The new task bar in Windows 7 functions very similar to OS X's Dock Bar

A quick description of the windows 7 feature I’m talking about, In windows 7 you have the ability to ‘Pin’ applications to the task bar.  In all honesty, it feels very similar to the Mac OS X dock bar. The ‘Pinned Application’ becomes the task bar entry while the program is running and remains once the application has ended. It doesn’t do any nifty scaling of the application’s Icon, but it is none the less effective.

Windows 7 Task Bar Multiple Windows + 'peek'

Also very important to my article is the changes to the Windows Grouping feature as it was called in Windows XP. They’re now called Combined Taskbar buttons. As you can see from the screenshot to the right, multiple windows appear as layered icons in the task bar, and when you hover your mouse over this group of icons you’ll be able to see the contents of those windows if you have Aero Peek enabled.

As you can tell from my screenshots that I use Firefox as my primary browser (and I use Pidgin and FooBar 2000 but that’s neither here nor there) and it’s a great browser for many reasons I don’t need to expand on here. If you’re not using it, you don’t know what you’re missing! get it here!

I tend to have several separate Firefox profiles depending on what I’m going to be doing at the time. I have my normal day-to-day browsing profile, my Web Developer profile (You don’t want to try and casually browse with some of the more advanced dev plugins installed, odd things happen) and a clean profile with no addons.  If you’re not familiar with Firefox profiles please read this article. The one missing tidbit of information from that article is if you add -no-remote to the command arguments, you can run multiple copies of Firefox, each using a different profile to store it’s data.

None of this is news. It’s been written, blogged, twittered, stumbled, shared, and posted about.  I’ve always launched my devel environment with the -no-remote argument and my normal one with out it. The problem I ran into was Windows 7 (and Windows XP) would group all Firefox windows together on the same taskbar button. I usually turned off window grouping to combat this problem in XP.  I’ve grown quite fond of Windows 7’s way of handling Combined Taskbar entries and I wanted to find a way to have one taskbar entry for each profile I was running. Thankfully I found out how!

Firefox Development Shortcut Information

Two Firefox instances with multiple windows appear as two "stacks" of task bar entries. Warning: large image.

The Solution turned out to be as simple as creating a copy of the Firefox installation in my Program Files directory.  When creating the shortcut that launches the second profile as described in the article above, use the copy of Firefox as the target Application. I went as far as to rename the shortcut and add a custom icon to it. See my example on the right. After creating the shortcut, execute the shortcut. If you did it right, it will create a new taskbar entry with the name and icon you specified in the shortcut. You then have to right click on the taskbar entry and select “Pin this program to Taskbar”.

There are a few little side notes. You don’t have to keep the original shortcut around. The process of pinning to the task bar actually creates a copy of the shortcut used to launch the program into C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar and you can delete the one you created initially. I’d also recommend disabling Firefox’s Default Browser check. Make sure one of your installations is configured to be default, not the other or else Firefox will ask you each time. Finally, changing the icon of the shortcut does not change the icon of the Firefox window itself, as indicated by the red arrow on the image to the left.  It will only change the icon on the task bar as indicated by the green arrow.

Since one of the nice features Symfony sports is it’s logging features, I started dumping such data to the log. I quickly found out that depending on what part of the code I was working on, the syntax of my logging was different and became quite cumbersome in some cases.

In comes the following class, the Logging class, or L class for short.  It simplifies logging and dumping a variable to the log.  I also found it helpful when I was first learning Symfony to know what methods a class had. I’ve also included that function as well.

Here are some examples:

        L::log('Something happened.');
 
        $array = array('1', '2', 'Tom' => 'Jones', 'Richard' => 'Smith',
            'Harrold' => 'Jackson');
        L::dump($array, 'Example Array', 'info');
 
        $config = new sfConfig();
        L::methods($config);

Output:

Jul DD HH:MM:SS symfony [debug]
***********************
* Something happened. *
***********************

Jul DD HH:MM:SS symfony [info]
*******************************
* Variable Dump Example Array *
*******************************
array (
 0 => '1',
 1 => '2',
 'Tom' => 'Jones',
 'Richard' => 'Smith',
 'Harrold' => 'Jackson',
)
Jul DD HH:MM:SS symfony [debug]
************************
* Methods for sfConfig *
************************
sfConfig::get
sfConfig::has
sfConfig::set
sfConfig::add
sfConfig::getAll
sfConfig::clear

Here is the code. Simply drop it into a file in your project’s lib directory (I placed it into a util subdirectory) and clear your cache to start using it.

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<?php
/**
 * Pretty Simple Logger
 *
 * @package util
 * @author Phazeon Phoenix <phoenix@phazeon.com>
 * @copyright 2009 Phazeon.com
 * @version 1
 */
class L {
 
    static public $allowedMessageLevels = array('notice', 'emerg', 'alert',
                         'crit', 'info', 'debug', 'err', 'warning');
    /**
     * Log a message.
     *
     * @param mixed $message
     * @param string $level
     * @param boolean $pretty Does not add the star header if false.
     * @return void
     */
    static public function log($message, $level = 'debug', $pretty = true)
    {
        if (sfConfig::get('sf_logging_enabled')) {
            if ( ! in_array($level, self::$allowedMessageLevels))
                $level = 'debug';
            if ($pretty)
                $output = self::prettyHeader($message);
            else
                $output = $message;
            sfContext::getInstance()->getLogger()->$level($output);
        }
    }
 
    /**
     * Dump a variable to the log.
     *
     * Known Limitation: Variables that are too large, such as many of the
     * Symfony core classes, will cause this function to fail. This is a
     * limitation of var_export(). If you need to dump such a variable, use
     * print_r(). It's ugly but it'll work no matter how large the variable is.
     *
     * @param mixed $var
     * @param mixed $message
     * @param string $level
     * @return void
     */
    static public function dump($var, $message = null,  $level = 'debug')
    {
        if (sfConfig::get('sf_logging_enabled')) {
            $output = self::prettyHeader("Variable Dump $message");
            $output .= var_export($var, true);
            L::log($output, $level, false);
        }
    }
 
    /**
     * Output all publicly accessable methods of a class.
     *
     * @param mixed $class
     * @param mixed $message
     * @param string $level
     * @return void
     */
    static public function methods($class, $message = null,  $level = 'debug')
    {
        if (sfConfig::get('sf_logging_enabled')) {
            $class = get_class($class);
            $output = self::prettyHeader("Methods for $class $message");
            $methods = get_class_methods($class);
            foreach($methods as $method) {
                $output .= "$class::$method\n";
            }
            L::log($output, $level, false);
        }
    }
 
    /**
     * Build a string padded and surrounded by stars.
     *
     * @param mixed $text
     * @return string
     */
    static public function prettyHeader($text) {
        $stars = '';
        $text = "* " . trim($text) . " *";
        $stars = str_repeat('*', strlen($text));
        return "\n" . $stars . "\n" . $text . "\n" . $stars . "\n";
    }
}

The first is a comment header for the Symfony template files.  Due to the shear number of these template files you can create if you’re partial and component happy, sometimes just the filename isn’t enough to really describe what file your editing. My motto is you can never have too much documentation.

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<?php
/**
 * Template Template
 * 
 * @author Phazeon Phoenix <phoenix@phazeon.com>
 * @version 1
 * @package Templates
 * @copyright 2009 Phazeon.com
 */
?>
<h2>My Template</h2>

Next is a template for new components.  This is the sort of thing that I always had trouble remembering. I had to track down the exact syntax for the component class declaration each time.  Now in my IDE (phpDesigner) I can define user entered variables in my snippets/templates.  It prompts me for the model name and the method name minus the “execute” prefix.

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<?php
/**
 * Component Template
 * 
 * @author Phazeon Phoenix <phoenix@phazeon.com>
 * @version 1
 * @package Components
 * @copyright 2009 Phazeon.com
 */
 
class templateComponents extends sfComponents
{
    public function executeSomething()
    {
 
    }
}

The one that I’m going to share today involves the creation of a form class for the new form handling classes added in Symfony 1.1.  I found myself constantly having to go back to the form and adding the sections that I needed but forgot the list time I was working it. I created this template and included all of the options I felt I’d need to declare to correctly implement a nice looking and behaving form.

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<?php
/**
 * Template Form
 * 
 * @author Phazeon Phoenix <phoenix@phazeon.com>
 * @version 1
 * @copyright 2009 Phazeon.com
 * @package Forms
 */
class templateForm extends sfForm
{
    public function configure()
    {
        $this->setWidgets(array(
 
        ));
 
        $this->setValidators(array(
 
        ));
 
        $this->setDefaults(array(
 
        ));
 
        $this->widgetSchema->setLabels(array(
 
        ));
 
        $this->widgetSchema->setFormFormatterName('list');
 
        $this->widgetSchema->setNameFormat('template[%s]');
    }
}

I must say when I found this link I was flabbergasted. Not only was it a revelation to me to see what my great grandfather did, it was also astonishing to me that anyone would scan in such a book, and make it available online in such a portable format.  I quickly started searching for other references of my grandfather’s name and found these few links and he’s named here, here, here and here. I even found his name listed in a 1920 USC Year Book as a professor of social engineering.

It’s simply amazing that such rather mundane objects from that era would be scanned and digitally archived.  Who would have figured anyone would want to see these books let alone want to digitize them. I also found it quite astonishing to find such a person in my ancestry of whom I had rather little information about. I think I need to find out more information about this.

I need to work on a way to automate as much as I can of the process. The tricky thing is that certain commands need to be executed as root (inlcuding rebooting the web server) and that throws a monkey wrench in the gears of that idea.  Certainly one could create a script and SUID root, but that is going to require extensive care to ensure that the process is handled gracefully if it fails for whatever reason.  It’s a large undertaking to say the least. I guess I have to weigh the time spent each new project vs. coding such a script.

Then after I finished building the table in Excel I realized I had to create multiple (24 to be exact) template files for all the pages this new project required. I didn’t feel like typing the command out (I used touch on my Linux devel box) so I copied the text I needed for the base of the file name, tacked on the remainder of the file name and removed the carriage returns with a quick recorded macro in UltraEdit 32, and pasted it into my shell window. BAM!

OK for most of you that will probably be complete gibberish. And that’s OK. It just suddenly dawned on me what exactly I was doing to accomplish my goal.  Such a contrived, inefficient but effective way of doing it.  Also as suddenly, the phrase “Data Weaving” popped into mind.

Also on a side note, I switched away from Gentoo to CentOS for my dev server. Not that I do not enjoy Gentoo (I’m a geek, give it a break) but I needed a turn-key enviroment for development. So far I’ve been satisfied with CentOS. Since it’s based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux it’s solid as a rock and help is easy to find.

I believe I’m sensetive to high levels of UV light. I’ve tried using sunglasses to surprising results. They seemed to help keep things managable.  The only problem is I either need to get contacts AND a pair of shades or buy a pair of prescription sunglasses. I’m not going to get one of those lame ass clip-on/slip-over/under/whatever sunglasses.