions problem I changed the path to one I knew I had write access on and the database exported without any problems.

The section I was working on was a form submission (within the wordpress administation) which saved the form values into the database and then redirected the user upon success to another page (using wp_redirect) but this resulted in a blank content pane.

This seems very strange to me as it showed some of the page contents i.e. the header and left navigation but the content pane was completely blank.

I searched around for a few hours trying various suggestions to similar problems, downloading other wordpress plugins and examining how they used the wp_redirect function to see if the authors of these other wordpress plugins had done anything different, only to find that there was no difference.

I eventually managed to figure out the issue after I read a post regarding a problem another user was having where they were getting a completely blank screen and another member suggested the problem could be due to whitespace which was sent to the browser before the redirect was called resulting in a “headers already sent” problem.

This got me thinking that I did not have output buffering enabled which was strange as I usually have output buffering enabled to resolve this issue, however, in this case I did not have output buffering turned on and this turned out to be exactly the problem. I added the following line to my .htaccess file and the redirection now works perfectly.

php_flag output_buffering on

I was glad to get this one resolved as I had to spend far too much time on something that I have resolved time and time again. Certainly one I’ll be aware of should there be a next time!

I hope to get myself more motivated in 2010 and make 2010 a good year and work for me.  In this aim I hope to post a good few new blog entries on here over the next year and I’ve got a few in the pipeline already including a wordpress plugin I’m developing and moving Manage My Alerts over to Symfony 1.3/1.4 and I hope the entries I post are of use to you.

Once again I would like to wish you a Happy New Year and all the best for 2010.

References

Manage My Alerts – An online reminder service

Luckily this one turned out to be relatively simple and only took 5 minutes to fix although when I first heard about it I thought it was going to take a few hours. My aunt and uncle reported a problem with logging into their laptop (running Windows Vista Home Premium) on my uncle’s profile where it would give an error message “The User Profile Service failed the logon”, after which it would simply return them to the profile selection screen.

I did a quick search using Safari on my iPhone and the first result which came up for “The User Profile Service failed the logon” sorted out my problem.

Seemingly the cause of the problem was that the profile had managed to enter a backup state and a registry amendment was needed to resolve the issue. The registry amendment to fix my uncle’s issues with “The User Profile Service failed the logon” was as follows:-

• Log in to Windows using an alternative profile
• Open regedit and go to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList\
• Within the ProfileList key you should see 2 keys with almost identical names except one will have a suffix of .bak (i.e. S-1-5-21-1209794152-539799901-2903691368-1010 and S-1-5-21-1209794152-539799901-2903691368-1010.bak)
• Delete the key WITHOUT the “.bak” suffix
• Rename the other key and remove the “.bak” suffix
• Edit the “State” DWORD within the renamed key and set to “0″ (zero)

After that we were able to restart the computer and log back in under my uncle’s profile without any more problems and no more “The User Profile Service failed the logon” messages.

Sources

TechArena Community – The User Profile Service failed the logon

Currently the whinge list consists of:-

• Change of Domain because of a Cyber Squatter – The domain I originally wanted was already taken so I was forced to chosen an alternative.
• Wordpress Snow Effects – Silly visual effects on Wordpress blogs making me question my vision.

I have decided to allow visitors to The Weekly Whinge to submit their own whinges via the Have Your Whinge page and I will endeavour to put these whinges up on The Weekly Whinge along with my own.

So do not bottle it all up inside. Share your whinge and see it posted on The Weekly Whinge!

function get_raw_sql($query) {
    if(!($query instanceof Doctrine_Query)) {
        throw new sfException('Not an instanse of a Doctrine Query');
    }
 
    $query->limit(0);
 
    if(is_callable(array($query, 'buildSqlQuery'))) {
        $queryString = $query->buildSqlQuery();
        $query_params = $query->getParams();
        $params = $query_params['where'];
    } else {
        $queryString = $query->getSql();
        $params = $query->getParams();
    }
 
    $queryStringParts = split('\?', $queryString);
    $iQC = 0;
 
    $queryString = "";
 
    foreach($params as $param) {
        if(is_numeric($param)) {
            $queryString .= $queryStringParts[$iQC] . $param;
        } elseif(is_bool($param)) {
            $queryString .= $queryStringParts[$iQC] . $param*1;
        } else {
            $queryString .= $queryStringParts[$iQC] . '\'' . $param . '\'';
        }
 
        $iQC++;
   }
   for($iQC;$iQC < count($queryStringParts);$iQC++) {
       $queryString .= $queryStringParts[$iQC];
   }
 
    echo $queryString;
}

I hope that it proves useful.

I’ve started off by resurrection an old project that I worked on while I was self employed as Design2Host Ltd.  csNews Pro (formerly V-Desk Newsletter System Pro) has had a few cosmetic details changed (changed the name, removed the licence key limitions) but it’s exactly the same project and it is compatible with the paid version that was original available so you can easily convert from the previous paid version across to the free version when any updates become available.

Feel free to download and play with csNews Pro and feel free to give my any feedback on it.