So how easy is it? Just download the package, unzip it, and run the OpenBlueDragonDesktop.sh. Thats all!. It will launch a gui to start, stop, and point the server anywhere (pictured above). I also must add the administration interface is MUCH more pleasing than their Adobe counterpart.

I still use ColdFusion on a daily basis, along with php. But the question remains. Does ColdFusion still play a major roll in web development? Or has it been written off is a slow, out of date, has been?

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PostgreSQL has the ability to return multiple cursors to result sets. Using this we can achieve the same effect with php with a little magic. Lets take a look at a simple function which returns three queries by way of refcursor type. Also note that I said “function”, not “procedure”, but never fear, 6 of one, half dozen of the other as far as this topic goes:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION test_get_users(userID integer) RETURNS SETOF refcursor AS $$

	DECLARE
		ref1 refcursor;
		ref2 refcursor;
		ref3 refcursor;
	BEGIN

	OPEN ref1 FOR
		SELECT id, name, email FROM users;
	RETURN NEXT ref1;

	OPEN ref2 FOR
		SELECT id FROM users WHERE is_active=1;
	RETURN next ref2;

	OPEN ref3 FOR
		SELECT * FROM users WHERE id = userID;
	RETURN next ref3;

	RETURN;

END;
$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;

So that is pretty simple, we run 3 select queries, and return the refcursor for those. Now the tricky part will be how to read each of these queries on the php end. The values returned from calling this function will resemble the image presented here. These merely represent references to the cursors to each query run, so we will have to use some pg magic to pull those result sets in. It boils down to we need to make one call to the function, then a separate call per result set to bring in those results (note the query has run at this point, its basically reading in the data, which should be quick). Lets look at the SQL which would achieve this:

BEGIN;
SELECT test_get_users(2);
FETCH ALL IN "<unnamed portal 1>";
FETCH ALL IN "<unnamed portal 2>";
FETCH ALL IN "<unnamed portal 3>";
END;

Now it should make a little more sense what has to happen. We call a fetch for each result set to return. So now we just need to process this with PHP:

$conn = new PDO("pgsql:host=localhost;port=5432;dbname=testing", "username", "password");

$userID = 2;

// begin transaction, this is all one process
$conn->beginTransaction();

	// call the function
	$stmt = $conn->prepare("select test_get_users(:userID)");
	$stmt->bindParam('userID', $userID, PDO::PARAM_INT);
	$stmt->execute();
	$cursors = $stmt->fetchAll();
	$stmt->closeCursor();

	// get each result set
	$results = array();
	foreach($cursors as $k=>$v){
		$stmt = $conn->query('FETCH ALL IN "'. $v[0] .'";');
		$results[$k] = $stmt->fetchAll();
		$stmt->closeCursor();
	}
$conn->commit();
unset($stmt);

echo '<pre>';
print_r($results);echo "\n"; // all record sets
echo '</pre>';

Now first off, we call the select test_get_users(), which returns a list of refcursor names. So with this we know how many queries were returned. Just loop through this list and fetch each result set. It is essentially the same process used from the Sql Server example, except the nextRowset() is not yet implemented for the pdo pgsql extension, so we just manually call the fetch. No Biggie. You would then receive something similar to the following:

Array
(
	[0] => Array
		(
			[0] => Array
				(
					[id] => 2
					[0] => 2
					[name] => John Doe
					[1] => John Doe
					[email] => test2@test.com
					[2] => test2@test.com
				)

			[1] => Array
				(
					[id] => 3
					[0] => 3
					[name] => Jane Doe
					[1] => Jane Doe
					[email] => test3@test.com
					[2] => test3@test.com
				)

			......

		)

	[1] => Array
		(
			[0] => Array
				(
					[id] => 3
					[0] => 3
				)

			[1] => Array
				(
					[id] => 1
					[0] => 1
				)

		)

	[2] => Array
		(
			[0] => Array
				(
					[id] => 2
					[0] => 2
					[name] => John Doe
					[1] => John Doe
					[email] => test2@test.com
					[2] => test2@test.com
					[password] => zxcvxcvczxcv
					[3] => zxcvxcvczxcv
					[is_active] => 0
					[4] => 0
				)

		)

)

If you’re still feeling frisky at this point, there are all sorts of ways to “fetch” the result sets, just take a look at the docs on cursors. The more I use PostgreSQL the more I am becoming a fan. It’s power and features go far beyond my skill set, but it feels good always knowing you have the best tool at hand for whatever task you have ahead of you. As always feel free to chime in and leave any knowledge you may have, especially on Postgres!

Related posts:

1. Making Sense of Stored Procedures with PHP, PDO, and Sqlsrv
2. Thought: Is else return really necessary?
3. CakePHP, PostgreSQL, and Regex

This is where Email Dissector comes in to play. Email Dissector creates a dummy smtp server right on your desktop. It will then intercept any outgoing emails on the host and port it is listening on, and present them to you in a few different formats: HTML, HTML Source, Text (for multipart emails with alternate text versions), raw headers, and attachments.

Since the email server is contained right in the application, there is zero wait time. The inbox is refreshed immediately! Also the Inbox is the only box, as this is development work only.

Before we get too carried away it needs to be noted right off the bat that the html view uses webkit. This means it is likely much more advanced than the general email client, so don’t get too far ahead of yourself with css and javascript. The good part is you can quickly see any major issues before debugging in 50 different email clients.

The html source view elegantly shows off the markup. Now you can see what is wrong with your html.

The Text tab is for alternate text versions of emails. If your email client is html capable (which it probably is) it can be difficult to find the the text versions of emails if they are supplied. Believe it or not but some people actually like text emails as they are generally short and to the point. Email Dissector presents this conviniently.

Looking for the encoding or your reply-to values? Check the Raw tab to see all the headers sent

Finally you can see what attachments were sent.

Thats all there is to this simple little program, but it should surely speed up you email development significantly! Best part is it is developed in python, so it should run most anywhere python does as long as Webkit is available. (So far tested on Ubuntu and Windows). Enjoy!

Python Email Dissector on Github

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Some character(s) could not be converted into client’s character set. Unconverted bytes were changed to question marks (‘?’)

I pondered for quite some time and searched quite a bit. I knew round about what the problem was but couldn’t pinpoint the solution. Finally I ran a phpinfo and checked out my mssql settings. Charset was an available setting. At that point I started searching around for available charsets for php. A nice listing was available for the html_entity_decode function reference.

I started plugging and playing and finally I found one that worked. According to the descriptions I stuck with the Windows based and found that “cp1252″ Character Set solved my problems. I just dropped this in where needed:

ini_set('mssql.charset', 'cp1252');

Thats all there was to it to solve the php to mssql character set issues!

Related posts:

1. Making Sense of Stored Procedures with PHP, PDO, and Sqlsrv
2. Return Multiple Result Sets with PHP and PostgreSQL Functions
3. Installing Memcached on Ubuntu for PHP

• Firefox: 61.37%
• IE: 23.82%
• Chrome: 4.95%
• Opera: 4.58%
• Safari: 4.28%

I thought that in itself was pretty interesting, which is gathered from over 7,000 visitors. There are others on the list incase you’re trying to total up the percentages, but I left those out since they were such small percentages. But the big question is out of those IE users who is using IE6?

• IE 7: 61.63%
• IE 6: 33.67%
• IE 8: 4.52%
• IE 5: 0.18%

Well it is good to see at least that Microsoft’s latest stable version is the most used, however there are still quite a few with version 6, which upsets me since I hardly tested this site at all in 6. (don’t worry I test all my other work in 6). And as for IE5, I didn’t know it was even around any more!

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1. Getting IE6 Working in Jaunty with IEs4Linux

• Full screen rendering
• Tabs
• Awesome bar type suggest(not sure on the exact name..)
• Bookmarks and easy navigational buttons
• Desktop emulators for Windows, OSX, and Linux!

Fennec Alpha Walkthrough from Madhava Enros on Vimeo.

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2. 7 Lucky Tips for Mobile Development
3. Impromptu 3.2 – Mobile jQuery Prompts

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Since I’ve started doing all of my programming on Ubuntu lately I’ve been much more pleased with Vista. Before I had nothing but problems with various issues from dual monitors, ide issues, to blue screens. I believe most issues were due to intense usage which most user’s aren’t apt to do. The last couple months I’ve stuck with internet browsing, instant messaging, and itunes on Vista and couldn’t be happier as far as an everyday email checking computer. As far as heavy duty programming, database work, and never ending for loops its not quite up to par just yet.

Ubuntu Fiesty has been very pleasing as well too however, especially since most of my computing needs for programming are well suited for it, where as my leisure computing is well suited for Vista with iTunes and Office. The two together seem to balance each other out very nicely, Which brings up an interesting topic from a post I read a the other day that not following web standards may actually help…

IE has long been going their own direction while other web browsers are sticking to standards. Well I love standards as much as the next guy, especially while doing CSS and Javascript, but had it not been for someone breaking the ice much of the client side capabilities would not be available today. As bad as we all like to jump on a bandwagon you have to understand sometimes that someone being bold and different is how we have evolved through the web, as programmers, as designers, as companies, and as humans.

At the same time I can’t say I’m uninstalling Firefox from my computer, its still my browser of choice, but I would like to see more people come to an understanding that just because something is different doesn’t mean we have to hate it, we should respect it and keep our eye on it. It could be on to something! Believe it or not I do have a lot of respect for many Microsoft products, and some of them I would probably prefer over any other product(SQLServer anyone?) although due to the financial situation we are blessed to have the others among us.

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Another serious problem I have encountered is that my mouse will disappear after I leave my computer idol for any length of time. Twice today I have rebooted because of this problem. Then after the second reboot I decided run my updates to see if there was a fix,.. well I’m not sure yet but my monitor did decide to turn off on me while I was using it(something my monitor has yet todo becuase I have it set to turn off after twenty minutes of inactivity and it never will). After a manual reboot my bottom menu bar happily decided it wanted to be placed on my secondary monitor.

I must note I have not made any system changes at all, only setting my screensaver and installing the usual aim, eclipse, ff, etc.. Not sure if there are some display settings I am missing but I would surely like to find it!

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